"Versus"

Outside a staid brick building on Manhattan's staid Murray Hill last week an Alexander Calder mobile* gyred and gimbled in the breeze. A frank hybrid, sporting a trio of abstract forms atop a classical column, it symbolized the hybrid show inside (at the headquarters of the Architectural League of New York). The show's title: "Versus." Its subject: the rival claims of traditional and modernist architecture.

Conservative architects (who appropriately had the ground floor) merely tiled the walls with framed photographs of colonial, baroque, gothic and romanesque structures--all built in the U. S. since 1900. Upstairs, modernists ran hog-wild. Their slick, streamlined exhibit had models of their buildings and shrewd camera shots, featured a credo that made traditionalists sputter. Sample sputter-causer: "The heritage of our generation is the accumulated rubbish of a century of fake fronts.".

Denver's Ionic-columned post office was pictured on the first floor; the Denver Children's Hospital, all function and windows, on the second. Manhattan's cavernous Pennsylvania Station, based on the Baths of Caracalla, was a contrast to the sheer, severe, glass-&-marble front of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

Similarly contrasted were speeches on the show's first night by Traditionalist William Adams Delano and Modernist George Howe.

Architect Delano: "Architecture is an art and not a business. ... I believe that the tendency today to let the engineering element dominate is unfortunate." Architect Howe declared that traditionalists divide "the architecture of the soul from the engineering of the body. Taking them at their word, engineers have gracefully yielded them the spirit and kept the flesh, together with the fleshpots, for themselves."

The structures planned by most modernists have run not to flesh but bone. Pleased, therefore, were many lay visitors to "Versus" to note that the trend is away from chromium, away from bony angles, toward solid design and comfort.

The latest furniture is typical. To be completely up-to-date, the modernists turned a model living room on its side and fastened it to the wall, but its furniture--rug, table, overstuffed sofa, padded armchair, etc.--looked comfortable even from that angle. And there was not a single piece of steel tubing in the room.

*A form of abstract sculpture originated by Artist Calder, mobiles are cunningly balanced contraptions of metal, wood and wire which sway, twist and turn as if alive when set off by motors, wind, water, the touch of a hand.

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