MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I wonder what the extreme modernists in sculpture will have to say to the glowing words uttered by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in praise of the Anglo- American Oil Company's successful conversion of a Queen Anne building into up-to-date modem offices ?
Lovers of England and English things will assuredly echo the words of praise. It was just after the Armistice that the finest architectural sites in England, and, to a lesser degree, Scotland and Ireland and Wales, began to be littered with buildings like cotton mills, square, straight, pseudo-efficient and undeniably hideous. No one, to be just, not even a modern poet, has ever claimed beauty for the new structures. All that has ever bten said for them is that they were in the style of erections now going up in the United States, Sweden, Austria, Czechoslovakia or some other foreign country.
That is always enough for the sheep who are our modern generation. It is well that they should be reminded that Queen Anne, after all, is not dead.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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