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For contemporary art and its immediate nineteenth-century background, there is much duplication. Only architecture lags, both in popular surveys and monographs. The chief use of an art book, as opposed to viewing a work of art itself, is to make one look closer or deeper. This requires, ideally, as much energy as is needed to read a piano score. "Claude Monet," by William C. Seitz, is a beautiful book with 48 excellent laid-in color plates that goes far to rescue Monet from recent perils to which his fair name has been subjected in its abrupt and rapacious revival.

This article presents information various books and publications. Some of the forthcoming from Macmillan Co. are "The Alps," written by W.M. Conway, with 75 plates in color after paintings written by A.B. McCormick, "The Burns Country," written by Charles S. Dougall, with 50 Lull-page photographic illustrations and "Edinburgh and Its Story." The book "The Watchers of the Trails," is a series of entertaining animal sketches written by Charles G.D. Roberts. D. Jozeph, professor in the new University of Brussels, has published a history of architectural art in all ages in two octavo volumes with 773 illustrations "Geschichte der Baukunst vom Altertumbis zur Neuzeit."

What sort of a home was Karl Munichreiter, the shoe- maker of Vienna, defending when they dragged him out heavily wounded, and, wounds and all, took him to the scaffold to be hanged? Reports from the victors say that this home-assuming that be was captured in one of the workers' "strongholds" was a fort. They say that clever leaders planned them in this fashion, because the big structures dominated the industrial centers where the workers worked, and because the walls were capable of stopping rifle bullets. Yet any house in Vienna will stop bullets if built of masonry, and so will any house in America if the masonry is not just a veneer. And machine-gun emplacements in apartment houses-see the peace-time papers of Chicago or New York.

The article comments on a magazine "Fortune." Fortune's purpose is to reflect industrial life in ink and paper and word and picture as the finest skyscraper reflects it in steel and stone and architecture. This unique publication was not designed for news-stand sale. Its price was a dollar a copy, by subscription ten dollars a year. Advertising was solicited in advance on the basis of a guaranteed circulation of 30,000 copies for the first issue. In other words, the publishers assured themselves of a gross revenue of $300,000 from subscriptions alone before going to press. And since subscriptions were solicited primarily if not entirely by mail, it was unnecessary to pay high commissions for them.

Discusses the significance of chairs from the point of view of architecture. Importance of chairs as an object of visual edification and functional necessity; Architects who have expressed their fascination for chairs; Ways in which chair mimics the larger built world.

The article presents information on the News Building in New York. It presents itself as almost nothing but a series of stripes. The vertical stripes of dark red brick contain windows, and alternate white stripes, as in the American flag, are the ribbon-like piers. Even the window shades with their lighter hue of red are a part of this textile weave, and at night the lights shine through them merrily, as if the building were a sort of gigantic paper illumination on parade. The building has no middle and no top: the stripes simply jump off into space.

The article presents information on several works of art. The Burlington Magazine for June is concerned largely with the minor arts, containing illustrated papers on plate, porcelain, etc., and, on two recent panels of colored glass by John La Fargo. The special spring number of the Studio is devoted to "Art in England during the Elizabethan and Stuart Periods, "but the art dealt with is that of domestic architecture and furniture, which is lavishly illustrated. A Roman marble sarcophagus has recently been unearthed in Rome outside the Porta Maggiore.

Stairs, the photographic exhibition in the snug cellar of the New York-based Museum of Modern Art, is a triumph of its type, which is the unpretentious, portable photographic display. Credited to designer Bernard Rudofsky and the museum's staff, it offers a collection of pictures of interesting architectural ascents, sets of risers and treads, extraordinary solutions to that ordinary old problem of getting people up and down from floor to floor. There are but few words accompanying the pictures, and no heavy ones. Rudofsky's captions are pleasantly incidental; "If we ever learn to walk again, stairs may once more find their place in architecture" is about the sum of his philosophic message.

The article focuses on the design show currently held at the main floor of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The show is an attempt to display new industrial exquisiteness in packaging, and to make an aesthetic claim for it. After the fond backward look at craft and nature, the show moves on to some contemporary containers. The show treats both disposable and re-usable packages, including a very fine pet-carrier for a small traveling animal, made of folded cardboard, and a transparent suit made of vinylfilm for a working man who needs two skins.

"The Art of the Exposition," by Eugen Neuhaus is a prettily made book devoted to the architecture, sculpture, and mural painting of the Panama-Pacific Exposition excluding exhibits of gallery type. There are a number of illustrations. The criticism is generally judicious, but written in a very lumbering English. "The Studio" Yearbook of Decorative Art for 1915 (Lane; $3 net) lacks perforce the usual articles and illustrations from continental Europe, but includes as recompense a rather fragmentary and desultory chapter on Architecture and Decoration in the United States, by Alfred Yockney.

In his paper on the "Fortified Headlands and Castles on the South Coast of Munster," reprinted from Vol. XXXII, 1914, of the "Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy," T.J. Westropp has discovered an almost unexplored field in Irish archeology. These Irish coastal forts were constructed at various epochs. In some, like Howth, near Dublin, and Shanoan, in Waterford, flint instruments have been found. Some belong to the Bronze Age, others were built or occupied by Danes, Welsh, or Normans. They differ greatly in form, and the following types are recognizable simple headland forts, with single wall, complex, with several earthworks or walls, entrenchments or citadels, multiple forts, with a single wall; complex, with several earth-with a gangway, natural or artificial, headlands, with a deep natural hollow it the neck, and fortified shore-rocks, usually isolated at high water.

The article throws light on a list of books and reprints by various publishing houses. The Century Co. will bring out in the autumn "The Story of Athens," by Howard Crosby Butler, lecturer on architecture at Princeton University, some of whose drawings will be joined with the abundant photographic illustrations. Furthermore, The central piece in the current (38th) number of the Year-book of the German Shakespeare Society is a reprint of the first version of Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humor," which has thus far strangely escaped the zeal of the modern editor of reprints.

High on a hill, commanding a 7-acre crown in the center of Los Angeles, California, sits the new three-building performing arts complex known as the Music Center. Costing $33.5 million, the Music Center consists of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and the two structures of the Center Theatre Group the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre. The Pavilion is home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Civic Light Opera and the Choral Society. The Center Theatre Group is Southern California's most ambitious regional theatre. The complex, designed by architect Welton Beckett, rises like an acropolis above the city's squatting gray office buildings, swirls of clotted freeways, and drab scuttle of civic center.

Modern architecture has acquired some powerful new friends, the mass-circulation magazines. They realize that they have hold of something good and are outdoing themselves to put it over in their own lavish way. From among the countless plans, models, and color reproductions through which this purpose is being accomplished, the most convenient to study are those produced through the collaboration of the "Ladies' Home Journal," with the Museum of Modern Art and with an imposing list of modern architects. Here the artwork at least, leaves nothing to be desired in its vivid and charming faithfulness.

The article presents information on several books. "Jack Robinson," is by George Beaton. Clues to this ingenious first novel lie not only in the meaning of the quotation from "Saison en Enfer" given on the titlepage, but also in the fact that a child lives in two worlds, that both of these are real, and that more often than not the two are one and cannot be separated--a fact which Hollywood in its recent production of "Alice" so painfully forgot, but which Beaton in what he calls a picaresque novel well recognizes. "Wedding Song," by David Burnham is the novel of intrigue which is back--in a modern version of course, stripped like a functional facade of all ornament, and showing, like architecture, the smooth, hard, anonymous effect of the machine age.

In the 1,228 French communes reconquered from Germany in 1917, there were to be counted more than 100,000 shattered houses, 50,000 of which were actually annihilated. The same territory contained, of other nined buildings, 485 town halls, 598 schools, and 472 churches, and the enemy were still in possession of 4,000 French cities and villages, with the great retreat and all its destruction still to come. In "La Renaissance des Ruines," M. Paul Leon, who writes as Head of the Architectural Service in the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, already looks forward to the rebuilding of the martyred zone.

The article discusses various books. The volume entitled "The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne," edited by Thomas Hake and Arthur Compton-Rickett and published in London by John Murray, is misnamed. The impression of slovenliness that the errors convey is increased by the writers' rule of the English language. A recent addition to the lengthening list of discussions of the inner content and significance of architecture is Claude Bragdon's "Architecture and Democracy" (Knopf; $1). The title really belongs only to the first three chapters, respectively discussing architecture before, during and since the war and covering 73 pages.

The article describes about the construction of a new theatre in Stratford. A large balcony has been added, promenades are ample, stairways wide. Backstage is developed and half the entire huge space devoted to services, with the best-arranged dressing-rooms in America and place enough left over for a whole other experimental theatre. There are so many seats that a comparatively short season with two lavish productions plus many ancillary art and musical events is self-supporting. This single-purpose auditorium reflects the fact that it is Tyrone Guthrie's house and his shrine. -

Chicago, Illinois has long been a more vivid city architecturally than New York. There is even a heritage of architectural heroes there. One was Uncle Thin Burnham, who said, "make no little plans," and who, himself, made some grand ones. Another was Louis Sullivan, probably still America's greatest artist in architecture, whose Chicago business buildings, among them the Carson Pine Scott department store in the Loop, Chicago, are in their way as deep and unknowable as Greek temple ruins. There are a number of other Chicago architects, who became great characters in their community, and whose buildings did so as well.

The article presents information on two contemporary masterpieces of architecture: the Munson Williams Phillips Institute of Utica, New York, and the Museum of Western Art, in Fort Worth, Texas. It rarely happens that an exemplary monument, as distinct from negotiable Shelter space, is erected in this country. Utica and Fort Worth are not large cities, but they will become focal points for art lovers of international curiosity, since each now contains one of the fine buildings of this century. An unusual set of circumstances led to the creation of the structure in Utica: an estate accumulated by three families with an enlightened policy of benefaction.

Analyses the architecture of Saint Louis low-income housing project Pruit-Igoe that failed. Doubts expressed by various critics about the concept of high-rise living for low income families; Views expressed by sociologists about the project; Criticism made by the author against the architects of the project.

The article presents information on the book "The Ideals of Indian Art," by E.B. Havell. It states that until very recent years there has been virtually no study of any of the Indian fine arts, except architecture, that has evinced real sympathy with its subject. The symbolism of Indian art is repeatedly considered by Havell, particularly for Brahma, Vishnu, and Ganesha. Havell is correct in saying that in the initial period of the so-called "early Buddhist" art "the prevailing influence is not the idealism of Aryan thought, but the naturalism of the non-Aryan races which were converted to Buddhism," among tile elements of this art being the Central and East Asian and the Helleno-Persian.

This article focuses on the journal "North American Review." People do not profess an acquaintance with all the numbers of the "North American," since the first appearance of the venerable quarterly fifty-odd years ago, but they doubt if any previous number has ever contained so many articles as this contains which the public generally may well be glad to read. Professor E.P. Evans, in an ingenious and eloquent essay, provides for any one who likes it a complete and fully appointed theory of art. To all former classifications of the arts and attempts at creating a philosophy of art, he has one and another exception to take and a system of his own to offer. By the fine arts he means architecture, sculpture, and painting, the imaging arts, and music, poetry, and prose, the speaking arts.

The article presents information about architecture. For the second time in the past ten years the Bauhaus in Germany has been closed by political decree. A Nazi burgomaster and his council for the time being ruling the city of Dessau, home of the Bauhans, took exception to the conception of culture that was being taught. It had come to be international instead of pure German. So once more there comes a pause in the career of what has become perhaps the leading architectural school of the present day.

The article presents information on the experience of the author in relation to school. Not long ago he spent a day in one of the so-called modern progressive schools that he has so often heard about. Frequently he passes the door of this particular school just before nine o'clock in the morning and a heartier, handsomer set of children never bounced into a school entry hail and slammed the door behind them. He was taken first to a couple of top-floor rooms, full of sun, in which a group of six-year-olds expressed themselves daily. On the floor were a number of extensive building operations in course of construction. Later he watched another group of nearly the same age enjoying instruction in the singing of Christmas carols.

The article presents information about the book "Hatter's Castle," by A.J. Cronin. Hatter's Castle is the home of a great, blustering, egocentric paranoiac, a hatter in a small Scottish town fifty years ago. James Brodie is convinced of his noble birth, he is a large, handsome man, domineering, brutal, deluded with visions of his own grandeur. The tale of his downfall, which is brought about by the destruction or death of every member of his family save one, makes the book. At the end he is a skeleton of his former self, destroyed by drink, by the failure of his last hope, by his own vast, vain aspirations and desires. Nothing is left out of the book to make it terrifying.

According to private advices from New Haven, Connecticut it has become the fashion among Yale University undergraduates to sneer at the Harkness grandeur in general and the overstuffed Gothic magnificence of the new library in particular, just as it became the fashion some years ago to wear raccoon coats. It has always seemed to him absurd to house a modern American university in walls three feet thick when there is no danger of attack from any enemy more medieval than an idea. The criticism of Yale's architecture has become so widespread and so bitter that there is even a rumor of an about-face to colonial when the next billion clinks down the Yale chute.

The article focuses on the book "The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art" by the author Rhys Carpenter. The book will help those who have already seen the temples at Paestum or Girgenti, or the marbles in the British Museum, to understand what they have seen, and perhaps to see some things more clearly in this enlightened retrospect than they did on the spot. To those who still look forward to beholding Greek vases and temples and sarcophagi, this book may be recommended as an indispensable propaedeutic. Besides which, Carpenter's book goes subtly and suggestively to the general principles more or less consciously controlling Greek artistic production.

The article focuses on woes of a poet, who left Paris after being threatened by the Madison Square Church. The architecture of the Madison Church has also been described. It further gives brief view of the noon services in old Trinity. The peaceful Varick Street of those days, troubled only by an occasional horse-car, has become a horror of mighty power trucks, peaceful only in the wee small hours, one side still the quaint relic of a more restful city but the other the scarred victim of the subway and new traffic demands.

The article discusses the book "New World of Space," by Le Corbusier. This book, people might almost say, this album is a Le Corbusier encyclopedia. It offers samples not only of his architectural and city-planning efforts but of his paintings as well. He expresses the hope that "some day through unanimous effort unity will reign once more in the major arts."

The Palace of Whitehall, London, England and its grounds, so associated with the names of English monarchs and rulers from the days of Henry VIII to Charles II, occupied the district between Charing Cross and Westminster, extending from the Thames up into St. James's Park. Part was burned to the ground in 1691 and the remainder in 1697. The space is now covered with streets, terraces, and public buildings. On the east side of Whitehall, opposite the Horse Guards, still stands the old banqueting-hall of the palace. Inigo Jones built it in the Palladian style in the reign of James I.

The article presents information on the Châhateau De Vaux in Paris. Though it is very accessible from Paris, the châhateau of Vaux is not often visited, its reputation is founded more on historical remembrances than on its own artistic merits. The style is what may be called pure seventeenth century. It was been at the time when French architects had abandoned the forms of the Renaissance and looked chiefly for a beautiful 'ordonnance'. The Châhateau of the Renaissance had been almost all built on the sites of old feudal castles and had preserved their complexity of towers, of inner and outer courts, of staircases; the architects of the sixteenth century cared little for symmetry and ordonnance.

Presents several letters to the editor. Views of a reader regarding architecture of Harvard University; Information given by a reader about the usage of the German double hyphen to connect the parts of a compound word; Suggestion given by a reader about teaching the Old Testament to a Sunday-school class.

This article presents information related to several books related to the field of architecture. These books include "The ABC of Architecture," by Matlock Price, "The Essence of Architecture," by W.R. Greely, "Mudejar," by A. Georgiana Goddard King and "Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain," by R.A. Cram. First two of these books are excellent examples of how two different lines of attack on the same problem, the popularization of architecture can give two contrasting results. The book "The Essence of Architecture," though even briefer, seems profound. It is a carefully organized and well-presented analysis of the art of architecture, its aims, its methods, its achievements.

This article presents information on the book "Charles Bulfinch, Architect and Citizen," by Charles A. Place. This biography on the life of Charles Bulfinch bridged a great historical chasm. Educated in Boston during the Revolution, he knew it as a small colonial port city whose architecture was dominantly Colonial English; by the time of his death, in 1844, American architecture had set out on its own eclectic course, American life had begun to develop those special characteristics that is the modern America. Place's book gives a new opportunity to evaluate the part which Bulfinch played in this change, and some little insight into the reaction those changes produced in him. In addition it is indispensable to anyone interested in the origins of American taste.

The article presents an overview of the book "Sticks and Stones," by Lewis Mumford. It is a stimulating adventure to open a book on American architecture and find neither those sycophantic appreciations, beautifully illustrated, which form so important a part of the current periodical literature of the subject, nor, on the other hand, those equally one-sided, bitterly pessimistic attacks on all modern work which characterize another type of criticism. For Mr. Mumford has seen deeply into architecture; careful historical study has given him an authoritative background; he has realized that behind that stream of form which makes the "style" of any place or date there is a reason; he has asked the why of form in American architecture.

It is the current view that American architecture has turned its back on modernity and reconciled itself to a barren reproduction of the classic. It is not the true or vital view. If one considers more intently the work of the contemporary classic school, one finds it is not only creative, but that it has an underlying affinity, real though not obvious, with the progressive work in modern painting and the other arts. It was in reaction against the historical eclecticism of the midcentury, the indifferent copying of historic forms, Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Renaissance.

Presents several letters to the editor. Criticism of architectural competitions; Knowledge of Italians about poet Alighieri Dante's works.

The article focuses on two books "The Art and Architecture of Russia," by George Heard Hamilton and "The Moscow Kremlin," by Arthur Voyce. Since most of the bibliography on Russian art and architecture is in the Russian language and access to the original works is impossible to most Westerners, knowledge of this vast field has been as secluded as Russia itself. These two volumes make a considerable contribution, the first through a broad survey, and the second through a detailed study at the very heart of Russian culture. Both of them required exhaustive research in Russian publications and a great effort to assemble adequate illustrative material. Both are exercises in objective scholarship, both are primarily descriptive in character, and neither carries the history of its subject beyond the revolution of 1917.

This article analyzes the book "The Spanish Temper," by V.S. Pritchett. It is the second outstanding book on Spain to appear in recent months. Sacheverell Sitwell's "Spain" was an excellent study of the timeless excellences of Spanish architecture and painting. Pritchett has placed lovers of Spain equally in his debt with this analysis of the unchanging characteristics of the peoples of Spain — the Basques, Catalans, Andalusians and particularly — for it is they who have placed their stamp on the language and everything that is summed up in the word Spanish — the Castilians.

The article focuses on the International Conference of Artists sponsored by United Nations Educational, Scientific and cultural Organization and held in Venice during September 22 to 28. It was the first international meeting of artists. The arts were the theater, literature, music, architecture, painting, sculpture and the cinema. Forty-three member nations and international associations sent representatives. The aim of conference was to investigate the practical conditions for the freedom of the artist in contemporary society and to discover ways of associating creative artists more closely with the work of UNESCO.

The article presents information on the First Conference on Aesthetic Responsibility, sponsored one long day a couple of weeks ago by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in the ballroom of the Hotel Plaza. The Plaza's ballroom is both robust and well maintained, a good place for a conference, even this one. The room has an arcade down either long side, with regal purple hangings in each opening. The goings-on at this day, long meeting were not at all vulgar, and not very hearty either. What the conference was about was the tasteless desecration of cities and other surroundings by banal, flashy clutter and blandly pompous buildings.

Edward D. Stone is one of the most successful architects in the United States today, having captured the imagination of the people, certainly of the press, with such grandiose architectural notions as this immense and impersonal symbol of the entertaining arts. He designed the U.S. exhibit building for the Brussels World's Fair of 1958, also a round building, but with a pool in its center, as well as the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, which had a large pool in its core too, not a social armory. These are much livelier designs than his cultural center because the open cores do subtract from their deadly bulk.

Lafayette Park in downtown Detroit, Michigan, is a serene but startling city-renewal protect. It is the antithesis of the dull housing monuments of today, those flat pyramids, those massive clusters in which tall slabs have been sliced off the standard apartment house cheese, then grouped together to cast their shade on stretches of limpid lawn, undeviating example of architectural logistics which lack the design grace of a saltine. Instead, Lafayette Park, or Lafayette Plaisance, as the proprietors sometimes murmur it, is a combination, so far, of one simple but handsome vertical apartment house slab, in front of which a group of 185 row houses and courthouses are arranged subtly in twenty-one separate horizontal structures.

The article focuses on the architecture at 54th Street to peer vest toward the chaste backyard wall of the Museum of Modern Art, over which one could see the plastic-roofed dome of the hare, spiney, cantilevered truss of the current outdoor exhibition devoted to R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor and builder. The structures looked good in the sunlight. Even from the corner, his motions were easy to understand. He has spent most of his lifetime promoting industrial solutions so imaginative that they threatened to bankrupt the industries concerned.

This article focuses on the books "A Discussion of Composition; Especially As Applied to Architecture," by John Vredenburgh Van Pelt, "Windows: A Book About Stained and Painted Glass," by Lewis F. Day, and "Furniture of the Olden Time," by Frances Clary Morse. The book "Furniture of the Olden Time" is the fourth contribution, published during the last two or three years, to the accumulating mass of fact and comparative criticism concerning the older styles of furniture known to the residents of what is now the U.S.