allowing architects freedom from stereotyped ideas, thereby permitting glimpses of the twentieth-century spirit in building. . . . Industrial buildings are accepted as deplorable necessities by some critics . . . the terms 'utilitarian' and 'harsh' are regarded as synonymous. . . . " Mr. John Cloag, who writes this in the Architects' Journal of January 12, 1927, thinks the latter view "exasperating," and goes on to say: "Utility untrammelled by an imagined need of some disguising 'style' is not lacking in beneficent effect upon the form of an industrial building."
Mr. R. A. S. Paget, in a letter to The Times, summarized in the Architects' Journal of April 7, 1926, thinks that Regent Street should have been designed as two great continuous stores facing one another in separate blocks which composed it, being connected by covered ways, tunnels or bridges at convenient intervals, so that customers could pass from one block to another in protection from the weather. He would also have had direct covered communication from the Tube station to the shops and motor omnibus passenger stations, so that the public could alight and embark under cover. The pavements in front of the shops would be arcaded, while the lighting of the ground-floor shop-fronts would be secured by clerestory windows in the shop-fronts themselves above the level of the roof of the arcade, so as to avoid the objections which were fatal to Nash's original arcades. On the roof of the arcades he would form an attractive open-air promenade for use in fine weather, with raised foot-bridges crossing the side of the streets.
From an advertisement in the "Hospital" number of the Architects' Journal of June 24, 1925.—"The modern hospital is a triumph of the elimination of the detrimental and the unessential. Because of its absolute fitness to purpose its operation theatre—like the engine room of an ocean liner—is one of the most perfect rooms in the world." (This is indeed the voice of Jacob!)
