Institutionalizing English Modernism 1924–33: From the Vers Group to MARS

On 28 February 1933, the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group was founded as the English chapter of theCongrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne(CIAM) by Wells Coates, Edwin Maxwell (Max) Fry, David Pleydell Bouverie, P. Morton Shand, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, and John Gloag. Historians have viewed its subsequent activities variously. There has been a tendency to sneer at its work in the 1930s and to praise its influence on the evolution of Modernism in the post-war years. Nonetheless, there is a consensus that, at the very least, the coming together of Coates and his allies provided, as John Summerson later recalled, ‘a focus, a point of illumination, in a cultural scene which was confused and overcast'. In reaching this conclusion, scholars have sketched in a pre-history of the Group and have established a basic chronology of earlier attempts to organize collective activity around the promulgation of a modern design or architectural culture in England. These efforts began around 1924 with a short-lived initiative by Christopher Hussey ofCountry Life, and were followed by the Twentieth Century Group, founded in 1930 by the Cambridge don and modernist patron, Mansfield Duval Forbes. The existing accounts of this activity are not inaccurate, but they are incomplete. Moreover, although they imply a trajectory towards the ultimate founding of MARS, they contain little consideration of how, why, or under whose direction, this process might have taken place.