Exhibitions and the arts of display / by Sir Lawrence Weaver.

  • Lawrence Weaver
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Exhibitions and the arts of display / by Sir Lawrence Weaver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    were let to exhibitors with the condition that there should not be tall structures upon them. These gangways were further punctuated by the provision at certain intervals by exhibitors of gilt columns 24 feet in height, on which were set either formal vases or emblems of the neighbouring industry. In the 75-feet bays it follows broadly that a street effect was achieved, emphasised in East Walk by the Lion Kiosk at the junction with North Walk (Fig. 80), and by the Cauldon Pavi¬ lion at the junction with South Walk (Fig. 34). And there the street analogy ended. The smaller bays, which are 26 feet 6 inches to the ridge, as against a height of 49 feet in the 75-feet bays, were visualised as interiors, and in the main divided up into a series of halls, entered through the porticoes. Where the gang¬ ways were only 12 instead of 25 feet wide, the portico treatment could not be applied. In such cases the main front of the sectional hall was treated as a unit, as in the Silk Section (Fig. 90), with very satisfactory results. Needless to say, the task of persuading about 800 exhibitors, in groups of anything from a dozen to a hundred, that a new sort of Exhibition demanded new methods of display was not without its difficulties. It involved, incidentally, unfamiliar methods of charging for space, naturally a ground of suspicion. It involved, still worse, the hardly less familiar, and, to some minds, diabolical suggestion that the carrying out of an architectural idea was the proper business of an architect. I believe that individualism is the life blood of British industry, but it is the devil and all in Exhibition-making. However, the committees of the Trade Associations responded nobly to the idea that what was needed in the interests of Imperial trade was not a group of fifty different stands showing the product of fifty manu¬ facturers of, say, woollen goods, but a coherent, unified, and persuasive picture of the range and power of the woollen industry. Needless to say, the idea of uniform decoration did not win equal acceptance in all sections, but in some it succeeded wholly, and in none did partial failure leave an offensive mark on the Palace of Industry as a whole. Perhaps there may be pardon for the vanity of saying that the commendation of Mr. Punch seemed to those who were concerned in the scheme to indicate that “ Weaver’s harmonious tout ensemble ” did not fail of popular appreciation. “ Evoe,” walking through Wembley as a Pioneer of Empire, supported with his engaging commentary the delightful sketch which Mr. Raven-Hill allows me to reproduce, and affords so welcome a note of the whimsical in my very dull pages that I venture to quote it. I do this the more gladly because of his rare virtue in giving architectural credit where it is due, in this case to Mr. Clough Williams-Ellis: “ And so in the Palace of Industry, whilst the ordinary sightseer staggers under the aesthetic impact of tall gilt pillars surmounted by lions and elephants, or the contents of a cornucopia rearranged to resemble a bird, your pioneer observes airily, ‘ Ah, yes ! Williams-Ellis’s columns. Rather pleasing—what ?’ And he knows who made the temples of gas and tobacco and boots and biscuits and lino-