Orient's Architect

In the mezzanine galleries of Rockefeller Center's International Building last week, curiously tucked away in a maze of advertising exhibits of home furnishings, a little gallery of architectural photographs made browsers perk up. To most features of the Home Beautiful, exemplified in the exhibit by a tasteless miscellany stuffed in fake "modern" interiors, these pictures gave the lie direct. They showed the actual and honestly beautiful buildings of an extraordinary architect, Antonin Raymond of Japan.

One more famous talent driven to the U. S. by warmaking abroad, Antonin Raymond is a bony, thin-lipped man of 50, with sunken cheeks and an ascetic affability. Born in Prague, he was once a U. S. assistant military attache in Switzerland, an engineer-architect with the late Cass Gilbert. Frank Lloyd Wright took him to Tokyo in 1919 to help build the Imperial Hotel. Raymond stayed there, became Japan's foremost modern builder. He employed as many as 100 men in his Tokyo office, did 600 jobs, including the U. S., French, Soviet. Belgian and Manchukuoan embassy buildings.

Last week Antonin Raymond had it in mind to show the U. S. a thing or two which the Japanese had first shown him. When Raymond arrived in Tokyo, he soon found out that Japanese master carpenters knew more about architecture in wood than he did. He also learned that the tradition of submitting building plans to an astrologer was not superstitious but practical. The seer turned out to be an expert on such matters as drainage, prevailing winds. the varying angle of sunlight through the year--a subtle factor that Architect Raymond now scrupulously studies.

Characteristic was Antonin Raymond's first U. S. publication: Architectural Details, published last week by The Architectural Forum. It contained not a word of theory but 116 pages of photographs and drawings of building techniques developed in Japan. In them and in furniture beautifully handmade after designs by his wife, Noemi Pernessin Raymond, the architect demonstrated his principle: "nothing wasted, nothing inappropriate." Most interesting to readers and exhibition visitors were several feats in reinforced concrete: the serene and summery Tokyo Golf Club, light-looking but earthquake-and-typhoon-proof homes, the remarkable Women's Christian College in Tokyo (see cut) of precast and reinforced concrete, with everything from stained glass to concrete and wrought-iron altar made on the spot by Architect Raymond's crew of craftsmen.

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