CONTEMPORARY ARTS
IDEAL HOME EXHIBITION
The Ideal Home Exhibition is, of course, only partly concerned with ideal homes. From kitchens to kitchen gadgets to foodstuffs is a reasonable sequence enough ; but it is bard to see die relevance of road-safety dioramas, cosmetics, Odham's Press and others, nylon underwear and film fashions, cigarette lighters, dog biscuits, hearing aids and paper collars. One can, after all, window-shop any day in Oxford Street. Visitors with a satiable capacity for .window- shopping should (after paying their individually graduated tribute to the Pavilion of Beautiful Things presided over by an outsize Britannia) make a bee-line for the Village of Ideal Homes (which is not a village ; town and country planning are regrettably unrepre- sented at Olympia) and whet their wits and appetites on the rival attractions of private enterprise and the Ministry of Health's four- dwelling, three-storey terrace block.
They will find matter of interest in technique, lay-out, furnishings and equipment, and sociological implications. The " Unity " house, an ambitious two-storied prefab of solidly traditional appearance, is furnished with three double beds; knows what sort of family is supposed to sleep in them. Te superlatively ingenious and very attractive Ministry of Health family house, theoretically occupied by a couple with five children, fits its occupants like a glove, but provides practically no space for their belongings and will burst at the seams when baby outgrows his cot. The dining-room table cannot possibly seat the whole family; and one pities Materfcrmilias if she ever tours this exhibition. Whoever designed her larder evidently shared Dr. Summerskill's view that home jam-making and bottling is a rich woman's fancy hobby, and there is nowhere in the neat little kitchen to put an ironing board, let alone a washing machine or refrigerator. The small flats in the same block are more successful ; but it takes private enterprise to be generous with cupboards. Unfortunately private enterprise also appears generous to a fault with grisly lamp- shades, tortured ornamental mirrors, and by-pass-de-luxe para- phernalia generally ; an impression heightened when the visitor passes from the " Village" to the stands of the furnishing companies, with few exceptions calculated to afflict the Council of Industrial Design with collective nightmare.
Indeed, the whole exhibition offers a striking contrast between the attractive honesty and cleanness of the apparatus—whether kitchen cabinet, pressure cooker, washing machine, vegetable grater or furnace—and the pretentious silliness of the " front of the house.' Generally speaking this contrast extends to the stands themselves. Top marks go to the Electrical Development Association for an imaginative and amusing pavilion wherein is traced, step by step, the redemption of a perfectly loathsome kitchen and its emergence as a housewife's dream ; the runner-up might be the Coal Utilisation Joint Council's display, or perhaps the "House of Hazards" (tellingly juxtaposed to Baby's Ideal Home with its " perfect nursery") ; an innocent-seeming pair of model rooms sown like a minefield with booby-traps ranging from worn flexes, holed rugs, and an inadequately lit stairhead to vagrant razor blades and projecting saucepan handles. Bottom marks are awarded to—no, better not.
The Garden of Music is a lovesome thing, God wot. In the confined space and surrounding atmosphere of Olde Englysshe that could hardly be helped ; but individual exhibitors make a brave show of flowering shrubs, spring bulbs, turf, water and genuine Westmor- land stone. Greenhouses, electric lawnmowers, compost-grown seeds. . . . A few more leaflets join the literature of stainless steel, trouble-free washdays, insulation, pickles and patent cleansers between the bulging covers of the catalogue and review ; and the visitor, carrying away whatever composite ideal may commend itself, reflects in Addison Road on the painful incompatibility of exhibition feet with the morrow's enthusiastically planned spring-cleaning
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