Art: Radio City

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Caviar canapés, cold boiled lobsters, chickens in aspic and other unaccustomed objects covered the draughting tables in the offices of Reinhard & Hofmeister last week. Earnestly munching, architects, reporters, engineers, radio tycoons and photographers stood round a central table on which a 5-ft. plasterboard model slowly revolved—the model for the greatest private architectural project ever undertaken in the U. S., New York's $250,000,000 Radio City (TIME, July 7).

The project started nearly two years ago when the Rockefeller estate assembled three full blocks in mid-Manhattan (48th to 51st Streets, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) as a monumental site for the Metropolitan Opera. But the Opera balked. The Rockefeller estate was left with a temporarily useless tract of land. Architects and engineers, who had been licking their chops at the thought of the juiciest contracts in generations, turned glum.

One who did not give up hope was lean, grey-haired John Reynard Todd of the engineering firm of Todd Robertson Todd.* In New York his firm is responsible for the much admired Graybar and Cunard buildings. John Reynard Todd is a great & good friend of John Davison Rockefeller Jr. A qualified lawyer, he is an able pleader. Last May he had many interviews with Mr. Rockefeller, with Merlin Hall Aylesworth, president of National Broadcasting Co. and with officials of Radio Corp. of America and Radio-Keith-Orpheum. In June it was announced that the great project would go forward, not as an opera but as a radio centre, something to serve not only New York but the entire U. S. Here would be the offices and broadcasting studios of NBC, RCA, RKO; a huge vaudeville theatre, a huge picture theatre, additional buildings for banks, shops, restaurants, offices. At John Reynard Todd's suggestion, three firms of architects were appointed to work with him: Reinhard & Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; Raymond Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux.

Press agents named the grand scheme Radio City. Then came the question of a figurehead to attract public attention, as Alfred Emanuel Smith was figureheading the Empire State Building. It was announced last week that Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel would be inaugurated "Mayor" of Radio City on April 1.

Art critics had an immediate reason for hurrying to inspect the model and renderings exhibited last week. Two of the three architects of Radio City—Raymond Mathewson Hood and Harvey Wiley Corbett—are also architects of the much publicized 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Fortnight ago at a meeting to protest the exclusion of the modernist pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright from the commission of Fair architects (TIME, March 9) the Fair designs of Architects Hood & Corbett were bitterly attacked as "fake modernism," "eclectic shams," "a pretty cardboard picture of ancient wall masses."