The late Maxwell Fry began practising architecture in the early Thirties, a pioneer of the Modern Movement in Britain.
Instrumental in engineering Walter Gropius' escape from Nazi Germany and bringing him to work in London, he designed with him a number of buildings before Gropius departed for America.
Fry conveys in his recorded talk something of the excitement and optimism he and his colleagues experienced in the Thirties, with new materials coming on the market, and new ideas filtering from the Continent of Europe. He tells of the birth in 1928 of CIAM (Les Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and in 1934 of its British offspring the MARS Group (Modern Architectural ReSearch), and of their subsequent influence.
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