Milwaukee's Guth

With their hats in their hands, 100 architects, art students and earnest souls tittuped round the Milwaukee Art Institute last week looking at photographs, blueprints and elevations of what a commission of three Chicago architects considered Milwaukee's greatest architectural monuments. Shepherding the Pilgrims round the gallery was a Milwaukee architect, Alexander Carl Guth, who was expected to say a few words of appreciation. Alexander C. Guth. secretary of the Wisconsin chapter of the American Institute of Architects, recent ardent convert to modernism, said a few words to set Milwaukee conservatives' hair acurl. Excerpts:

''This, gentlemen, is the best collection of moth-eaten architectural motifs ever gathered in Milwaukee. . . . The exhibition shows the best of good taste in current architecture, but no progressive thought. Our English type houses have out-Englished the English. We are building better colonial homes than can be found in the seaboard towns along the Atlantic . . . but this exhibit contains only two examples of progressive thought. All else is borrowed from other times and other countries and hashed over."

His scorn was marked for the half timber & stucco dear to Milwaukee realtors.

"What a pity, what a joke," cried he, "what a travesty on the original."

Only buildings to escape the scorn of Guth were the Emmanuel Philipp School by Eschweiler & Eschweiler, a hospital from the drawing boards of E. Brielmaier & Sons, a chapel and a Catholic convent by Peter Brust.

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