School Ball

On a black horse and dressed in black velvet, John Gielgud came as "Night." On a white horse Gertrude Lawrence came as "Day." Mrs. S. Stanwood Menken, "Silver Rain," wore 600 yards of silver-lined bugle fringe, a headdress six feet wide illuminated with blue neon tubes. Gypsy Rose Lee wore spangles. That was the seventeenth Beaux-Arts Ball which took place at Manhattan's Hotel Astor last week.

Long before Actor Gielgud and Actress Lawrence had returned their mounts to the Ben Hur Livery Stables and the Ball was over, a small gentleman in evening clothes, Beaux-Arts' Board Chairman Ely Jacques Kahn, knew that the Beaux-Arts had made history this year. It was back on Broad way after a nostalgic period at the Waldorf-Astoria. For the first time an outsider had furnished the decorations, seven rayon companies having paid heavily for the privilege of advertising the ball as a Fete de Rayon Fantastique. And into the coffers of the Beaux-Arts Institute to educate young U. S. architects would go the proceeds from 2,000 tickets sold at $10 apiece.

To many an observer, the success of last week's Ball signalized the renascence enjoyed by the Beaux-Arts Institute since Ely Jacques Kahn became chairman of its Board of Trustees three years ago. The first architectural school in the U. S., founded in 1894 by a group of U. S. architects trained at Paris' famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Institute had begun to show signs of declining into old age. The idea of the founders had been to set up a central agency of architects which would license any group of five or more students as an atelier, project problems for them, judge and grade the resulting drawings.

As colleges and universities opened their own architectural schools they too affiliated with Beaux-Arts. In 1926 every U. S. architectural school except Harvard used Beaux-Arts problems, submitted monthly drawings of standard problems to the Institute's jury of architects.

In 1928 Beaux-Arts built a five-story structure in Manhattan to house its own drawing classes. But architects and colleges were beginning to complain that its slant was too traditional, theoretical, unpractical. Year after year the problem sent contestants for the Beaux-Arts Scholarship to Paris was an opera house, although no notable opera house had meanwhile gone up in the land except the one Utilitarian Samuel Insull built in Chicago in 1929. As Beaux-Arts prestige threatened to crack, University of California resigned its membership and University of Virginia followed.

Architect Kahn, a native New Yorker who studied at Columbia and won a Prix Labarre while at the Paris Beaux-Arts, stepped boldly into the Institute chairmanship in 1933. Brisk, mustached and famed for his spaghetti suppers, he has never designed an opera house but his Squibb Building and many another chaste Manhattan skyscraper are nationally known. As a practical result, Beaux-Arts students have lately been getting assignments for esquisses and projects of automobile factories instead of orangeries. When they finish them in six weeks and ship them to New York, they are returned with crisp comments by such practical specialists as Detroit's Albert Kahn.

This year the Institute is solvent, with 80 member schools, 3,000 students enrolled at $15 a head. Once more the only holdout was Harvard. So heartened by the proceeds of his successful Ball was Board Chairman Kahn that he planned to revive instruction in sculpture and the Manhattan classes abandoned two years ago.

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