Few better places outside London than Eric Mendelsohn's and Serge Chermayeff's De La Warr Pavilion, built in 1935 on the front at Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex, could be chosen to mount an exhibition commemorating the 175th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1834.Long considered one of the pioneer buildings of the International Modern Style, it was described by Charles Reilly soon after completion as "a revelation from another planet in the rococo redness of that terrible town".
Others, like Henry-Russell Hitchcock, recognised it in 1936 as "the most conspicuous and successful modern building in England".
While today Alan Powers, the organiser of the exhibition, Mind into Matter, for RIBA South East, argues that since its restoration in 2005, "the pavilion has become a place to bring people who need to be convinced that Modern architecture has a positive and life-enhancing quality".
This austere exhibition breaks new ground in the appreciation and understanding of architecture. Composed of architectural drawings and outstanding photographs taken by Nigel Green, the exhibition selects eight exemplary buildings that many will find unfamiliar and surprising.
Victorian and Edwardian enthusiasts will welcome Charles Barry's Reform Club, Deane and Woodward's Oxford Museum, Philip Webb's Clouds House and Ninian Comper's St Mary's, Wellingborough. Secure, if recondite, ground there.
The modernist will find the De La Warr Pavilion as familiar as the Parthenon, but what of Alison and Peter Smithson's Economist Group buildings in St James's, London, Craig and Collinge's Royal Mail Mechanised Letter Office at Hemel Hempstead and Tony Fretton's British Embassy in Warsaw?
The last three represent unconsidered historical territory, but so, in this unforeseen survey divided into intervals of 25 years, do the rest because I suspect that, given their competitors, none of their architects would have expected to be included in such a record.
There is no Pugin, Mackintosh, Voysey or Lutyens, no Giles Gilbert Scott, Basil Spence, Norman Foster or Richard Rogers; the obvious is studiedly omitted. Being exemplary does not mean being familiar, nor does unfamiliarity mean being mediocre.
In this setting exemplary means that there is something of permanent value to learn from each building.
We are taken into their architects' minds and, as Powers explains: "Each of the selected buildings has a strong sense of purpose, including a desire to teach a lesson, but also to serve a particular set of needs, practical and symbolic."
For Catholic and Anglican visitors the inclusion of St Mary's, Wellingborough, Comper's masterpiece set in a Midlands industrial suburb, has much to teach because it was the most profoundly Catholic church built in England in the 20th century when the Church was seen as a historic faith and its significance transcends its denominational boundaries.
Powers describes it as "one of Britain's unforgettable architectural experiences" and goes beyond aesthetic appreciation by analysing its uniqueness as a place of worship and the integrity of planning.
Most visitors are entranced by the beauty of the interior but few recognise the powerful depth of thought subsumed in tradition that lies behind the synthesis of styles and its function as a church of the Eucharist.
The altar stands beneath a ciborium magnum of burnished gold set within gilded, white and black iron screens as the liturgical heart and inspiration of the building.
At the present time no church in England embodies so fully Pope Benedict XVI's understanding of the hermeneutic of continuity in theology, doctrine and liturgical development, and the place of beauty within it, than this matchless church.
Comper's mature planning, based on fourth-century North African basilican models, helped to bring life to Christian worship and Powers makes the startling point that "this was, in its way, as revolutionary as Walter Gropius's Fagus Factory of 1911, often seen as the founding of Modernism".
He goes further by identifying other similarities - "the search for light as a spiritual quality in buildings, and the desire to symbolise community". Comper's theories remain to be tested.
The freshness and brilliance of Powers's approach to architecture and buildings not only enable people to see and understand them better but comprehend the design process and the continuity of expression achieved in buildings of markedly different, sometimes alien, appearance.
What binds these eight disparate buildings together is the variance of Classicism even when stripped of historical references.
So Fretton's abstract glass embassy at Warsaw, completed this year, suggests not only Mies van der Rohe but the German neo-Classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a contemporary of Charles Barry, who inspired Mies, thus linking the last building in the exhibition to the first, the Reform Club, completed in 1843. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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