Philip Morton Shand(21 January 1995-April 1960) was an English architect and design critic, a proponent of modernism, and wine and food writer. He is also the grandfather of Camilla Parker Bowles (born Camilla Shand), now the wife of Prince Charles.
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The son of the writer and barrister Alexander Faulkner Shand and his wife Augusta Mary Coates, Shand was educated at Eton College, King's College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne[1].
Reviewing the Exposition Internationale in Paris of 1925, he coined the term "Swedish grace" for Scandinavian design[2][3].
He was a translator and correspondent of the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius[4]. Shand with Jack Pritchard helped with Gropius's emigration in 1934[5]. With Wells Coates and Maxwell Fry he founded the MARS Group (Modern Architectural Research Group), in existence from 1933 to 1937[6]. It came into existence at the prompting of Siegfried Giedion, after Shand wrote to him[7]. A series of articles under the title Scenario for a Human Drama, in Architectural Review of 1934-5, was Shand's attempt to document and place the contemporary architecture in Europe[8]. In seven parts it set out ideas on the evolution of Continental modernism[9].
With Geoffrey Boumphrey, he set up a company Finmar in 1933 to import Alvar Aalto's furniture into the UK[10]. He set up a London exhibition for Aalto[11]. In 1935 he visited Finland with Jack Pritchard and Graham Reid and saw Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium and the Artek furniture factory which made the furnture sold by Finmar.[12].
He was the son of Alexander Faulkner Shand (1858-1936), barrister and writer, and his wife Augusta Mary Coates. He married four times. His children include Bruce Shand and Elspeth Howe, Baroness Howe of Idlicote (by his fourth wife Sybil Mary Sisson).