The Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS) was a coalition of architects, academics and critics united by the aim to promote modernist architecture in Britain. Founded in 1933 as a British branch of the Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM), the group was an attempt to bring together practitioners and polemicists committed to the ideals of European Modernism, who had previously been isolated in the conservative design establishment of 1930s Britain. Most of the participants were British, but many were émigrés fleeing oppression in Nazi Germany. The acronym MARS was chosen to express the group’s futuristic nature.