While living in Lyon, France, in the early 1920s, he was invited by the editor of the
Architectural Association Journal to review the
Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris of 1925. Shand's first book on architecture,
Modern Theatres and Cinemas was published in 1930 and featured many of those buildings he had encountered in Germany during the late 1920s, arguing that there the cinema had emerged as a separate design typology, not an adaptation of traditional theatre design. The entire August 1930 issue of
The Architectural Review was devoted to the topic of Swedish design, for which Shand delivered a 29-page illustrated survey of the
Stockholm Exhibition. His positive response to the exhibition concentrated more on the overall effect of lightness, fragility, and uniformity. The exhibition had set out its mission of, in Shand's words, “taming and humanizing the growing monster” of Franco-German design. Shand was befriended by some of the leading figures in European modernist architecture, including the German architect
Peter Behrens, the Swiss-French Le Corbusier, the founder of the
Bauhaus school German architect
Walter Gropius, Finnish architect
Alvar Aalto and Swiss historian-critic
Sigfried Giedion, keeping correspondence with each of them. He also developed close links with architects back in the UK, encouraging their participation in the modernist debate. Shand translated from German to English Gropius's 1925 book
Die neue Architektur und das Bauhaus, published in 1930 as
The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Shand with furniture designer and entrepreneur
Jack Pritchard helped with Gropius's emigration from Germany to the UK in 1934. Le Corbusier and Giedion had been prime movers in the foundation of the
Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1928, in the promotion of the cause of modernist architecture and town planning. Giedion was its first and only general secretary. There had been no British participants in the first CIAM conference in 1928. But, in January 1929, Shand wrote to Gropius suggesting Howard Robinson, head of the
Architectural Association school of architecture and Shand's own cousin, as the British CIAM representative. When this did not work out, Shand recommended Japan-born, Canada-educated architect
Wells Coates. Shand, together with architects Coates,
Maxwell Fry and
F. R. S. Yorke were the founding members of the
MARS Group (Modern Architectural Research Group), which operated from 1933 to 1937. The group came into existence at the prompting of Giedion, after Shand wrote to him. Shand, Coates, Yorke and three other members of the Mars Group attended their first CIAM congress in 1933, which took place on board an ocean-going liner journeying from Marseilles to Athens in July that year. 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. In seven parts it set out ideas on the evolution of Continental modernism. Shand was sued for bankruptcy in March 1933, with the court case taking place in August that year. That same year, however, with Geoffrey Boumphrey (a fellow member of the
Design and Industries Association), he founded a company Finmar to import Aalto's furniture into the UK, for the purposes of which he set up an exhibition of Aalto's furniture and experimental wood reliefs at the
Fortnum & Mason department store in London. 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 furniture sold in the UK by Finmar. Shand retained a friendship with Aalto, and as Aalto spoke little English until the 1940s, they conversed and corresponded in German. Aalto would later tell his biographer,
Göran Schildt, that due to his military background and faultless German, Shand had acted as a British spy behind German lines during the war, though Shand himself never made such a claim elsewhere. On Aalto being awarded the
Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal in 1957, Shand wrote him to offer his congratulations, and Aalto wrote back saying of himself and Shand that "We are the last surviving soldiers of the Salvation Army". On his trip to the UK, Aalto visited Shand in Cambridge, where he spent his retirement. Despite his early enthusiasm for modernism in design and architecture, by the late 1950s he was far more critical towards the results of modern architecture, writing that: Shand demonstrated his knowledge of food and wine in articles and books published during the 1920s. He set out his viewpoint at the beginning of the 300-page
A Book of Food (1927): "This is frankly a book of prejudices, for all food is a question of likes and dislikes. One may be tolerant about religion, politics, and a hundred and one other things, but not about the food that one eats." ==Death==