The first committee consisted of the first-generation modern architects Maxwell Fry, Robert Furneaux Jordan, Raymond McGrath, Howard Robertson, George Grey Wornum and F. R. S. Yorke.
Each was asked to "suggest solutions to certain problems of town planning in London, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Bournemouth", using "all the structural and decorative resources of the Glass Age, but [to] produce practical schemes that could actually be built.
[2] During the 1950s the Committee was formed of Geoffrey Jellicoe, Edward D. Mills and Ove Arup & Partners, and it was joined by other architects for individual projects.
[3] Notable schemes included a proposal in 1955 to demolish the entire area of Soho and rebuild it entirely in glass,[4] a 1957 proposal for the replacement of St Giles Circus in London with a 150-foot (46 m) tall glass heliport,[5] and the 1963 "Crystal Span" proposal for the replacement of London's Vauxhall Bridge with a seven-storey glass building straddling the River Thames,[6] which was to have contained a shopping mall, luxury hotel, residential development and a museum to house the modern art collection now housed at Tate Modern.
[9] It was intended that the development would have been economically self-sufficient thanks to boatbuilding workshops, fish farming, and the export of fresh water from an onboard desalination plant, while a lagoon in the centre of the development would support a tourist industry based on skin diving and water skiing.