Serge Chermayeff: Designer, Architect, Teacher - RIBA Publications - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, August, 2001 by Dean Hawkes

By Alan Powers. London: RIBA Publications. 200 1 [pounds]30

Serge Chermayeff (1900-1996) lived a long and complex life. In the 1920s he made a living in London as an illustrator, theatre designer and ballroom dancer. In the 1930s he blossomed as, first, an interior designer and, then, in brief partnership with Erich Mendelsohn, as an architect. Together they produced some of the most significant works of English Modernism, most notably the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill in Sussex and the house at Old Church Street, Chelsea. In 1939 Chermayeff built Bentley Wood, his own house in Sussex that quickly assumed iconic status in the promotion of the new architecture in Britain.

At the outset of the war, Chermayeff and his family moved to the United States and there he began a career in design education that culminated in professorships first at Harvard and then at Yale. The best known fruits of this period were two books, Community and Privacy, 1964, written with Christopher Alexander, and The Shape of Community, 1971, in collaboration with Alexander Tzonis.

Alan Powers' meticulously researched book fills out this life and its achievements. Of particular note is the account of Chermayeff's role in the creation, in 1933, of the Academic Europeenne Mediterranee. This project that, perhaps sadly, was short-lived, for an international school of the arts, 'a sort of seaside Bauhaus', involved, among others, H. T. Wijdeveld, the publisher of the magazine Wendingen, Amadee Ozenfant, Eric Gill and Paul Hindemith. Of the American years, Powers offers a detailed account of Chermayeff's work as educator at Brooklyn College and the Chicago Institute of Design, before the Harvard and Yale years. He also illuminates the relatively little-known products of his practice, in which a sequence of private houses provided a counterpoint to the mainstream academic work.

Most works of architectural biography are concerned with the built work of their subjects, or, occasionally, of their contribution to historiography or theory. Chermayeff's life was full of twists and turns, many of which were beyond his control. There is little sense here that he had anything as banal as a career plan, nor I suspect would he have wanted one. But, maybe because of this, he lived a life that was richer than those of many of the more single-minded and which certainly repays discovery in this valuable book.