(1900-96)
Russian-born architect and designer Serge Chermayeff (born Issakovitch) emigrated to Britain as a child and was educated at Harrow. However, plans for higher education at the University of Cambridge were dashed with the loss of the family's money following the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. After a period as a journalist and dancer, in 1924 Chermayeff became an interior designer. After marrying into the controlling family of the furnishers Waring & Gillow, he became a British citizen and was appointed director of the Modern Art Studios. Together with the French designer Paul Follot, in 1928 he mounted an important exhibition of Modern Art in Decoration and Furnishing at the firm's London showrooms, consisting of 68 room settings. Although many of these were in the contemporary French Art Deco style the modernizing flavour of many other aspects of the show was favourably reviewed in the Architectural Review. Other significant interior commissions included the Cambridge Theatre, London (1930), and work at the BBC (1932) which he executed alongside other promoters of the Modernist aesthetic in Britain, Wells Coates and Raymond MacGrath. Chermayeff's functional stacking tubular steel furniture designed for the BBC was manufactured by PEL Ltd. and subsequently widely used in cafés, canteens, and halls throughout Britain. Other design work of the period that has become widely known was the Bakelite AC 64 radio (1933) for the manufacturer E.K. Cole Ltd. Chermayeff was zealously committed to the Modernist cause as seen in his unsuccessful attempt—with Eric Gill, Amadée Ozenfant, H. T. Wijdeveld, and the composer Paul Hindemith—to establish the Académie Européanne Mediterranée, a projected new Bauhaus in the south of France. In 1933 he exhibited a pronouncedly Modernist, somewhat austere, Weekend House at the 1933 Dorland Hall Exhibition, a landmark show in the promotion of avant-garde design in Britain. The display included furniture by Plan Ltd., a company he had founded, and was envisaged as a prototype for low-rise housing. In the same year he launched an architectural practice in central London, taking on the German architect Erich Mendelsohn as partner, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Chermayeff and Mendelsohn undertook a number of important commissions that helped draw Modernist architecture to British critical and public attention. These included the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea (1935), the first English public building in the Modernist glass, steel, and white-surfaced style, and the Cohen House in Church Street, London (1936). However, he dissolved his partnership with Mendelsohn in 1936 and closed his business in the late 1930s on account of lack of business and the outbreak of the Second World War, emigrating to the United States. He was appointed to Brooklyn College in 1942, establishing the Department of Design, and in the following year was elected to the American Institute of Architects. In 1946 he became a US citizen and, succeeding Moholy-Nagy, was made president of the Chicago Institute of Design, followed by appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he was Professor of Architecture (1953-62), and at Yale (1962-7). In 1974 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Canadian Institute of Architects.
