By 1940, Europe looked hopeless for the young Chermayeff family. Furniture design was not high on anyone’s mind and everyday life became increasingly hard to maintain. The wartime sumptuary measures unnerved the handsome couple – finding bicycles in Sussex at the time was almost impossible. They decided to come to America (Barbara’s fortune teller foresaw their emigration). Caught harrowingly between subs below and the Royal Air Force above, their first ship was forced to return to Belfast; they sailed off for Montréal again two weeks later. From there, Serge and Barbara made their way by car across America in search of jobs. They left the boys with Walter and Ise Gropius in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and sent for them about a year later when things seemed relatively settled in Oakland, California. Ivan and Peter, with Ivan no more than 8 years old, Peter barely 5, travelled for days alone to California. The kindness of some nuns on the same train ensured a safe passage, but even without them, Serge saw no reason why his sons could not travel by themselves. After all, he must have thought, he himself made the arduous and often mountainous trek from the Caucasus to London alone as a child of 10. Later when Ivan and Peter attended Phillips Academy Andover as borders, they would spend weekends with the Gropiuses. Walter and Ise were inveterate bird watchers and they taught Peter how to lure them to their window with seeds and flowers. Walter also taught Peter how to identify and shoot at cowbirds, the cuckoo’s cousin, with a 22 calibre pistol. Those he loathed.

California was fine – a sunny intermezzo before Serge’s life really began back on the East Coast. Serge had a contract in the Northwest and he would often take the whole family on the drive north from California. On one such trip, when it was reported on the radio that the Soviets had joined the war, Serge stopped driving and got the whole family out to do a war dance around the car. He had speaking engagements at the San Francisco Museum of Art, designed some houses, hung out with Amelia Earhart, and by 1942, they all packed up for New York where Serge was hired to chair the art department at Brooklyn College. Almost immediately, he changed the department’s name from art to design. There is a shape to life and this can be designed, optimized, improved. In the 1940s the world was alive to the idea that the pragmatic and the ideal could, in fact, meet through ingenuity. In 1939, television transformed mass communication; in 1941, penicillin, used as an antibiotic, revolutionized medicine; the atomic bombs of 1945 unambiguously allowed for the reality of whole cloth annihilation. If we could design for our extinction, so too could we design for life to prosper.

 

 

In New York, as in California, Serge’s name preceded him. He and Barbara were quickly entered into society. The couple became eligible for American naturalization in New York and they called Phillip Johnson and MoMA director Alfred Barr as their guarantors. On the day of the hearing, Johnson and Barr arrived at the courthouse to vouch for them in full matching eveningwear: top hats, cummerbund, tails, rolled umbrellas. Bertrand Russell crashed at their two-bedroom between apartments. They were entertained and they entertained in kind. Ivan and Peter grew accustomed to sleeping on piles of coats as their parents wiled away boozy evenings with friends, where Serge reliably prevailed over every conversation, even ones not in his field. Serge’s argumentative nature and rigid intellectual position is often noted by his critics, but they reductively confuse passion with ire. His close friends and most talented students knew his tough, emphatic and often domineering manner as the expression of an inspired pedagogue, hell-bent on arousing a combative and creative spirit, but not out to condescend.

By 1952, Serge was teaching at Harvard – a welcomed consolation after the Institute of Design in Chicago, under his directorship, lost its financial backing and was subsumed within Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology. At Gropius’ invitation, and together with Josep Lluís Sert, the famous Spanish architect who was newly installed as dean began a new phase for the architecture school that was to define its legacy. One of the first things Serge did at Harvard was to devise a new foundation course called Environmental Design. Serge believed in a socially holistic approach to design and he took the classroom as a microcosm of how real-world design could be approached. Where architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture students traditionally followed different course plans, Environmental Design was a class that brought them together, solving problems by playing off each other’s separate strengths. His strong convictions for logical reasoning, critique over opinion, a modern positivist humanism, and for design that is materialized through intellectual journeying and not a crude desire to blindly produce were impressed deeply upon his students and colleagues. Harvard’s renown grew through Environmental Design, and it became the basis of most design programs throughout the United States. “There was no way of escaping the importance of Serge,” Louis Bakanowsky said about his former teacher. “You could hate him, or dislike him, but you had to respect the man for how he approached the subject. He did not compromise. [His] values were too high. As a result, he could be quite brutal.” Mediocrity threw him into conniptions; he ignited with the slightest variance to his version of perfection. In 1962, he joined the architecture faculty at Yale and stayed there until his retirement nine years later.

 

 

Serge became notorious for his dyspeptic personality at work, but with his boys he was soft-handed, nurturing their whims into blossoming imaginations. The image of Serge the gardener comes to mind. In an address writer, Victoria Milne gave in 1994 on Serge’s legacy, she recounted the story of how he created the garden at Bentley Wood by throwing bulbs into the lawn, planting them where they fell. Butter daffodils, white narcissus, great sheets of bluebell and primrose flowered purposefully by deed of his casual scattering. “That, I think was one of the most beautiful things,” Serge told Milne. Just as easily, Serge planted a sense of initiative and wonderment in his sons. Out on Cape Cod, where Serge kept a summer house since the early 1940s, they would spend afternoons making sculptures by the water out of whatever was laying around. Ivan liked to draw, Peter liked making things and Serge, the father (not teacher), allowed space for both to make their own way. “Our father was a stimulus machine,” Peter told me from his office in Andover. “He knew how to turn our minds on.”

 

 

As it were, Serge was also Ivan and Peter’s teacher at Harvard, and his holistic view of the built environment took hold in the evolution of their respective practices. Immediately out of school, the brothers, along with with Louis Bakanowski, Paul Dietrich (also a former student of Serge’s), Alden Christie, Thomas “Tom” Geismar and Terry Rankine founded Cambridge Seven, an architecture partnership that sought to engage with design in a wider field than that prescribed by buildings. At 22, right out of Harvard, Peter received a grant to make a documentary film about the effects of nuclear weapons – a project in a field that he found far more urgent and immediate than building design. Paul Dietrich had approached the brothers about starting an interdisciplinary firm – Ivan and Tom already had a successful graphic design practice – but nothing came of that suggestion until a few weeks later when Peter was at the Middlesex Fells Zoo just north of Boston. He found the experience so adverse that he approached the zoo director and offered his nonexistent firm’s soi-disant expertise to renovate and improve the ageing facility. The director, Walter D. Stone, surprisingly agreed to attend a presentation of their pitch. The boys were potent, and their proposal was compelling but impressed as he was, Stone had no budget at his disposal. He did, however, introduce them to Lee Finner, a herpetologist from Detroit who was in town to meet architects for a new aquarium set to be built on the harbour, east of Boston city centre.

 

 

Beating out the competition, the young men built the New England Aquarium in 1969. A year later, the aquarium’s cylindrical Giant Ocean Tank opened to the public; 40 feet in diameter, at the time it was the largest of such aquariums in the world. Blue light filled the interior of the building. Within, audiences were corralled into the other side of reality by the exhibits. Visitors fell silent as schools of gleaming mackerel eddied in front of their eyes; nurse sharks glided into view; giant groupers, with eyeballs the size of a man’s fist, floated above their heads, weightlessly like planets. With this project, Peter had found his calling. “I became fascinated with these spaces where people could lose themselves in,” he recently recalled to me. “I wanted to take them out of their normal surroundings, to allow them an experience of wildness, to show them the effectiveness of nature.” Cambridge Seven made many other types of projects but Peter would lead the aquariums. (“We used to call him the ‘wizard of wet’,” Catherine told me recently in Berlin.) Over the years, and later in his own separate practice, he would build them in Baltimore, Chattanooga, Osaka, Genoa, Salmiya in Kuwait, Seward in Alaska, and his largest one in Lisbon.

 

The New England Aquarium was Cambridge Seven’s first commission, but their first executed project was, in fact, the US pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montréal. The pavilion was designed by Cambridge Seven, with Peter heading the team, even though it is commonly attributed to Buckminster Fuller alone. Jack Masey, one of the design directors at the United States Information Agency at the time, was charged with producing the American pavilion for the Expo in Montréal. Masey approached Cambridge Seven about designing the pavilion in 1965, and they produced a design that featured a monumental transparent three-quarter dome, which enclosed floating platforms, like a giant snow globe. To realize it, Masey and the architects then asked Fuller if he would make the clear shell for them. At this point, all of Fuller’s domes were low and squat, and the prospect of building a long unrealized idea at an unprecedented scale piqued the old man. Fuller’s firm detailed the dome and fitted its cells with clear acrylic, manifesting his grandest structure and Cambridge Seven’s first project.

“Architects work on things that take a long time,” Ivan told an interviewer in 2007, “and often fail because of lack of funding or whatever reason. With graphic design there is the advantage that ninety-nine percent of what we do is produced.”

“Architects work on things that take a long time,” Ivan told an interviewer in 2007, “and often fail because of lack of funding or whatever reason. With graphic design, there is the advantage that ninety-nine per cent of what we do is produced.” The pace, visibility and immediate effect of graphic design attracted Ivan. Just a few short years after school (he graduated from Yale), he formed Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar Associates in New York. Robert Brownjohn was one of his father’s top students in Chicago, and Tom Geismar was a classmate at Yale. They made ads, posters, album and book covers from a one-room office on West 56th Street. This was 1957; work had just begun on the nationwide interstate highways; the first commercial domestic airline was just months away from flying its first passengers; hair was cleanly parted, lapels were high, ties were trim; this was the jet age. The city teemed with an ideological decadence. Artists moved to the East Village to live amongst the Ukrainians and Italian fruit vendors, while uptown, fueled by postwar consumer spending, large corporations were fast becoming larger corporations. In the midst of all this, Ivan and his colleagues became the original Mad Men. Their knack for politicking quangos brought the firm lucrative contracts. In 1959, CA Magazine did a feature on them called “The Bold Young Men.”

 

 

 

Swept up, Brownjohn left for London in 1960 to a quick ascent (he designed the nubile silhouettes for the opening sequence of From Russia with Love) followed by a meteoric collapse (he overdosed on drugs). Not only did Chermayeff & Geismar continue, they thrived, and for the next half-century, the firm would come to define American visual culture of the second half of the 20th century, their images and logos, ubiquitous, would burn into our visual vocabulary. They designed the Chase Bank’s indigo octagon (1961), and the Mobil Oil Corporation logo (1964) – its blue letters with a red “o” dependably dispersed along American roads and highways at gas stations like a comforting refrain. They gave NBC a rainbow peacock (1986), National Geographic its yellow frame (2002), Barneys New York its asymmetrical ‘y’ (1983), PBS its staggered profiles (1984) and in 1972, they planted the now-iconic giant red “9” on the sidewalk in front of the “ski-slope” building at 9 West 57th Street. Pan American World Airways became the much more recognizable PanAm from Ivan and Tom’s consultation in 1957. Xerox, Time Warner, standards for American road signs, it’s hard to overestimate the degree to which their designs have shaped the way we see information in the built world. Perhaps the most impactful civic project carried out was in the 1960s when Ivan and Peter, with Cambridge Seven, reconceived the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) way-finding system. They were to give a new face to greater Boston’s public transit system. A capital “T” inside a circle symbolized the entire subway and above ground train system, and the lines were renamed for colors rather than the name of the final stop, which kept changing as the lines expanded. Cambridge Seven went on to build a number of Boston’s subway stations. About a million people ride “the T” every weekday and for Peter, this is how he and his brother’s practices dovetail into the tenets of their father’s teachings at Harvard: design is not the act of servicing the whims of clients, but it’s born from the need to problem solve, and holistically furnish the public with a way, an ethic, that allows for a sense of social identity and meaning. Like a road prohibition sign with the oversized letters “W” and “ST” replacing the diagonal slash, Chermayeff & Geismar’s recent logo for the Occupy Wall Street movement, commissioned by the New York Times, draws upon the most rudimentary of symbols to evoke the loftiest of aspirations.

It wasn’t until after school when Sam went to Tokyo on a Swank Fellowship research grant that his life began on its current trajectory. “I applied to do research on Japanese construction, which never happened because I sent in a portfolio to SANAA – whose work I’ve always admired. A week later, Sejima-san and Nishizawa-san took me in on a provisional basis.” Tokyo had no comparable reference points to the Upper East Side. His first apartment in Togoshi-Ginza was a 300 square foot confection of fake wood, which was no bother because all waking hours were spent at the office. Work at SANAA was conducted in Japanese and epigrammatic English, and the firm’s ethic of relentless perfection dramatically brought focus to Sam’s life. His first project there was work on the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. Sitting in the office next to Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge – a beautiful, headstrong young woman from Sigmaringen in southern Germany – was a situation that presents itself now as an auspicious token of their current partnership in Berlin.

 

More than five years on, after leading separate teams to design and realize SANAA’s Serpentine Pavilion, and organizing the 12th Venice Architecture Biennial together with Sejima, in 2010, Sam moved to the German capital together with Johanna to found their architecture firm, June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff. They hit the ground running, collaborating with artists like Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Demand, a commission from 3M, an exhibition design for video artist Lynne Marsh. They’re making inflatable aluminium coffee tables and mirrored side tables with arched legs like a bridge – wry humour with a minimalist’s practicality. Having lived far from home, first Tokyo, now Berlin, Sam seems to be someone who finds no security in convention, instead drawing power from a work-hard-play-hard approach that keeps him up late in Berlin barrooms, and sends him early into the office the following day. Neither Sam nor his father, feign any academicism – the act of making and working itself forms a virtue. When asked, “what is the great[est] challenge you foresee in the city’s future,” he ripostes, “finding clients.” (Incidentally, when designboom.com asked Ivan what his favourite time of day was, he replied, “when the check arrives in the mail.”)

 

 

Like his father, and his father before him, Sam is tall, slender, with a tapered face animated with deep large eyes and a directed nose. His robust tangle of unwashed dirty-blond curls lends him a charming insouciance (his current apartment in Berlin lacks a bathroom and shower, like his place in London when he was on exchange at the Architecture Association). The physical affinities between Sam, Ivan, Peter and Serge are obvious enough from photographs, but the more nuanced familial ones are enshrined at the house Serge built in Truro, halfway between Wellfleet and Province Town on Cape Cod. From 1942, not long after Serge and Barbara first moved to America, they leased about 12 acres of wooded landmarked with ponds, close to the Atlantic shore on the cape. It was a grey, wooden saltbox – a pitch roofed local vernacular (later, Serge would give it accents of red, yellow and sky blue). Overlooking Slough Pond to the west and crowded amongst scrub oaks, aspens and towering pitch pines, the house epitomizes rural Americana in its cosiest incarnation. Here, Serge was amongst the giants of architectural modernism in a physical sense; Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen and György Kepes were neighbours. The theorist and landscape architect Charles Jencks has a house around there still. People of letters, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy had a place close by.

 

 

 

Serge and Barbara were living full time on the cape by the 1970s when he was retired. There was a thought in 1972 to move to San Juan – they even bought land in the centre of the old town – but the cape was where they stayed, where the children, grandchildren and their children would come and stay year-round, and where old friends and colleagues would wassail over stories from the past. It’s a house that still stands today, having changed remarkably little despite the years; it’s an emblem of how once, they were all young together. Serge passed away on the cape in 1996, Barbara some years later, Ivan turns 80 next year, but through the dizzying, peripatetic expansion of life and its accomplishments, of history, the family remains tight. Kenneth Rexroth, in his introduction to Serge and Christopher Alexander’s 1963 book, Community and Privacy, wrote that “It is precisely the private familial peace, what might be called the inner life of parents and children, that our communities seem built to corrode and disrupt.” What Rexroth gleaned from the book is that, “There is a secret family ingathering of strength which is essential to human life.” Beyond all else, he continues, “It is this that is Serge Chermayeff’s main concern to enable, protect, and enrich.”

 

 

Greyscape appreciates the help of Carson Chan, Sam Chermayeff and Victoria Camblin of 032C

Carson Chan (1980) is an architecture writer and curator, pursuing a PhD in Architecture at Princeton University. After working for Barkow Leibinger Architects and the Neue Nationalgalerie’s architecture exhibitions department in Berlin, with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, he founded PROGRAM in 2006, a non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. He has variously curated and overseen more than 30 international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture. His writing on art, architecture and contemporary culture appears in books and periodicals worldwide, including Kaleidoscope, where he is a Contributing Editor, and 032c(Berlin), where he is Editor-at-Large. Chan has interviewed a broad range of contemporary practitioners, including Thomas Demand, Udo Kittelmann, William T. Vollmann, MVRDV, Ute Meta Bauer, Greg Lynn, Rick Owens, Hans Kollhoff and David Simon. With Nadim Samman, Chan curated the 4th Marrakech Biennale 2012, presenting newly commissioned works by more than 40 artists, architects, writers, musicians and composers at 5 locations throughout the city. Chan was Executive Curator of the Biennial of the Americas 2013, in Denver, Colorado. Also in 2013, Chan co-organized a conference at Yale School of Architecture with David Andrew Tasman and Prof. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, bringing together leading and emerging scholars researching both historical and contemporary practices of architecture exhibition-making. The papers and roundtables presented at the conference have now been published by Yale and is distributed by Actar. His current research tracks the rise of environmentalism and aquarium architecture in postwar United States.

On Instagram:

www.instagram.com/chan.carson/

www.instagram.com/samchermayeffoffice/

Sources The Chermayeff Century:

Chermayeff, Serge and Alexander, Christopher, Community and Privacy, Doubleday & Company, 1963

Milne, Victoria, Serge Chermayeff: Never Trivial, speech given on July 25, 1994, and revised on May 9, 1996

Powers, Alan, Serge Chermayeff: Designer Architect Teacher, RIBA Publications, 2001

The Chermayeff Century by Carson Chan originally published 5.12.17 by  032c.com

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