Serge Chermayeff - Architect of the Month – August 2013

Serge Chermayeff was born in 1900 in Grozny, Chechnya, then part of the Russian imperial state. His family sent him to England at a young age to be educated.  He went to Harrow school, but his family’s business was destroyed by the Russian revolution and he was unable to follow his ambitions to go to Cambridge. He spent some time in Argentina, then returned to England to work as a designer for furniture manufacturer Waring and Gillow.  He became a British citizen at the age of 28. As an industrial designer he created Bakelite radios for EKCO.

De La Warr Pavilion, staircase (2013)

In 1930 he established his own architectural practice.  His work was modernist and Bauhaus influenced. His first building was a small concrete house for a schoolmaster and his most famous building in England came about when he joined up with German architect Erich Mendelsohn in 1933. They entered and won an RIBA competition to design a new, modern pavilion for the seafront at Bexhill-on–Sea. The building was sponsored by the 9th Earl De La Warr. The brief was for a completely modern structure with no heavy stonework. 

De La Warr Pavilion, seafront elevation (2013)

The resulting building is a beautiful Modernist design which shows signs of the Bauhaus and Constructivism as well as the more Anglicised version of Art Deco, which excelled at seaside and marine- style design. The pavilion has been recognised as being of international significance and given a Grade I listing.  The Chermayeff Mendelshon partnership created other buildings including Cohen House, built alongside a development by Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry in Chelsea.

Both Chermayeff and Mendelshon were members of The Modern Architectural Research Group, or MARS Group, a think tank created in 1933 by architects and academics in the UK who were involved in the Modernist movement. These included Fry, Morton Shand and Wells Coates as well as supporters such as John Betjamin. The MARS group proposed a radical plan for the redevelopment of London, at its height there were 58 members and their greatest success was in 1938 with a show at the New Burlington Galleries, which unfortunately left them in debt.

Despite the success of the De la Warr Pavilion, Chermayeff’s partnership with Mendelshon only lasted a few years. By the end of the 1930’s, Chermayeff’s practice was in difficulties, he went bankrupt in 1940. This and the war persuaded him to emigrate to the USA. He became involved in academia, co-founded the American Society of Planners and Architects and worked in universities in California and Chicago as well as Harvard and MIT. He published several books and his working life concluded as head of architecture at Yale, he retired in 1970.

Chermayeff designed his own house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife Barbara and family for 55 years and died in May 1996. His son Peter is an architect and his son Ivan is a graphic designer.