Serge Chermayeff Oral History by housingdotcom

ORAL HISTORY OF SERGE CHERMAYEFF Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Complied under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1986 Revised Edition Copyright © 2001 The Art Institute of Chicago

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Outline of Topics

Oral History

Appendix: Curriculum Vitae

127

Selected References

129

Index of Names and Buildings

131

iii

PREFACE On May 23rd and 24th, 1985, I visited Serge Chermayeff in his home at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where we recorded his memories of his tenure as president and director of the Institute of Design in Chicago, following the death of Moholy-Nagy in 1946. Chermayeff’s tenure from 1946 to 1951 was a time of great consequence in the history of an important educational institution in Chicago and his first-hand account of events and personalities bring to light little known particulars of the period. Although it was Serge Chermayeff’s wish to confine the oral history interview to this particular time in his long and varied career, when it was relevant to the topic at hand, we touched on experiences both before and after his time in Chicago. His recollections contribute a dimension of special interest to The Art Institute of Chicago’s oral history study of architecture in Chicago from 1920 through 1970. Our recording sessions were held in Mr. Chermayeff’s study, a large room bathed in ever changing light from a skylight and a window that framed a peaceful pond and pine-bough Cape Cod setting. This room, filled with treasured objects—each one pregnant with unique and personal meaning—reflected the multiple aspects of Serge’s multifaceted career, expressed his cosmopolitan vision, and suggested the extraordinary richness of his professional and private life. The oral history was recorded on four ninety-minute cassettes, which have been transcribed and reviewed by both Serge and me. Serge made the necessary corrections and, in several instances, added information that amplified and clarified his original recollections. The transcript has been minimally edited in order to maintain the flow, spirit, and tone of Serge’s original comments. Because the fiveyear period covered in the interview was highly concentrated and the fabric of people, ideas, and events so densely woven, the material is presented here in a loosely structured topical format. The transcript is available for research in Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and also can be downloaded

from the Art Institute’s web site. Despite limited energy due to a debilitating health condition, Mr. Chermayeff cooperatively shared his recollections in detail and with candor. Recounting memories of friends, many now deceased, caused him sadness and was obviously difficult for him to relive. For all of this he deserves grateful thanks. I also wish to thank Barbara Chermayeff for her assistance in supplying several details that otherwise may have been lost to this account. For more information about the career of Serge Chermayeff one should consult the Serge Chermayeff Archive at Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University, New York City; Serge Chermayeff: Environmental Design, Pidgeon Audio-Visual Library of Tape/Slide Talks; and the extensive bibliography in Selected Writings 1930-1980 by Serge Chermayeff, edited by Richard Plunz (1984). Selected references that I found particularly helpful in preparation for this interview are attached to this document. The Department of Architecture is grateful to William M. Drake, Jr. for his generosity in funding Serge Chermayeff’s oral history. Mr. Drake was Serge Chermayeff’s student at Harvard and remembers him fondly as the most stimulating instructor he ever had. To Kai Enenbach, our efficient and thoughtful transcriber, go special thanks for her continued devotion to the oral history project. Betty J. Blum January 1987 We are grateful to the Illinois Humanities Council for a grant awarded to the Department of Architecture in 2000 to scan, reformat, and make this entire text available on The Art Institute of Chicago’s website. Annemarie van Roessel deserves our thanks for her masterful handling of this phase of the process. Betty J. Blum January 2001

OUTLINE OF TOPICS European Pioneers of Modernism

Opinions and Colleagues

Chermayeff Becomes Director of the Institute of Design, Chicago

Travelling in the United States, 1940

Brooklyn College

Moholy’s Philosophy

Differences: the Institute of Design and Illinois Institute of Technology

Program at the ID under Chermayeff’s Leadership

Popularity of Jazz

Frank Lloyd Wright

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Seagram Building, New York City

Chermayeff’s Interest in Painting

Opinion of Postmodernism

Urban Concerns

Merger of the Institute of Design with the Illinois Institute of Technology

Chicago Plans Exhibition, 1950

Associates

Institute of Design and IIT

Impact of Technology on Furniture Designs

American Institute of Architects

107

International Congress of Modern Architecture [CIAM]

110

The International Design School of the Mediterranean

111

Chermayeff’s Early Design Drawings

117

Chermayeff’s Materials Available for Research

118

Serge Chermayeff [Tape 1: Side 1] Blum:

Today is May 23, 1985 and I’m with Mr. Serge Chermayeff in his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Mr. Chermayeff was born in 1900 in Russia. He was educated in England and lived there until 1939. He spent a few months in Canada before coming to the United States in 1940. In England he was associated with those who were in the forefront of the crusade of modernism. His personal commitment is demonstrated through his writings, his interior design and architecture. Mr. Chermayeff, in the early forties you came to the United States after others in the forefront of modernism such as Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy and through the educational process...

Chermayeff:

I want to make a correction. I am eighty-four but if we now think of Mies, if he were alive, he’d be ten years older than I am; Corbu would be ten years older than I, if he were alive. I don’t belong to what I think is the first wave of modernism. I’m in the second wave of younger men who followed in their footsteps. They felt they were leading architecture on totally different paths from the eclectic reproduction of various periods, without any contribution of originality and without any concern for the change in time, habit, technology and, generally speaking, the way of life in urban situations throughout Europe.

Blum:

The similarity I was drawing between you, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius was the fact that you all, within a period of a few years in the late thirties, left Europe and came to the United States. You were all in the forefront of modernism and you all went into teaching the next generation of young designers and architects. So what you did was bring that idea...

Chermayeff:

You must put Moholy-Nagy first.

Blum:

There were others equally influential that I simply didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mention.

Chermayeff:

And Josef Albers.

Blum:

Of course.

Chermayeff:

These are the three real teachers.

Blum:

But you were all seminal figures in doing this in various schools in the United States. In reading your credits what I discovered was that you are a man of many talents. You were an architect, a writer, a critic, a ballroom dancer...What did I miss?

Chermayeff:

A ballroom dancer, a painter, a poet...

Blum:

A furniture designer, an interior designer...

Chermayeff:

And a graphic designer.

Blum:

And an educator. It’s your role as an educator, as the president and the director of the Institute of Design that we’re here to explore in this interview.

Chermayeff:

Is that your introduction?

Blum:

Yes.

Chermayeff:

As I said earlier, because I think that was recorded, that I belonged to the second wave simply because of being there at the critical historical moment but I was younger than the pioneers and very different in terms of my interests. For instance, it’s no secret that Gropius seldom put a pencil to paper. Leujko Marcel Breuer did all the work that Gropius claimed. I didn’t find this out until very much later. In the meantime I had become a great admirer of his philosophy. It is a philosophy, which attracted me and which made me dedicate my first book Community and Privacy to Walter Gropius. However, one of my best friends was Marcel Breuer who had a house across the pond here. We brought him here, and he bought land. He had left Gropius because Gropius claimed to be the author, the designer for everybody who ever worked with him. That includes in a late book Konrad Wachsmann, General Panel Corporation, which was entirely the work of Konrad to which Gropius simply gave his name. He did nothing in the design. Happily this thing failed because it was based upon an obsession of Konrad Wachsmann's with joints. He wanted every panel of a simple house to be jointed with the same device. This, unfortunately of course, was very impractical because it meant that you had to build

from down up, whereas the ideal house is that which is roofed and then built down. Wood in particular, which is a characteristic material of small house building here, didn’t suffer, it didn’t warp, it didn’t do this, it didn’t do that. All these little differences really became visible. For instance, Mies was particularly interested in space, continuous space, with a minimum of structure. Where the environment came into the house, the house poured out into the environment. Wachsmann was technologically involved in his joints. Breuer was an original designer, particularly versatile because he—and I will now name Charles Eames—and Eames were the greatest chair designers of our time. They have become, in fact, the “run of the mill.” Everybody copied them so that they couldn’t even claim royalties on so many different copies. They were cheated. Their work became so popular that they couldn’t collect all the royalties that were due to them. Blum:

But were their designs patented?

Chermayeff:

They were part of the design.

Blum:

Were they patented?

Chermayeff:

Not as far as I know. I think he patented the later designs, which were a low-pressure mold process of plywood. That he patented, but that’s all. That’s all you could patent.

Blum:

Did Breuer patent any of his designs?

Chermayeff:

Breuer has no patents at all as far as I know.

Blum:

Even though he didn’t collect the royalties, maybe it’s a tribute, to the fine design of his chairs that they became so popular.

Chermayeff:

Oh yes. He had the copyright and people did pay royalties and so on at first. But it went so fast that all these things became so popular that as you see, look around, but you’re sitting on one chair of my design of the same date.

Blum:

What is the date?

Chermayeff:

The date, about 1932 maybe. What you’re sitting on as a matter of fact is a kind of a parody really. Although the frames are original, the chairs were designed for the new Stuttgart Railroad Station, which was 1931-32, about that time. All these cushions were removable so that they could be sent to the cleaners and replaced with clean ones. The frame stood but the cushions could be varied and could be cleaned.

Blum:

How functional.

Chermayeff:

Actually you see immediately everybody began to copy things. The frame on those two chairs comes from Mies. You’re sitting on one of mine with a steel tube frame. The wood frame is all the same, always with cushions, removable cushions, the same. Next to it is yet another chair of mine. What really was happening in the thirties was

that there was almost a kind of intercourse between designers. They didn’t compete so much as collaborate. These variations of invention and so on, they all pointed the same way. Both in architecture and in furniture but some people were better than others. Mies, however, after his pavilion in Barcelona, which was his first space opener with a pool, you remember that. That’s the most photographed building in the world I think. When he arrived here and found the elevators, he became a friend. He went to the Illinois Institute of Technology, with the approval of Holabird and Root. He built up, but instead of decorating the top, leaving so many floors between and decorating the bottom, he started from the bottom and went to the top. It was an absolute system of building. He was really the skyscraper king. Following him came all kinds of people who clung on to him like—now who’s a hero today?—an imitator and generally an eclectic in all he did. Blum:

Are you talking about Philip Johnson?

Chermayeff:

Johnson, Philip Johnson right. Philip Johnson of course had his imitators and so on. Then came the next stage in decay, namely back to eclecticism, but eclecticism not based upon previous ancient styles, highly developed and polished, but whimsy of individual men. When I look around now I am absolutely horrified. When I spent my time at Harvard dealing with the emerging business, which I have now described, in order to start with a functional aspect with the material and all the things which were fundamental to the thing being made. Right? That is when I was hooked, I came to the conclusion to leave. I left Harvard at the invitation of Paul Rudolph,

who is a very gifted architect and who is an original. I went from there to Yale from which I retired as emeritus after about nine years because by this time I was getting into my seventies. I had to think twice until I finally retired from the academy at the age of seventyone. If you look back upon all this, one always must pay one’s debts. When I got a job in Brooklyn College I’d had absolutely no knowledge how to teach this kind of thing. I had to learn it. In order to learn it I went to my friend Moholy-Nagy, who was then struggling in Chicago, and went to see what he was doing by joining his summer school as a student. We went through all the exercises together and I was fascinated. Of course, after that, many variations of these things were added. Moholy you know died of leukemia. He came east from Chicago two weeks before his death to say goodbye to his friends. I was one of them. Gropius of course, and ourselves, we were all friends. Gropius recommended me to Walter Paepcke who had given a free hand to Moholy-Nagy. Moholy asked me if I would take the job and he was dead within two weeks. Then Gropius and many others formed a committee and they all came to the conclusion I probably was the man to replace Moholy. Off I went and saw Walter Paepcke. The interview was very interesting to me, if this is part of the kind of interest you may have. Walter was always interested in art as you know, and his advertising became a model really of art in advertising. We had a very long talk together. We seemed to like each other and understand each other. I was very interested. As I was leaving he said almost casually, “By the by what are your politics?” I said, “I’m a socialist of course.” He said, “Well,

that doesn’t make any difference, but you’re not here to teach politics, you’re here to do something else.” No objection and I got the job. Walter was very kind, as a matter of fact, and gave me two or three paid leaves of absence because I worked very, very hard. I added to Moholy's curricula, which were really fundamental formmaking, extending as far as furniture—chairs, in particular. I added architecture because I thought that architecture and city planning was in fact the container of every other detail that went into it. Although Moholy was very much focused on invention of detail, remember it was the war and he was making mattresses out of wood slats and so on because of a shortage of metal. A most ingenious, marvelous man. He went on with his painting and I went on with my painting.

were

both

engaged

developing

comprehensive curriculum so that one could go from a foundation course, of a most generalized kind of form making and material manipulation, in any direction either to detail or to skyscrapers. The principle is the same; it’s only the components that differ. It was fascinating, so much so that when the Illinois Institute of Technology tried to make it into a kind of conveyance for money collecting by going and saying “We’ll get this design at the Institute of Design—it won’t cost you anything,” and so on, I said “No. Goodbye” and I left. At that point I went to MIT for one year because they wanted me there and Kepes was already there. My MIT period lasted only a year. Harvard had a line for a full professorship and I said I would take that but I don’t want tenure because I want to be free. I never took tenure anywhere. I stayed only as long as I wanted.

Blum:

What year was that?

Chermayeff:

That was in 1952. I left in 1962 to go to Rudolph in Yale and he very typically said, “I’d love to have somebody on the jury with whom I can argue in front of the students.” That suited me very well because I’m very argumentative. I had a lovely time because he was a very nice man, I liked him very much and we got on very, very well. I had six years actually before I reached my retirement age by the rules. By then they had invented the three-year extension of which I had two. I left in 1971. You’re now sitting in the room that I built between the old cottage there and the workshop, which I had here standing free. It was just a little summer wooden thing. I made it all one structure. I made this into a library because I had big paintings and although you think there are a lot of books here, I gave six hundred away to Columbia and also to Harvard and Yale. I had friends at the Avery so that the heart of my archive is there. It is of course accessible to anybody who wants to see it. So, if Mr. Plunz says you can’t see it, you can go straight to the president and have him kicked out. This late period really became one of travel. You’ve been hearing me speak—I speak fairly easily. I never wrote a lecture, I always spoke it. We went around the world twice, to the Pacific, South America, everywhere, lecturing, trying to clear one’s mind, which is the process of lecturing. As you lecture without having committed yourself already to something, you improvise freely and you add and change, in fact you keep growing. That’s where I am now.

Blum:

That’s a wonderful gift, very few people can just improvise like that.

Chermayeff:

Not many.

Blum:

There are many pages that have been printed with lectures and the speeches you’ve given.

Chermayeff:

But I have nothing written down beforehand.

Blum:

You’ve just spoken about many things. Let’s back up for a moment. What do you think was the reason that brought all of you together early in the twenties, thirties to support the cause of modernism?

Chermayeff:

You asked me just now what made me do this. The whole notion of urbanism, which really started with Corbusier, he invented the word and Brasilia for instance is a kind of pastiche of Corbu’s work. His Marseilles housing however, was a pastiche of his own work. In that he made both an error and a great contribution. The roof, as you know, is really an exhibition space. It’s an exhibition space of many levels and many ways of looking out at Marseilles. Furthermore, you could have sculpture there. Henry Moore had an exhibition there, learning from the Mexicans about the great statues. Everything was possible on this roof. But Corbu made a mistake. He had a market street inserted in the middle so as to shorten the up and down stair movement and have as few elevators as possible. It’s true that he is a Swiss by origin, that after all he lived most of his life in France, but

he should have known that nobody, but nobody, would be satisfied with something which is just a little tiny street. Every lettuce, every cucumber is fingered and so on in a great market. The market actually is an urban club in France. Blum:

I never thought of it that way.

Chermayeff:

This is what is missing here.

Blum:

In the United States?

Chermayeff:

Absolutely. If you take all the supermarkets, they’re standardized. Things have to travel; they’re demanded and advertised in the same way everywhere. It is impossible really to have, except in a very, very small town which couldn’t afford shall we say a supermarket, small shops still in which you bought not only corn or your chickens but maybe even saucepans for your own cooking. They are lovely little stores. What I’m thinking of now is how does one return to smallness, not mass production, but mass consumption of that which is wanted by an infinity of immigrants. Here is a country of immigrants; everybody in America is a foreigner, except for a few families. The Homans are descendants of the original Congress or whatever; they’re absolutely great friends. This is what is missing, missing is variety of—I’m not a religious man, so I won’t talk about that—taste, family way of life, number of children in family, this sort of thing.

Blum:

Are you talking about one of the results of industrialization, of mechanization, of standardization?

Chermayeff:

Yes. We’ve been running so fast with technology that we haven’t realized that we have been run over by it.

Blum:

But isn’t this just what was so celebrated at the time that you became, as you said before, “hooked”?

Chermayeff:

Yes, but we never thought it would possibly reach the stage of such infinite mass production and copying. Russia is filled with Fiats, Fiat cars. They made a contract for them. Wherever else you go we are now being inundated with Japanese cars. We have one. Every single one of these countries has something imported. If you go to Mexico what strikes one immediately is baskets. There is a great tradition in Mexico in basket making.

Blum:

And they are handmade from locally available materials.

Chermayeff:

Yes. As they travel from town to town, a very poor woman might bring two eggs to the market miles away because on the way she meets other people doing the same thing. This travel and interchange is between people and not machines.

Blum:

Don't our supermarkets, even though they’re all pretty standardized, somehow serve the purpose? Do you think they somehow have become the forums for a social ritual among people?

Chermayeff:

They do, they do—they’re beginning to be so. The trouble is that there’s so little variation. You can travel one hundred miles and ask for and get the same thing. Walter Paepcke, who was a millionaire who made the Container Corporation out of boxes. Cornflakes are the same everywhere. I have nothing against convenience, and I’m all for variety, but variety of the kind which you find in great art. The Renaissance was a remarkable period inasmuch as every building was really the same, every subject was biblical but every painter was totally different. I think it’s tremendous.

Blum:

Do you think that exists today?

Chermayeff:

Yes. Why do you go to Rome? Why do you go to Paris? To sit outside in the cafes and see people, the passersby, to see people, to see people, to see people.

Blum:

Do you think our society today encourages that?

Chermayeff:

No, they’re much too concerned about parking their Goddamn cars. One of the troubles of technology, we’ve been literally run over by the technology of a particular kind, and I’m not talking now about high technology of a very sophisticated sort. We’re being simply run over by cars. Cars must go. When a railroad carriage can carry twenty times more people and occupy one-tenth of the space of those hundred people in their cars, you suddenly realize that it will have to stop at some critical point or urban life will be impossible.

Blum:

What would you have done had you been working with Corbu and Oscar Niemeyer when they designed Brasilia, the new capital?

Chermayeff:

Corbu went car-mad, hence Brasilia. He was absolutely and completely seduced by the highrise, the skyscraper, the car, and by the four-lane highways. Now we must retreat from that period in technology and use our technology intelligently and on a more personal basis.

Blum:

Did I understand you to say that it was Corbu’s inroads into modernism that first influenced you and others at that time?

Chermayeff:

Yes, absolutely, we were under their spell.

Blum:

When did you come to criticize his values?

Chermayeff:

At the time I never thought of it, never thought of it that way. It takes many, many years of trying to explain what to do to a student to discover if you’re talking rot or not, you know? And if you know an awful lot you pick up so much knowledge in a great university. There are faculties of great minds that have nothing to do with your subject but they have a way of thinking. That’s what you learn, that is what you learn.

Blum:

You said earlier that the modernists worked in collaboration as opposed to competing with one another.

Chermayeff:

Collaboration rather than individuality. Everybody now wants to beat his chest and be visible, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re afraid of being the same as anybody else. High fashion rose out of that elite pride. Go back to Madame de Sevigne and everybodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peruke was exactly the same, everyman's coat was cut exactly the same, but some were richer brocade. There are certain things that you can do and yet be different at the same time, but be the same person.

Blum:

I had the sense that you were saying that collaboration was an attitude among people who were working towards the same goal.

Chermayeff:

Yes, towards the same goal.

Blum:

But on the other hand, you were critical of Gropius for not giving Marcel Breuer credit for doing his drawings when in fact that was a collaborative effort.

Chermayeff:

It was a very painful criticism that I had to make to his face.

Blum:

At that time was everyone given credit and identified as the originator of some idea or object?

Chermayeff:

No. You had to be one of the great leaders and then people gathered around you.

[Tape 1: Side 2] Blum:

You became the head of the Institute of Design when it was known to be diverse and differences existed. How did you handle this situation?

Chermayeff:

It is quite untrue what you were told by Crombie Taylor, as you just informed me, that there were all these fights and differences and so on and therefore the Institute of Design must have been a very difficult school. It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a very difficult school but it was a school, which was full of individualists, this is true. The one who made it a nuisance was Sibyl Moholy-Nagy who stayed behind as a librarian. She was a very good-looking girl. Among other things she seduced a young historian, Martin Metal, who applied for a job and who really was rather a good art historian whom I hired. His wife was just left out. Sybil Moholy-Nagy was extremely ambitious, as Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve said, to really become the director. She had hoped to inherit Moholy's place. Crombie Taylor was her mirror image.

Blum:

Why do you think you were selected as the director? What were your unique qualifications for that job?

Chermayeff:

I think the people who asked me to be director, particularly Moholy himself was because they knew what I could do, what I had done, and probably what I would do. We were, to put it bluntly, in a totally different intellectual class from Crombie. He and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy were both briefly a nuisance. I found no difficulty in getting rid of

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy because she realized that she was not doing a librarian’s job. She had been an actress, she had written a book—we never knew whether it was a success or not, which might have led her to become a writer. The interesting thing to me was the craftsmen, the people who really taught whatever it was, either wood or metal craftsmanship or graphics, particularly a man called Koppe who was a very good graphic artist. There were others of that type. They all, in a sense, were not in competition but rather in a committed way co-workers, except for these two rather obvious ambitious ones, Sibyl and Metal. To say that the school was in constant turmoil is rubbish. There were political differences; it was very easy to deal with those because we were not a political school. I told them in the meantime they either do their job or go and look for one somewhere else—that was that. They worked very well. I had Sigfried Giedion, “Dr. Pep,” whose name I’m sure you know, recommend Otto Kolb who joined us just at the time, as I mentioned I think, of the invention of the low pressure mold techniques. He understood this and was able to operate it and show others. Then you must remember that the school was very largely composed of veterans and the fees were paid for under the G.I. bill. We had some people who chose to come to us who did so because they knew that a lot of different things were going on. That’s why they came. The veterans, of course, were accompanied by a certain number of very nice, intelligent and gifted girls. I didn’t find any difficulty whatsoever. I had a good secretary and finally my wife Barbara became registrar when Mollie Thwaites went back to England. We tried to keep ourselves to ourselves; we didn’t want to join anybody. We wanted to develop our own curriculum and get the best people for that purpose.

Blum:

What did you do to extend the existing curriculum and to perhaps strengthen it?

Chermayeff:

I simply acted as a director. It was quite simple. I made a new curriculum. I had two excellent assistants, not from faculty, but they were left over from the best students of Moholy’s.

Blum:

Who were they?

Chermayeff:

Brownjohn was the best. I prefer not to discuss either his work or his sad drug end.

Blum:

You said before that you brought architecture into the program.

Chermayeff:

By hiring Gerhard Kallman who you know was not a very good designer but an extremely well educated Englishman, who really could make himself understood. Here he was able to, with my help, make up a curriculum which was based upon the basic design of highrise building for dwellings, apartments in other words. That is where we started because everybody knew what goes into an apartment. The question is how do you get into an apartment and how do you get out of it, very simple things. Strangely enough after the “scandal,” I don’t think it’s too strong a term, to describe kicking out Sibyl. It was really quite simple.

Blum:

Did that happen soon after you took over the directorship?

Chermayeff:

Yes. I stood it for so long and then I said, “I’m awfully sorry but you have to go because you’re just intruding all over the place and you really don’t know quite what you’re doing.”

Blum:

Am I’m correct to understand that she had to agree to whomever was selected as a director?

Chermayeff:

No, she had to do what she was told.

Blum:

When you were appointed director, but did she have to agree to your appointment?

Chermayeff:

She had nothing to do with it. She was just a person around there, she was never consulted. There was an outside committee headed by Gropius and I think that Sert was another one of them. I can’t remember them, but there were about five people who chose some names and submitted them to Paepcke.

Blum:

I see.

Chermayeff:

Sibyl had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the selection of the director. To do her justice after she had learned and I would say sucked dry this poor young man whom she had seduced away from his rather plain wife. He really taught her because she drank in everything he was saying. He really knew a lot. After she left she began to develop her own view of the history of architecture. This she did remarkably well. We were all very surprised. She did very

well and published her own book. Her two daughters by that time had grown up and were gone. There was no question at all as I think she did extremely well after she was removed from our Moholy thing. Blum:

But she caused you difficulty for a while?

Chermayeff:

For a while with me, but not very long because she was so obviously a nuisance.

Blum:

You said before we turned on the tape recorder that when you first came to the United States you bought a car in the East and decided to travel cross-country to California. Did you come through and stop in Chicago at that time?

Chermayeff:

Yes, of course.

Blum:

In 1940?

Chermayeff:

Oh, yes, I passed through Chicago.

Blum:

What were your impressions of the city at that time?

Chermayeff:

Of the school?

Blum:

Of city and the school both.

Chermayeff:

I thought it was a most vital city, much more interesting than New York. Of course with the water there, it was rather beautiful. Later after Brooklyn we found, through friends of the institution, a very nice house and installed ourselves in quite a comfortable way.

Blum:

I’m asking about 1940 when you traveled the country.

Chermayeff:

That’s before I got the job in Chicago.

Blum:

Yes it was.

Chermayeff:

It was very exciting in a way. When we went to the Navajo country we saw all the places like Indian canyons and the ruins of an old civilization and things of that kind. We enjoyed this very much. It wasn’t until I had felt that there was no job immediately open in San Francisco, where we ended up, that we were quite safe in bringing our children there. They had been left back East in the care of a retired schoolteacher under the supervision of Ise Gropius. I think I mentioned to you that they went to a school there, a good school. We found a very nice little house just above Oakland and under Sequoia Park, where it begins. We had amusing things happen. For instance, we used to go to San Francisco to see all our friends, particularly Emily Josephs and Dorothy Liebes who really were sort of queens of the art colony within San Francisco. They were very kind to us. We met an awful lot of people there. We used to go over to San Francisco very frequently to meet friends which we had made, new friends, people like Gardner Daley for instance, you may have heard of him. He committed suicide, poor man. I can’t remember many other

names. There was the band of young architects striving to be modern who called themselves Telesis. We made friends really of most of them. On top of that was a most remarkable director of the Art Institute of San Francisco, Grace McCann Morley. Many years later we met her as a kind of emissary from the U.S. to India where we saw her again and where she was again very kind to us. She remained there for many years, I believe, although Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure about this, that she died there. She was already in her late middle age. She was kind enough to make it possible for us to live in San Francisco by having a series of lectures at the Art Institute which I could give for a modest fee. Blum:

In San Francisco?

Chermayeff:

Which I did. So between Mrs. Josephs, Dorothy Liebes and Grace we became quite influential. Later we moved to San Francisco near a good school on Grant Avenue.

Blum:

Is this when you first traveled in the United States in 1940-43?

Chermayeff:

Right.

Blum:

You were called to Brooklyn to head the department of design at Brooklyn College.

Chermayeff:

Yes. What happened was it was a department of art. Harry Gidionse, the president, had sent for a man I mentioned, Leo Balet, who was a musical historian and a very brilliant man. He was out West. We met

in a house in Oregon. I went salmon fishing while the girls took the car down the river to meet our boat. We camped out and fished as we went down. Again, it was really a very exciting time. On our way there, in New Orleans, we had met a Mexican sculptor, Enrique Alferez. He made those two heads you see there. The head on the left he made in 1941 I think when I there. There was very good clay on the beach there. Later on, many years later, he made a head of my wife who had then become quite middle aged, and I called it The Trojan Woman because this is a very strong head of somebody who’s sixty or so. We remained very good friends with Alferez. He was married, God knows how many times, and at that time Enrique was married to a very beautiful woman. They drank and everybody said we would be mad to leave our two boys in the hands of this drunken pair, which we didn’t for a moment believe. And, so it turned out that when we came back we found the little garden which had a little stream running through it, the whole place was covered with works of art, sculpture and constructions, paintings by the boys and by Enrique Alferez. We were proved correct; they never touched a drop while we were away, not a drop. Blum:

Have you always had a good working relationship with artists?

Chermayeff:

Yes, provided that they did something. I didn’t like very much the sort of burglars or the old fashion art teachers. In fact my task in Brooklyn when I went there, given me by Harry Gideonse, was to get rid of two women, one of whom had been the chairman of that de-

partment and had tenure. I did that by a very, very simple device, by making their life impossible. I took away all of the privileges that they had, their titles and everything else, except tenure of course. I took away their students; they just had nothing to do. They very wisely decided to leave, which was exactly what was intended. That’s the kind of people that I didn’t like and neither did Gideonse. He realized that I was strong enough to take no guff from people like that. Blum:

Were you charged with that kind of responsibility going into the Institute of Design, to rid the faculty of dead wood?

Chermayeff:

No, not at all. I was a friend of Moholy's, I became a friend of Paepcke who was the patron and there were two or three members of faculty who became very good friends. I imported my own, recommended by Otto Kolb, recommended by Giedion. I even went so far as to make peace between Moholy and Mies van der Rohe who in the years they had been there had never talked to each other. I went to see Mies very frequently because we both liked to drink. He was very solid—he weighed three hundred pounds or so. He had rheumatism, moved very slowly. He only woke up at about twelve o’clock at night. I was quite happy to sit up with a great man and his one or two friends, and a woman he was in love with at the moment. She was a divorcee; I can’t remember her name [Lora Marx]. I was able to make peace between the Institute of Design and IIT assuming only those things which we could do without interfering in any way with Mies’s own theories of architecture and so on. My line of thought was totally different from his. His was exquisite finish and

brilliant space-making and structure. That was not my interest so we got on very well. Blum:

How was it possible to make peace between Moholy’s theories and Mies?

Chermayeff:

By simply taking Mies by the hand, and saying, “You’ve got to come with me, look at the school, meet Moholy and we will all sit down and talk about our different functions.” They came to a very easy agreement and that was that.

Blum:

When did that happen because you did not come here until after Moholy had died?

Chermayeff:

Remember I told you that on our way West first I went through Chicago.

Blum:

Early in the forties?

Chermayeff:

Yes.

Blum:

Was that before or after you took a summer course with Moholy?

Chermayeff:

When I had this offer to teach from Brooklyn College, the first thing I did was to learn from Moholy what to do. I didn’t know. The foundation course was really the base of all this. When I arrived at Brooklyn, after the summer session with Moholy, I was perfectly prepared to sort out the existing faculty there and make new assign-

ments and get all the cooperation from people who were in the Museum of Modern Art and President Harry Gideonse. Blum:

Did you pattern the program at Brooklyn College after Moholy’s?

Chermayeff:

I changed that from a school of art, which I thought was absolutely ridiculous, to a school of design. There wasn’t an artist within miles. Secondly, and in principle, I didn’t think that a university without great talent could have a department of art. William Gaede, who was then the dean of Brooklyn College as well as the president, and I both agreed that it is very much better to make use of the excellent minds, which were around. I have to remind you that to get into the New York colleges was a tremendously competitive business. The students who went there, particularly to the school of music and art, which was a very good school, they were, I would say, ninety percent Jews and competitive Jews really produce results. They are brilliant if they want to do something, they’re awfully good. Karen Karnes’ pot over there is an example; she brought it to me the other day. As a result I had the support within the general school, the support of the faculty as well as the dean and the president. There was one rather amusing interval. I was asked to design a theater for them, which I did. The chairman of the music department, Maurice Lieberman, was a terrible nuisance; everything was always wrong. No matter what you did he wanted it done another way. I told him, I said, “You’re not going to do it your way because I know more about theaters, having built two in London, than you’ll learn in the rest of your lifetime. Therefore, I don’t want to argue with you. That’s how

it’s going to be.” The president said, “Yes, of course.” These arguments came up at the weekly meetings of faculty with the president. One day Lieberman made himself particularly obnoxious so I got angry. Everybody was there, faculty, all the chairmen of the departments, president, deans, everyone, and I said, “I think it cannot be too widely known that Professor Lieberman is a son of a bitch!” and I hit the table and I cracked the bone in my finger! Blum:

Were you pounding the table with only one finger?

Chermayeff:

With one finger. As we were leaving the meeting, which then broke up, Gideonse put his arm around my shoulder and said, “High time, it was said.”

Blum:

And did you go to the hospital right from there?

Chermayeff:

Not until my wife got a fracture skiing and I put my hand under the x-ray. You can see it had its nice, light moments.

Blum:

Is that also part of the responsibility of the director, to do those things?

Chermayeff:

Yes. What you decide to do, you had bloody well do.

Blum:

May we go back to this course that you took from Moholy, before you came to Brooklyn College. Did you bring any of the ideas with you?

Chermayeff:

All of Moholyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ideas, and added my own. Principally I added the architecture side.

Blum:

To the Brooklyn College curriculum?

Chermayeff:

Curriculum first. For instance we designed. I asked students to do this, to design a day school for junior classes in New York. They made some very fine designs. In the meantime of course a lot of people were furious that a foreigner had been appointed to one of the colleges of New York. The mayor was then Fiorello La Guardia, a nice little, tubby man who used to go to every fire and was generally really a great worker. The people told him how awful I was and how indecent were some of the drawings which were put up in the school.

Blum:

Was this objection or prejudice directed towards what you were doing in the school or just that you were bringing in modern ideas? Or was it because, as youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve just said, they were incensed because you were not an American, but a foreigner?

Chermayeff:

The Brooklyn opposition really was because I was a foreigner.

Blum:

It was? Were you naturalized at that time?

Chermayeff:

No. I became naturalized a couple of years later, I think I mentioned to you, with our sponsors being Philip Goodwin and Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art which pleased Giedion very much. We made friends in that kind of way. We got on simply because each one of these people I mentioned knew what the other man could do and did do. We agreed that this was the thing to do. We didn’t want any pettifogging self-appointed teacher of, I don’t know, metal work or something, in a college. I managed to squeeze out all these wretched people, e.g. a man who is supposed to be teaching drafting, and he couldn’t draw himself.

Blum:

Was this in Brooklyn College?

Chermayeff:

In Brooklyn College, so this was sort of a clearance. When I was asked to take Moholy's place I had considerable experience in administration and obstinacy and knew what I wanted. I knew what Moholy had already established, which I could build upon, and I could recognize the Crombie Taylors of this world from a mile away. It was not difficult at all. The people who didn’t like it got the hell out. Period!

Blum:

The faculty?

Chermayeff:

Yes. I don’t think that many left as matter of fact because they had the tools, the equipment and the freedom to continue the Moholy kind of work they approved of.

Blum:

The Moholy philosophy that I’ve read about that seemed to underlie the curriculum or the program in the school was one based on the idea that everyone has talent and all they need is the right environment to be able to express it.

Chermayeff:

Everybody had to do everything. In other words there were no classes for graphics, and no classes of this, and no classes of that. The foundation course everybody had to take. All of them were exposed to the good teachers in the school. Every semester there was a dual examination where all the work was put out and the faculty walked around, observed, made their comments and that was that. There were no marks.

Blum:

They did a critique, so to speak?

Chermayeff:

Yes. No A’s, B’s, and C’s.

Blum:

It would seem to me that in an environment like that where creativity and expression was encouraged, fierce independence of the individual would also be encouraged.

Chermayeff:

Of course, but not to be a nuisance.

Blum:

This strikes me as being very different from Mies’s school and his program.

Chermayeff:

Mies, with Peterhans, his chief assistant—there were only two of them on the faculty—was a very strict run line disciplinarian. Everybody had to produce a drawing with a tree in it. Every leaf on

the tree had to be drawn perfectly, every brick in the wall had to be drawn perfectly, exactness, elegance and certain things that Mies particularly liked were repeated again and again and again and again. Unless you really belonged to the Miesian philosophy and admired his particular strict discipline from which there was no escape, they just left. He had a one-man school really you see. Everybody came out doing exactly the same thing, everybody. They all went through this tremendous discipline. The very gifted people, and there were several—I don’t happen to remember their names—which came out of Mies’s school. Blum:

In his early years...

Chermayeff:

Moholy was already there before Mies came you see. There were a few who were able to maintain the discipline and yet develop their own style. The phrase Miesian really meant something, you could recognize that’s a Mies student. That’s how it worked. In our school it was exactly the opposite, you couldn’t recognize who did what unless it were very brilliant like Robert Brownjohn. He was so gifted that it was inescapable that he was the best man around the place.

Blum:

Did you resent that kind of difference in approach? I’m sure you believed in what you were doing and what you were teaching, and the validity of your approach.

Chermayeff:

Of course, absolutely, yes. But, what I did also believe in was that if you had a good man, and we had splendid veterans who had just come out of the army, in other words people who had learned how to learn, very important you see. They could cut short their time in the school by half simply because they were trained to learn in the army or in the navy or whatever it was, or the air force. They were also gifted people who wanted to be designers. The combination of both their ambition and their experience made a most remarkable body of students. I wasn’t going to have nincompoops trying to twist their minds.

Blum:

This was at your school?

Chermayeff:

That was at ID.

Blum:

Was the student body any different from that at IIT?

Chermayeff:

Only much older.

Blum:

At Mies’s school?

Chermayeff:

Oh no, you’re talking between Miesian and our school. No they were simply the same generation but different in approach.

Blum:

They were also veterans?

Chermayeff:

Most were. One group chose this very strict, limited, highly disciplined line of Mies and the others chose our experimental free approach and invention. There was never any conflict between the two schools; they were doing two different things.

Blum:

Did you and Mies ever discuss these differences between your programs?

Chermayeff:

No, because one doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t discuss the obvious.

Blum:

Did you feel comfortable with him knowing that he was doing something diametrically opposed?

Chermayeff:

Good heavens, yes. Aesthetics have got nothing to do with people.

[Tape 2: Side 1] Chermayeff:

We were friends while doing totally different things.

Blum:

Were you?

Chermayeff:

We were, yes. I used to love drinking with Mies.

Blum:

Who were the other friends you said just a moment ago that used to join Mies at midnight?

Chermayeff:

I’m trying to remember names but it’s awfully hard for me to do so, I can’t remember.

Blum:

Were they Mies’s students?

Chermayeff:

One was from the office of Holabird and Root, a younger man.

Blum:

Was it Helmuth Bartsch?

Chermayeff:

Helmuth Bartsch, it could have been. Helmuth sounds familiar.

Blum:

He was a good friend of Mies’s.

Chermayeff:

He was younger than any of us and had the duty to remove at the certain given signal, say at one or two o’clock in the morning, from Mies or whoever, the drinking was over, and that was that. It was a very simple direct relationship. Hugo Weber was one of the best of the faculty—he was recommended again by Giedion—a Swiss man, a very good sculptor, excellent draftsman and the most inventive man. For instance, stop me if you think this is irrelevant, in order to develop line of perfection you don’t use rulers you use fingers. That’s where the skill lies. He invented marvelous exercises. You drew first only with your fingers, holding a finger, your pencil, fingertips and doing everything within the limits of that very precise and elegant line that a pencil can produce. Or, it was an exercise in drawing with a brush, or drawing with an arm and not a hand. Hugo Weber, who became an alcoholic unfortunately, and died after I left, long after I

left, I only saw him twice after that. He had a very nice girl and she was a scientist. She was very, very valuable to him when he was sober but then he started slowly sinking into this drinking disease. He invented, for instance, body line by walking along a wall and doing it with the body. Things like that. When you experiment imagine it in this way in many media, painting, whatever, the using of color, like Albers did in Black Mountain. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve suddenly become a master of the medium. It came from here down to here. Blum:

Under your tenure the foundation course was extended from two to three terms. Was that your idea?

Chermayeff:

No, one year.

Blum:

Did you measure in terms or semesters?

Chermayeff:

No. We had semesters simply to give a break.

Blum:

Did you lengthen the duration of the foundation course?

Chermayeff:

The foundation course was a year and divided into sections so that different members of the faculty could come in and work with the same group.

Blum:

Did you extend that from what it had been under Moholy?

Chermayeff:

Yes, through adding architecture. For instance a problem would be, you’re going to design a small house of two bedrooms and it’s in the tropics, and there’s only wood available: so design it! Or, you are somewhere else, concrete is the only available material and the weather was very, very tough: design it.

Blum:

Have to use imagination?

Chermayeff:

Use your old nut, yes. Then everyone had an exhibition of these various exercises, which everybody saw and could see the differences, which were the base of the solution were underlined and discussed into good, bad, terrible, excellent. But no marks.

Blum:

It has been said that under your tenure you brought in features that Josef Albers had used in his course in Black Mountain College. What were they?

Chermayeff:

I used some. He was much more interested in color by the time he got to Black Mountain. But of course when he was in Germany in the second Bauhaus, he was a brilliant designer. He designed some beautiful chairs and things like that. Finally he began to focus on color. He carried it on. We invited Buckminster Fuller. I did the same thing when Buckminster Fuller found that the narrowness of Albers, to say nothing of lack of money, which was very serious at Black Mountain College.

Blum:

Do you mean salary?

Chermayeff:

They had no money. I invited Bucky to come to the Institute of Design. We gave him the whole basement in which he did the most marvelous things of explaining the structure of geometry with the help of dowels and ping-pong balls, which we imported by the hundreds. He built wonderful things you see, just like Marlin’s Cave.

Blum:

How did the students respond to that?

Chermayeff:

Immediately, immediately. Not only that, there was jazz. Jazz was developing and two of the faculty, one a painter, now I don’t know whether he’s still alive but he went to Colorado Springs finally.

Blum:

Who was that?

Chermayeff:

I’m trying to remember but I can’t, not at the moment. Yes, Emerson Woelffer, that’s it. This kind of freedom and also the analogy drawn between shall we say jazz beat and geometry became visible. We used to go to nightclubs together.

Blum:

You and Buckminster Fuller?

Chermayeff:

Bucky and a few chosen students went to nightclubs. I remember a wonderful black singer, I think she’s still alive, she must be very old [Ella Fitzgerald]. She discovered that here were these strange people who shouldn’t have been there you see. We became great friends.

Blum:

What club did she sing at? Do you recall what club you went to?

Chermayeff:

I can’t—the Blue Note I think.

Blum:

So you did your homework at the Blue Note?

Chermayeff:

Sort of. Bucky loved jazz, he could do his little beats and stuff, and I loved dancing. Everybody entered into the spirit of the thing, but it was not relaxation from the other work, it was a continuation in another medium. We had as a matter of fact a teacher of music in the school.

Blum:

Was this something to which all students were exposed?

Chermayeff:

All students.

Blum:

Did they see the relationships?

Chermayeff:

The whole thing was one. I’ll give you an example of the kind of thing that can happen. Bucky had a theoretical notion that it was possible to make a structure, which was continuous compression, like brick on brick, or continuous tension, say, with a cable between two points. He couldn’t make it work, he just couldn’t make it. He knew it was possible but he couldn’t make it. And then one morning, downstairs, came a boy and said, “Bucky, here it is.” It was the first prototype model now in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.

Blum:

Who was the student?

Chermayeff:

I’m trying to remember the name again. I can’t remember his name.

Blum:

I just handed you a list of faculty from the prospectus for the Institute of Design, 1959.

Chermayeff:

I’m trying to recognize some of them. John van der Meulen for instance, was really a rather good architect—Hans Schleger, a graphic artist.

Blum:

Did you add him to your staff?

Chermayeff:

No, van der Meulen was there.

Blum:

From Moholy’s staff?

Chermayeff:

And Hugo Weber in the foundation course, and John Walley, David Pratt.

Blum:

Were any of these men architects?

Chermayeff:

Practically the whole of the foundation course I kept exactly as it was. The painter I mentioned to you was Emerson Woelffer who went later to Colorado Springs and became head. Hayakawa visited us, George Fred Keck the architect visited us, George Kepes had left by the time I got there, and Katherine Kuh was sort of an angel, outside school.

Blum:

Was she visiting faculty? Did she give a course?

Chermayeff:

No. James Prestini was there before me. He was the wood turner who made those exquisite bowls, so thin. I saw him last in San Francisco where he lives, I hope he still is making exquisite sculpture. Henry Russell-Hitchcock made very little impact, he did visit occasionally but he didn’t mean much. Ferdinand Leger visited but that was simply because he happened to have an appointment in California and took us in on the way west. It was quite useful he may have used one afternoon or so—Herbert Read came, of course, a poet from England.

Blum:

Herbert Read was the person who wrote and said that the Institute of Design was perhaps the finest school of its kind certainly in the country, I don’t know if he said in the world.

Chermayeff:

I think if you look here at the people that visited it, and some of them are very short visits, and you look at the one or two people like Georges LeBrun, Barbara’s brother-in-law, he was a very good painter and an extremely interesting teacher of painting. He taught himself to paint. He became one of the good Belgian painters, you see him in museums, by doing portraits and painters “in the manner of.” Of course Hugo Weber in particular, who I’ve mentioned. Richard Filipowski was very gifted, he went to MIT. Richard Koppe stayed—he was a very good draftsman. I could go on about this, but I would say that if you really looked at this list you would recognize the names of the best artists of that time, Neutra, Leger...

Blum:

The reason I handed the list to you, and perhaps it hasn’t been a help to recall names, but it’s been interesting to hear your comments. I was trying to help you identify the student that put Buckminster Fuller’s design together and made it work. I wondered if his name appeared on those lists.

Chermayeff:

This list of course, they were not all there together. Sometimes they were there, sometimes not. Hans Schleger was there for a couple of years, and so on.

Blum:

Apparently they were there in the 1949-1950 year.

Chermayeff:

Let me look at the list. I don’t see the student’s names.

Blum:

No, students are not listed on there. I thought perhaps they were, but they’re not.

Chermayeff:

You thought you might have triggered something, I’m afraid I can’t think of them at the moment. If you look down this list I can tell you George Anselevicius is now chairman somewhere after Harvard and became dean of the architecture school at Albuquerque, New Mexico. Robert Brownjohn, I’m afraid, became “hooked” and died in London.

Blum:

Hooked on what?

Chermayeff:

Heroin, I believe! While it was tremendously expensive here, all drugs were… The drugs were penetrating the schools. I had an awful

lot of trouble because the drug police really werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a big enough force to attend to a relatively small school. We had very little help from them. The drugs penetrated very, very deep. Blum:

What were the drugs that caused problems?

Chermayeff:

Mostly heroin.

Blum:

Was that generally a problem among the students and faculty?

Chermayeff:

Injection, almost in every school. It was a period in which the drug people hooked a few and these hooked others and then they became salesmen and so on. It was a very bad time; it was a very difficult time.

Blum:

It interests me that the Institute of Design was called the New Bauhaus or the Bauhaus in Chicago. Mies also came out of the Bauhaus...

Chermayeff:

He inherited the Bauhaus after Gropius left.

Blum:

I would think he would have to share the German Bauhaus philosophy in some way as Moholy did. Here Moholy headed one school, Mies another and they were diametrically opposed in approach. How did that happen out of the same root, so to speak?

Chermayeff:

The original Bauhaus was very close to what Moholy was doing, and infinite diversity but not nearly as diverse as this list suggests because these people came and went you know. By this time the school had grown from a few students to quite a considerable school because of the Army boys.

Blum:

The G.I. Bill to send servicemen to school?

Chermayeff:

The veteran program. It grew very fast, as I say, but it grew with excellent students because really there was no room to accept mediocre students. We just couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t accept them.

Blum:

What Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m really asking is how did the same school, the German Bauhaus, spring two branches that were so different: Mies with his approach, Moholy with his?

Chermayeff:

You must remember Mies had absolutely nothing to do with the Bauhaus until Gropius left.

Blum:

Yes. Are you saying that Moholy and Gropius shared one philosophy and Mies a different one?

Chermayeff:

Gropius never got into the foundation course type of thing. That was really people like Moholy and Albers. Mies was accused of being a fascist because he stepped in when Walter Gropius left for England and then America. This of course was utter nonsense, he, himself, left very soon and went to the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was then an extremely limited school. His department was a very good

department in his own terms, but as far as the quality at IIT it was not in the same order of excellence as say MIT. It was a third rate school. Henry Heald went to the Ford Foundation because he fundamentally was a money collector. He was trying desperately to get money for this school. He was not very bright—he failed of course. He didn’t understand a word that I said or Moholy said, or Wachsmann said, or whoever. He wanted everything. He wanted IIT’s own registrar to admit our students. I stopped that dead. My wife became the registrar because she knew the kind of students we wanted. Blum:

Was this after or before the Institute of Design and IIT merged?

Chermayeff:

It was before.

Blum:

It would seem that ID was appealing to very different students, if students knew the programs.

Chermayeff:

Yes, definitely.

Blum:

You were the director and the president of the Institute of Design. Did you teach at all?

Chermayeff:

Yes. Everywhere.

Blum:

What type of courses?

Chermayeff:

In every single section sometime or another, partly because I wanted my idea to percolate and partly because I wanted to learn myself.

Blum:

Did you learn from the students?

Chermayeff:

Not particularly. Brownjohn became a partner of my sonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.

Blum:

I see. You spoke about Konrad Wachsmann being added to the ID staff. You shared a studio with him in New York. Was he a partner of yours or did you just share an office?

Chermayeff:

We shared an office in New York.

Blum:

What prompted you to call him to the Institute of Design?

Chermayeff:

When he came he did his stuff, particular and meticulous things. He was a brilliant person. He would draw like an angel and he could do all sorts of things, which other people couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do.

Blum:

He was convinced that prefabrication was a viable solution for housing. Was prefabrication an issue that the Institute of Design dealt with?

Chermayeff:

No. He was doing his own stuff; he never made the General Panel system work in the school. That was his project on the side.

Blum:

Technology certainly was one of the acknowledged forces that were accommodated in the curriculum.

Chermayeff:

For instance, I invited Wachsmann to come because he had an extremely disciplined way of steel structuring. He did wonderful drawings. This was very good. He was an ambitious man and rather unscrupulous. He borrowed money from all his colleagues, most of whom are on this list. He didn’t investing it in the work which Henry Heald hoped he would in order to get a contract from the government for hangars, beautiful hangars for the air force and so on. Heald hoped through Wachsmann to get money. He didn’t understand what was going on.

Blum:

Did that contract ever materialize?

Chermayeff:

No.

Blum:

Was George Fred Keck a permanent on the staff in the architecture department?

Chermayeff:

No, he visited, he was not a regular faculty member. Again, you must remember that we didn’t have much money, in spite of all the help Paepcke gave, people couldn’t be full time. Looking at this list one could see that the volunteer professional staff who came there were almost as numerous as the students who went there.

Blum:

How large was the student body?

Chermayeff:

I’m trying to remember. Barbara, again, would know it better because she was the registrar. I would say we never had more than one hundred, probably less.

Blum:

One hundred people was a pretty sizable school.

Chermayeff:

Yes. It is possible some of these were visitors who came in and went out.

Blum:

How many students were in a class? It seems it’s almost semi-private instruction.

Chermayeff:

The whole school was a class. The students went anywhere in the school whenever they had a chance to step in when they weren’t doing something else.

Blum:

That sounds very much like an account of someone with whom I spoke who attended the Bauhaus in Germany. He went to a weaving class among others.

Chermayeff:

That’s right, exactly.

Blum:

What were the student activities under the school auspices? Recalling the Bauhaus in Germany, did you have an annual carnival?

Chermayeff:

I wouldn’t call it a carnival. We had dances and because Emerson Woelffer, this man I mentioned just now who loved jazz, he knew many of the best jazz musicians. Emerson Woelffer used to invite these people, who came free of course, in order to be able to play

music, which was really improvisation, pure improvisation in jazz. This kind of thing could be called a carnival when it happened. Blum:

Was there drinking and dancing on the premises?

Chermayeff:

A lot of people would stand up as soon as they knew that somebody, a most distinguished musician, was there. They poured in. They had nothing to do with the school. There was no drinking.

Blum:

It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a concert like one in an auditorium. What were the schoolsponsored activities, for instance, where both students and faculty participated?

Chermayeff:

Apart from our visits to the Blue Note with Bucky I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know of any.

Blum:

You held an annual Open House?

Chermayeff:

We had an auction of student work, which helped the school.

Blum:

Every year?

Chermayeff:

Every year.

Blum:

What was the purpose of that?

Chermayeff:

To raise money.

Blum:

How did the students present their material? Were they encouraged to prepare for the auction during the class year?

Chermayeff:

No. We simply asked them to submit something to the auction in order to get money for the school.

Blum:

Was that a successful venture?

Chermayeff:

Very. We used to have an auctioneer, usually from the Art Institute. It was an occasion. We had a dance afterwards maybe, if there was a band around.

Blum:

Do you know what the students did for leisure activities?

Chermayeff:

No. I think that would have been too much for us. The friends we made, of course, did get involved, we got together in various activities. I think that people should lead private lives.

Blum:

Not that you participated necessarily, but did you have knowledge of what students were doing? Did they go to movies, did they watch television, generally how did they spend their time?

Chermayeff:

Of course one knew that. By the by, television didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist.

Blum:

Soon after the war wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it available?

Chermayeff:

Where did it come from?

Blum:

I don’t know, where?

Chermayeff:

Experimental stuff somewhere. I had a radio program for awhile and interviewed Bucky and other important people connected with the arts who came to town. I can’t remember the station. Nadia Boulanger was one of them.

Blum:

Was it WFMT in Chicago?

Chermayeff:

Yes. They gave us a half-hour and we talked. It usually amounted to Bucky saying very complicated things in his own special language and my interventions by saying, “I think, Bucky, you mean...” He teased me about this for years.

Blum:

For whose benefit were you doing that? For the listening audience?

Chermayeff:

The listening audience.

Blum:

Was Robert Bruce Tague on the staff at ID when you were there? He worked in the Kecks office as an architect.

Chermayeff:

Tague, yes he was. He was for a long time a regular. He was very helpful.

Blum:

He worked with the Kecks in their outside practice. When you first came to Chicago and you said you had been there in 1940 as you drove through, I’m interested in how you perceived the city. In 1922 we had a Chicago Tribune competition. Did you know about that?

Chermayeff:

Yes, of course.

Blum:

What did you think about the selection of the design that actually won?

Chermayeff:

I was not one of the judges and I thought that some of the entries were extremely poor, fundamentally. Nobody as clean cut as Mies, in terms of structure, entered. It was all a little bit fiddle-dee-diddley.

Blum:

What about the Saarinen design, although it was late?

Chermayeff:

I can’t remember it. He was very romantic you know. You’re now talking about the old man?

Blum:

Yes.

Chermayeff:

Eero’s father?

Blum:

Yes. It seems that the general opinion of people that I’ve spoken with is that it was really the best design although it was disqualified because it was late. Many think it truly should have won.

Chermayeff:

I don’t remember it and I don’t remember hearing any opinions about it.

Blum:

It was 1922 and you weren’t in the United States. I just wondered what had filtered through about that competition. In 1933 and 1934 we had a Century of Progress Exposition. Did you hear much about that?

Chermayeff:

Nothing.

Blum:

See any of the designs?

Chermayeff:

I was much too busy in England doing my own work to think about America.

Blum:

And the idea that there were modern designs on exhibition presented to the public at large, was that of interest?

Chermayeff:

It may have came through one or two magazines, but I don’t remember anything of significance being published in the Architectural Review, which was really the English statement of what was going on architecturally all over the world. Morton Shand, who is one of the editors of that, and James Richards, who is now Sir James Richards, when I saw him in 1980 in London. It’s very hard to answer questions of so general a nature. You’re asking me to give you opinions of opinions.

Blum:

I am trying to do is see how much information about Chicago filtered to perhaps where you were knowing that you were a modernist.

Chermayeff:

Very little. Chicago had absolutely no influence whatsoever in England.

Blum:

It obviously had no visibility as well, whether it influenced or not.

Chermayeff:

Right.

Blum:

Were some of the early buildings known? Those of Burnham or Sullivan?

Chermayeff:

Yes, but they were interesting to us because of the highrise and the elevator. Nothing to do with that. Frank Lloyd Wright was very much admired and known. In fact he visited England on some kind of a special grant, just after Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d finished my own house in Surrey. I have a photograph somewhere. The sun was in his eyes and he borrowed my little Locke hat, which was just a little bit too small for his big head. He is sitting next to my younger son, who was then three years old.

Blum:

Was he a friend of yours?

Chermayeff:

I knew Frank fairly well. We stayed with him.

Blum:

In Arizona at Taliesin West?

Chermayeff:

Yes. Taliesin West we visited several times. The interesting part of that was that around it is rough ground—arroyos, boulders, no roads. Frank really liked to torture people, so off they went with stainless steel cups and the latest picnic equipment and radios with loud speakers which could pick up the symphony in New York and relay it and with tires blowing out left and right. Everybody stripped in order to pull him out of a hole or whatever. He was standing by in a large straw hat admiring the sweating young men.

Blum:

Were you present on some of those picnics?

Chermayeff:

Yes. I didn’t enjoy it. In fact, I teased him about it. He was extraordinarily egotistical. His younger daughter was a fairish cellist. I remember sitting with Barbara and Frank and she was giving her concert in Taliesin West. She made a musical error at one point somewhere. Frank banged the bench on the side and said, “That’s because they took her away from me and sent her to school and this is the result.” Nobody was allowed to have any life other than that projected by him. His wife too was a tyrant.

[Tape 2: Side 2] Blum:

Was this Olgivanna?

Chermayeff:

I don’t recall her person or name clearly. Myers, was he the editor of Architectural Forum then?

Blum:

Howard Myers?

Chermayeff:

Howard Myers. He was up at Taliesin. We were talking and Frank had just gotten the commission for the Guggenheim Museum. Frank said, “My fee on this ten million dollars building is ten percent and I can now pay all my debtors.” That’s all he said about building.

Blum:

What did he really get paid? He was a friend of yours nevertheless?

Chermayeff:

Not a friend, exactly, but he was friendly enough. He stayed in our house. He came down, there were students sitting around you know worshipping the master. We went to his carp in the West and that sort of thing. There’s a funny story about this. The entrance was a sort of skewered and then there was a long, long pergola leading to the main living quarters of the complex of tents. You probably remember it from photographs and drawings in his books.

Blum:

Yes, Taliesin West.

Chermayeff:

Taliesin West. I came in and I found that the pergola clearance was six foot three and I was six foot two. As, these bars came across you knew you weren’t going to hit them but kept on ducking. When I got to the end of this thing—it was about two hundred feet long—I said, “Frank, why the hell did you have to do this? It wouldn’t have spoiled the proportions of your damn pergola in the least to have made it usable for people like myself.” He said, "Oh, Serge, I’m trying to eliminate weeds.”

Blum:

I suppose you had to admire his sense of humor. That sounds very much like others stories that are told about him. What a clever wit.

Chermayeff:

Yes. He was really a very nice man, but he was brutal about his family. He really wanted them to be masters of their craft, whatever it was, music or something. The marriage of Peters, his assistant, to Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, brought terrible results. Frank was dead, then but he’d left drawings and things which they [Peters] had to interpret. It was a terrible building. Really I think it was high time that he disappeared.

Blum:

Are you saying that Peters had to interpret Frank Lloyd Wright drawings after Wright died?

Chermayeff:

Yes.

Blum:

For what building? Did he finish Wright’s projects?

Chermayeff:

He tried to finish it, a public building like a post office.

Blum:

While you were at the Institute of Design did you have the idea that students should wear uniforms?

Chermayeff:

No. But it was obvious, however, which I learned from Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin who I knew of course very well. He had a laundry for the whole of his staff because you know when you’re doing drawings if you don’t have a smock, which you can ignore, you’re not free. So he, Mendelsohn, had a laundry, and he had these

smocks three-quarter length just below the knee for everybody in the office, with lots of pockets for everything they needed. I may have mentioned uniforms to people but I didn’t do it in my own office, I didn’t have enough. I never had more than sixteen people in my office. Blum:

Did you think that was a good idea?

Chermayeff:

A damn good idea.

Blum:

You never did that in the school?

Chermayeff:

You have to work an awful lot to warrant this kind of expenditure.

Blum:

Was there any competition between the Institute of Design and IIT? We’ve explored the idea that they were approaching what they were doing in such different ways, their programs were different and obviously each school attracted a different type of student.

Chermayeff:

Yes, of course.

Blum:

Was there any competition between them?

Chermayeff:

Competition?

Blum:

Not a formal competition, but a feeling among the students. A man who was a student at the Institute of Design when you were head of

the school, said that the students at the Institute of Design felt they were so good but they felt they were quite misunderstood by the IIT people. Chermayeff:

Yes, the IIT people by this time had become a commercial school.

Blum:

In what way do you mean? Because Mies had an outside office?

Chermayeff:

Mies had died.

Blum:

Even earlier, while Mies was still there.

Chermayeff:

Mies kept very much to himself. Peterhans is his extension as it were. People were told what to do, if they didn’t do it and if it wasn’t liked, that’s all.

Blum:

But Mies also ran a commercial office and he had outside commissions.

Chermayeff:

He didn’t run an office because he always worked with somebody.

Blum:

Yes, but it was his office.

Chermayeff:

Yes, just like the corner on Park Avenue and all his steel structures.

Blum:

The Seagram building? That was designed by his office and built with Philip Johnson.

Chermayeff:

For Seagram building on Park Avenue Mies had made sketches and his help did their best. It was a silly building, again from my point of view, because it was set back, therefore breaking the street. There were two fountains in front and if the wind was blowing the wrong way you couldn’t get into the building without getting soaked. The whole thing was wrong. There are inadequate cantilevers you know. It is absolutely useless to have a cantilever of two feet in order to have the smooth facade. The space is wasted; it’s a complete waste. You either make a cantilever, which will accommodate at least a desk or something or be a passage or be something… Then the fenestration operates in the way it should. Mies was very impersonal. The buildings that he did for IIT were impossible in the summer. He made them all glass, as usual, or a steel frame and practically all the glass was covered with aluminum paper by the users because it was impossible to work in them, too hot, greenhouses.

Blum:

What would you have changed to make it more habitable?

Chermayeff:

It had to be a different kind of building and not the standard Miesian framed glass, it was impossible, absolutely impossible. You can really say that all this kind of development, which we now look upon as history, at the time it was measured by use. They are not photographs, they’re not lovely drawings, they’re places people use. As places some of them are awful. His later museum the National Gallery in Berlin was quite different, the mistakes were eliminated. It was a great pavilion.

Blum:

What you just said reminds me of a constant thread in your writings that is that there is a social reason for architecture, to make people’s lives better.

Chermayeff:

Better, right.

Blum:

Was that part of the message that you felt you were compelled to transmit, or you wished to transmit at the Institute of Design?

Chermayeff:

Yes, of course.

Blum:

Was that built into the program?

Chermayeff:

Yes, of course.

Blum:

How?

Chermayeff:

The first thing was to ask of architecture is, What was it for? How does it work? Then you ask, Is it ugly? Is it expensive? Is it cheap? That’s secondary.

Blum:

I think one of the things that you wrote was, one first considers “what for” and then “how will follow.” Is that what you said?

Chermayeff:

You must have a program “A,” the requirement to house whatever. But that requires a process in addition to how to get it right for the purpose for which it was designed. If it failed, if the process failed, the whole thing failed.

Blum:

Is that the measure?

Chermayeff:

Yes, the measure of everything.

Blum:

Did the Institute of Design have a connection with the commercial world, for instance, with Container Corporation of America?

Chermayeff:

No, we had an auction to raise money.

Blum:

Just the auction?

Chermayeff:

Just the auction.

Blum:

Did ID design products that manufacturers wanted?

Chermayeff:

Moholy tried during the war and then there was a shortage of metal. He tried to do mattresses out of lattice board and things of that kind. Yes, these are all good tries. But it never came to anything.

Blum:

Were there any commissions or jobs that were produced?

Chermayeff:

No, it never came to that. You see that? That’s Charlie and Ray’s sculpture which I exhibited in England when I did the exhibition of the twenty-fifth anniversary. This is molded plywood. They couldn’t have done this you see unless it had started somewhere else. The way it started was with splints.

Blum:

Splints?

Chermayeff:

Yes. That’s how they started it, in a backyard. Concrete forms and making splints, for broken legs, cut off legs and so on, and the technology came out until one could play with it. First of all it did a job.

Blum:

Is this the famous molded plywood chair with a metal frame?

Chermayeff:

Yes, they’re all here somewhere. Some all wood, some wood and metal, and practically every one of them is so old now. All these original chairs, the rubber rotted and the backs fell off. I redrilled them and you can see where I screwed them together instead of trying to glue them together again which wouldn’t have worked you see.

Blum:

Now I think you can send them back to Herman Miller for repair.

Chermayeff:

Everything has fallacies, and age also tells. Rubber depreciates, glues...

Blum:

That’s true. While you were in Chicago...

Chermayeff:

How long was I there?

Blum:

During the years you spent in Chicago from 1946 through 1951, were you painting?

Chermayeff:

Painting all the time.

Blum:

Were you exhibiting?

Chermayeff:

Yes.

Blum:

Every year your name appeared in The Art Institute of Chicago shows.

Chermayeff:

Not only in the Art Institute, whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the university there, the big university?

Blum:

The University of Chicago? The Renaissance Society?

Chermayeff:

No. Just outside.

Blum:

Northwestern University?

Chermayeff:

They had an annual show of painting.

Blum:

At Northwestern, in Evanston?

Chermayeff:

Yes, I think so. In fact, most of our faculty showed their work.

Blum:

When the search for a director was conducted, Moholy said that he wanted someone who was not only an educator but also an artist himself. He said this is not going to be just another engineering school.

Chermayeff:

Right. I think he probably said that.

Blum:

Did this influence you in terms of painting? I know you were a painter prior to that.

Chermayeff:

I started painting when I was ten years old.

Blum:

Did that renew your interest in doing it at that time in Chicago?

Chermayeff:

Yes, of course. I liked painting.

Blum:

Did Chicago have a particularly exciting climate for painters?

Chermayeff:

Not in particular. A lot of people were painting around in the schools. There was no particular climate. I think you tend to do what an awful lot of people do, and I apologize for saying this, you try and make some kind of a historical chapter out of an everyday, continuous process. Life is not that way.

Blum:

I’m glad you point that out because in doing research one absorbs bits and pieces, fragments. Now I’m trying to fit them into a continuum with your help.

Chermayeff:

You can’t do it.

Blum:

I know. It’s hard to understand another persons’ life in a week or from reading about it in a book.

Chermayeff:

Some obvious analogous things you don’t really have to say, you can see it. You can’t categorize things into chapters of this, chapters of that and chapters of the other because then it ceases to be alive. That’s why I think imitation Mies and imitation Frank Lloyd Wright which has covered the prairie are the most awful houses, all ala Frank Lloyd Wright. His roofs and things were often awful. It’s bad. Bad people trying to do something that a good man did. I don’t like these

categories

postmodernism.

What

the

hell

postmodernism? Post-modernism has got absolutely nothing to do with art. Postmodernism is a movement among the weak or stupid, ninety percent, who are trying to assert themselves and with the help of a man as influential as Philip, make themselves known. A man like Bob Stern is simply an arrogant ass. Have you seen anything that he’s ever done? It’s awful. It’s a kind of a bad eclecticism: half baked this and half baked that. Nothing comes together and nothing stands for anything. The word style, which is really so abused, style is the outcome of the fact that something which is really good is pervasive enough to have force, to be good. Then you have a style. But to do this whimsical, and that whimsy, I spit on it. Blum:

Robert Stern has also done some writing.

Chermayeff:

Oh, yes. He never stops talking. He’s the most ambitious, bumptious, arrogant… In fact, contemptible and meaningless! When they are really arrogant, they’re the worst.

Blum:

Isn’t that a privilege of an architect? So many more architects today are able to practice whether we approve of what they’re doing or not.

Chermayeff:

Nobody knows what to do because you can do anything. My whimsy can be built, anything.

Blum:

Could this be a time of searching and experimenting and out of this something significant may grow?

Chermayeff:

Possibly. I think it’s going to be quite different. I think it’s going to be kind of variation on something that is pre-fabbed but has variations within it like the tatami measure of a Japanese house. You get something that is happening and it is slowly absorbed because it’s good, it works. At the same time it’s present because it’s made out of nice stuff with taste. That becomes the Japanese style, if you like.

Blum:

Since the war what would you say has been developed that falls into that category?

Chermayeff:

I think that Bucky’s work goes a very, very long way. Unfortunately it’s a space waster. You have a dome, what are you going to fill it with? How are you going to cool it? How are you going to make it warm? How are you going to use the space between? He never gave it a thought.

Blum:

In terms of your measure, you said...

Chermayeff:

Individual invention and all kinds of things that he did were marvelous. In an open world, I use the phrase somewhere in one of these articles, which you’ve come across in a book, urbanity really is the new form of intensity, quantity and frequency of whatever. This kind of intensity leads to its own problems. When people make cars now they don’t realize that that car sleeps motionless for something like two-thirds of it’s life, dead, parked. And, where is it parked? On the most precious land that you have, the urban land because you could walk from A to B if you didn’t have a parking lot which is half a mile long.

Blum:

Where would you put that car if you needed one?

Chermayeff:

I wouldn’t have the car.

Blum:

How would you manage to go from place to place?

Chermayeff:

Things that carry people must move all the time. We cannot afford a dead vehicle.

Blum:

Public transportation?

Chermayeff:

Public transportation. The best of all private transportation is what the Chinese have been doing for years and years and years, riding bicycles. Because the energy needed to propel a bicycle at a very considerable speed is one-tenth of walking. According to such things, if you look at them, you get the things that you need. If you need to

move an awful lot of people to be together, you move them in some economic mass transportation which is public so this constant insurance and wrecked cars by fools which is costing billions, stops. There are so many things that we have not looked at with clear eyes. Blum:

Is it lack of planning?

Chermayeff:

You can’t plan something that hasn’t happened yet. Something has to happen before you see which pieces are necessary to transpose this happening into some kind of sensible form. The car is the last thing of all. I think there won’t be any wheels, tires that go pop, usually, within a decade.

Blum:

You mean they’ll just be so improved?

Chermayeff:

I mean there will be public transportation or very simple things like something that you don’t have to own, something which is small enough to be able to be tucked away in somewhere where it doesn’t do any harm to traffic. An Italian has now got a patent and it’s now being tried out in Brussels. It’s a very simple thing; it takes two people, maybe a dog and parcels. It’s a very cheaply constructed thing. You don’t own it, you hire it. You release it with a card so that it reads the record of the last user who is then billed every month.

Blum:

Can you go great distances in such a vehicle?

Chermayeff:

No, you wouldn’t want to. It’s not meant for that. It’s meant for highly, dense, intense, frequently-used space.

Blum:

You must be speaking about cities, urban centers.

Chermayeff:

Suburbia is awful because it destroys the countryside. Countryside is food as well as beauty. What is going to happen is that we’re going to run out of tillable land very, very quickly if we don’t stop suburban sprawl?

Blum:

It’s true much of the land in suburbia, at least in the Chicago area, was agricultural before it was housing.

Chermayeff:

It’s a problem of food.

Blum:

Don’t we also have improved technologies to raise food?

Chermayeff:

Yes.

Blum:

So do we need all this land for farming?

Chermayeff:

Technology doesn’t feed you, you can’t eat technology. Technology helps you to reap something and make something but it has to exist in its natural state in order to nourish it.

Blum:

You wrote something in 1949 that’s very pertinent to what we’re talking about. It was an address you gave at Harvard. Somehow I

sensed a certain pessimism in it. You criticized housing; you called it the new romanticism. Chermayeff:

Yes. That’s this term that they now call postmodernism.

Blum:

Even after the war when there was a housing crisis, were the suburbs being built up with houses that you objected to?

Chermayeff:

That’s a critical situation. The response to being deprived for years because of war, of people, of material and so on. Suddenly all this repression vanishes. We were overly optimistic because there is just as much or more poverty and starvation in the U.S. now, the richest country in the world, compared to China, which is rich. They do it by hand. If you’ve got a lot of people you use hands. If you’ve got an awful lot of people, which we’re getting now, why would you substitute robots, machines?

Blum:

Is that what you called new romanticism?

Chermayeff:

This is the technological romanticism. The idea that technology will solve everything because you’ll be able to use all these machines to put things back together in a very excellent way. But, they consume an enormous amount of energy to work and all they do is they save time and make somebody money. Finally you get exactly the same product.

Blum:

Is that what you think was happening in housing after the war?

Chermayeff:

I think so. I think that’s what happened. There was a sort of a "Oh, thank God, now I can build that house that I’ve been thinking about.”

Blum:

Many of them were built in track housing by developers and builders, not by architects at all.

Chermayeff:

Houses built purely by builders are sometimes good enough to earn the title of architecture.

Blum:

People seemed to buy that and want it.

Chermayeff:

Some were good.

Blum:

Some were good. Let me just read a little bit more about what you said—that the housing currently, the new housing, new postwar housing, were modern systems, open plans of undivided spaces.

Chermayeff:

When was that?

Blum:

1949. Open plans, but placed in a conventional shell. Apparently just a modern look to the exterior was not very acceptable, that’s what I understood you to say. You went on to say that in spite of that, even though people have these new things inside, their way of life is not any better.

Chermayeff:

I think what I meant, I don’t remember these passages. It’s very easy, you see, to change a bit of wall or something. It’s not at all easy to

change a bathtub, lavatory, or a system of sewage disposal, these things are very difficult and very, very expensive to change. We are looking at the wrong things first, i.e. the jolly little dream house instead of a better sewage system and of garbage disposal. In the middle of the richest country in the world plastic bags filled with garbage stand on the sidewalk and in the corner and in parts of the world they are torn to pieces by rats. This is not progress. Blum:

Whose responsibility was it at that time after the war when the...

Chermayeff:

Nobody had any responsibility thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the point.

Blum:

The housing shortage was so critical and people needed housing.

Chermayeff:

The best housing was then the housing which was built in the country, the farmworkers housing program immediately after the War, particularly in the Midwest and in the Northwest. Some of the best architects were actually doing this kind of work for people in the field, not in the town.

Blum:

Where does such a group of houses exist?

Chermayeff:

It depends, it depends on which terrain.

Blum:

Were there any in the Chicago area?

Chermayeff:

I really don’t think so but it needs bigger spaces, bigger distances of an agricultural region.

Blum:

Most of the housing activity happened in suburban areas, did you observe anything around Chicago of which you particularly approved?

Chermayeff:

No, I haven’t personally, but it may exist.

Blum:

I meant at that time.

Chermayeff:

It may exist, I hadn’t seen it. Some old stuff turned out.

Blum:

What about a concept like Park Forest? That was a totally planned new town with a village center, a variety of houses, rental and those that were for sale.

Chermayeff:

It’s a question of how you pay.

Blum:

What do you mean?

Chermayeff:

When you say rental, it’s a question of how you pay for it.

Blum:

Yes, except some people couldn’t afford to purchase but they could afford to live there if they rented.

Chermayeff:

If they rented it. Now we have this condominium stuff. What is actually happening is that poor peoples’ houses, which can be ac-

quired by a developer for a really modest sum, can be gentrified. You are familiar with that word. I don’t like it, which means that the poor people have even less housing. The lower middle class has a little bit more housing. This is not what I would call a social plan, neither is it a moral attitude towards the relief from the horrors of war. It brings new horrors. It makes the difference between the fairly well to do and the very, very poor greater. Blum:

I know you developed an urban house at Harvard, it was a townhouse, or a row house, I’m not sure what you called it. The garden was inside like an atrium. It was not designed for low cost production. It was designed for people who could afford it.

Chermayeff:

Of course.

Blum:

If you have this social commitment and you were designing for people who could afford to live in the center of a town like Boston or Cambridge, who was designing for the poor?

Chermayeff:

Precisely. The trouble with that kind of question is that really when we talk about poverty we’re talking about people and not houses. There are some people who have never been to school, who are illiterate, who never learned about hygiene, etc. These things are the ones that spill out on the sidewalk.

Blum:

I’m following you so far.

Chermayeff:

Poverty can be seen as something that means absolute deprivation of something essential, which may not have been realized up here. A mother with seven children. There is no limit to birthrate. There were sextets or something born the other day from a fertility drug. Now who the hell wants, in an urban situation, a mother who has to work to maintain this thing which they call the family. Here she has to go out and earn some money for things, which are called food and whatever, transportation for this family. There is a gap between their infancy and the moment when they can be on their own. If they repeat the pattern, God help us.

Blum:

But what happens? Where do these people live, strictly an architectural question, where do they live, who designs for them?

Chermayeff:

If there wasn’t a Mr. Weinberger who got a paranoia together with our Mr. Reagan, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the money which ought to be spent on the things that we’ve just been discussing, is spent on absolutely unusable missiles. What are they going to do with all these missiles? They’re not going to let them off because that’s the end of the world.

Blum:

How does this impact architecture and architects?

Chermayeff:

An architect needs money, just like anybody else, to do anything. You don’t waste money and you don’t do anything that is not a rational thing to do in relation to the problem.

[Tape 3: Side 1] Chermayeff:

The urban situation becomes greater and greater because of the high rise. A village of five thousand people coming out and coming in. Twice a day this whole village moves...

Blum:

In the book that was recently published, the chronology states that in 1950 negotiations for the incorporation of the Institute of Design with the IIT began. Would you comment on that?

Chermayeff:

I’m not sure of the dates. I can tell you the events and the sequence of events. Number one was that Walter Paepcke had been supporting Moholy-Nagy and the school to the best of his ability. He used to attend our auctions and things of that kind. It might interest you to know, as a detail, that once I asked him if he wouldn’t bid for something just to make things go. He said, “No I can’t do that.” The prices were all very modest and he said, “But I’ll write you out a check for one hundred dollars as a gift to the Institute for the very simple reason that in my tax bracket if I do anything like a purchase I would have to pay tax on it, which would be very, very high. I’d much rather give you the money directly.” This explained an awful lot. All these millionaires, in fact, exchanged. One was, shall we say, the patron of the music, another was the patron of the ID, somebody else like Levy of Republic Steel, patrons of something else. They all exchanged with each other benefits under these kinds of conditions so that the tax business was kept out. I remember going to a party out in the country, an architectural party, all the architects that we

knew were guests. I can’t remember who the host was; probably it was Sam Marx. It was a stag party. As this is a little libelous I’m not going to mention the names, but in the middle of our drinking and talking in came two very well known architects dressed exactly the same: blue suits, blue ties, etc., etc., sort of the heavenly twins. They were so obviously paired that there was a roar of laughter and they left soon after it. Very soon after that there was a very rich man whose name you will probably remember, who manufactured railroad cars, a millionaire, an old man who had for years been trying to become one of the directors of the Chicago Art Institute. He had a house between this house and Chicago, he was closer in. He had a very nice collection of paintings, very, very good paintings. I remember that the host said to this old man, I can’t remember his name, short, Jewish man who was the president of a railroad carmanufacturing firm that will give you a clue. Blum:

Perhaps he was Max Epstein.

Chermayeff:

The host said to me, “You’re going back to Chicago, why don’t you give the old man a lift? He doesn’t like to drive and we might just as well tell his chauffeur to go home and he might want to talk to you.” Sure enough, the old man said to me, and this was about one o’clock in the morning, “I’d like you to see my paintings. Nobody appreciates what I have.” He had really good things, classic things for which he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. He said, “I bought this and I paid so much for it. I bought that and so and so and

I paid so much for it.” All these things, of course, were being fished for by the museum. They wanted to have it left to them. The old man was as proud as punch, we went around and he had all special lights for every picture. He showed them to me and we spent nearly an hour looking at this wonderful collection that he had. Finally I said goodnight and went on. This was about the time that Paepcke had started taking interest in Aspen. He was, in fact, trying to unload the Institute of Design, which he felt was his responsibility, on some rich man to replace him or better still an institution. As I told him, if you give something like that to an institution it does not require any explanation of why you did it. It explains itself by belonging to a very respectable institution. This thing is all right. The interest that he had was really overwhelming. He found this very beautiful village which had been an old marble quarry some hundred years before that and there were still stacks of marble around for sculptors to collect. He felt that this could make a wonderful ski resort and he would add a great tent, which Eero Saarinen designed for him for summer concerts and other functions of that sort. He was really very anxious to get rid of any responsibility of the Institute of Design. I understood this very well and even tried to help him. I remember, for instance, going to the University Club with him and trying to sell our school to Hutchins who was president of the University of Chicago. He flatly refused. He said, “Art has no sort of part to play in the university that is an intellectual knowledge kind of institution.” He was married to a sculptress and I think the sculptress had already begun to get on his nerves so he was doubly against art at home, and, God help him, in the university. I was sitting talking to Paepcke at

our table and Heald, who was not a very understanding potential for our purposes. Between the two I saw Bob Hutchins sitting a few tables away. He saw me looking at him and he gave me a great big wink because he knew what was going on. We did succeed in conveying this thing to Illinois Institute of Technology as a new department, quite apart from Mies, which I would head. The conditions which they laid down, they wanted to have their own registrar who knew nothing about the type of student that we wanted, who knew nothing about the subject matter, who could not interview anybody on the basis of the kind of student that we were looking for. With Rettaliata, the new president, who was really stupid indeed, he pretended to be an expert in ballistics. It happened that I know Hawthorne, an expert in ballistics, and Homans of Harvard. We went across the ocean for a holiday once. Hawthorne wasn’t feeling too well. He’s been since knighted, I think now he’s Lord Hawthorne. He really did know about ballistics and he thought Rettaliata was an absolute illiterate. He said, “He knows about as much about ballistics and rockets and things as that fly.” He dismissed him completely and left. We had a hilarious time on the boat because George Homans knew the words of every song ever written and we were the alternative after dinner amusement. People either went to dance or they went to hear the professors singing away. Blum:

Who was the head of IIT when this consolidation was being discussed? Was it Heald or Rettaliata?

Chermayeff:

Heald. The marriage was consummated and then these difficulties began to be visible. It was at that part that Heald resigned and went to the Ford Foundation. He left the presidency to Rettaliata. That was enough for me and I resigned and went to MIT for a year. I was just a visitor because there was still no line at Harvard for me. Gropius and Hudnut were already antagonistic to each other. They were due to retire in another year, so there were complications there. After MIT I went to Harvard.

Blum:

When this consolidation was being worked out...

Chermayeff:

1952, it was worked out during 1951.

Blum:

With the consolidation between IIT and the Institute of Design, what was your role to be?

Chermayeff:

I would remain head of the Institute of Design within IIT. Rettaliata and Heald both thought that because we were designers we could bring more money in by offering to have designs prepared for corporations in the school, saving professional fees and preferring donations. That didn’t suit me either, I wasn’t going to be a salesman for IIT or anybody else. I resigned and went to MIT. That was the sequence of events. Paepcke losing interest and trying to convey the thing, not succeeding with Bob Hutchins at the University, but succeeding with Heald who thought of us as a possible moneygetter. It was no longer the kind of school that I was interested in. There was some man that they hired to be head of, and I can’t remember his name.

Blum:

The Institute of Design?

Chermayeff:

Institute of Design.

Blum:

Was that Jay Doblin?

Chermayeff:

Doblin, right, a commercial man, I knew it began with D. An absolute non-entity who certainly didn’t understand anything about the processes which we were involved in but could have knocked up the kind of thing that Heald and Rettaliata were looking for. I said, “That’s it, goodbye,” and never went back.

Blum:

With the merger with IIT was the architecture department of the Institute of Design to continue?

Chermayeff:

Yes, to continue. It was called the Shelter Department. I was concerned with shelter or simple housing for different ethnic and cultural groups in different climates and various parts of the world.

Blum:

So under the umbrella of IIT, there would be one architecture department headed by Mies and one in the Institute of Design?

Chermayeff:

Right. They didn’t like me at all because I was very frank about what they were doing and how absolutely un-understanding they were and I told them so. I became extremely unpopular and they were very, very pleased when I left. That’s when Doblin came in. I was very relieved because I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life fighting two idiots.

Blum:

Two idiots being Rettaliata and?

Chermayeff:

Rettaliata and Heald. That was that.

Blum:

In 1950, an article you wrote was published in a magazine setting forth the program at the Institute of Design. You said one thing that struck me as if there was a bite to it. You said, “The trend in architecture is more and more education for more and more students, the result being too often less and less.” Were you playing with Mies’s words there?

Chermayeff:

No. Mies was not a teacher of architecture. Mies was a teacher of his architecture. We agreed about that and we remained good friends.

Blum:

How do you account for this cult that developed around him?

Chermayeff:

He was a very great man.

Blum:

Do you think everyone had that sense of it at the time?

Chermayeff:

A very great man, no question about it. Everything that he did was absolutely perfect, elegant. He invented, for instance, a steel corner that avoided the problem of how to put two pieces of steel together by a very simple device. All his corners were open. That was very typical of his perfectionism. I remember him also when we were doing an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art that he actually asked something to be moved on the wall three inches to the left. That kind

of perfection. I also had my enemies but also my friends because of that. Every enemy is represented by a friend. Alfred Barr was a great friend. D’Harnoncourt who was then a director was a great friend. He helped me to do this exhibition. Monroe Wheeler was an out and out pansy and one day he came through with his latest boyfriend and some balloon chair which I looked at hastily. We were all very busy, just a day or two ahead of opening. “You haven’t got time to watch people,” I said in a very loud voice to all the electricians, carpenters and so on. “I wonder when we should see the end of this bugger’s opera.” Monroe Wheeler picked up his little boy and his chair, they got out, and we went on working. Monroe wouldn’t speak to me for about five years, I don’t blame him at all. That was the kind of things that went on all the time and it was quite clear that the pederasts were up, their influence was everywhere, particularly starting, of course, with the most influential one, Philip Johnson, Monroe Wheeler and others. They were held in contempt by people like d’Harnoncourt, myself and several others. There was already emerging a kind of private club of the pederasts, to which, as a matter of fact, Rudolph, who was a very good friend of mine, and Philip Johnson, who also happened to be a very good friend of mine, joined because of their sexual interests. I could not share them so we drifted further and further apart. In the last twenty years or so I don’t think I’ve seen Philip or talked to him, although he lunches at the Four Seasons restaurant everyday, I could have walked in and joined his table. I was through. That was it. The joining that you speak of in IIT of the ID and Mies or any problem in connection with a possibility of that never did exist. They remained totally and

absolutely autonomous departments. What happened after I left I don’t know and I don’t care. Blum:

You did say in I think the address you gave on the occasion of the merger that you felt that perhaps the advance research department headed by Wachsmann would serve both architecture departments.

Chermayeff:

No, he was in the ID.

Blum:

Yes he was. Did you anticipate that IIT would also take advantage of his research or benefit from it?

Chermayeff:

Of course, he was the biggest bait. His marvelous hanger, of which he’d made a wonderful model and had detailed perfectly, was the great promise to the IIT for the military forces. Big hangers for big planes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, military establishment. That’s why Wachsmann was given a great deal of attention by the IIT. At the some time he had designed an extremely nice housing building system at the ID, parallel to this. He had finished with this hanger thing, it was designed in detail. It was never carried out, neither the housing nor the hangers. The military thought better of it. I don’t know the reasons I can’t tell you why, probably purely technical reasons or military reasons, of which I knew nothing.

Blum:

Was his housing system one that was called “General Housing”?

Chermayeff:

No, it was General Panel. The housing system was very nice but it came to nothing because you can’t sell a housing system out of a school. Contractors don’t work that way, contractors like to be their own masters. To have a prefab factory of any kind should be under the control and guidance of whatever contractor undertook this rather large business. It never came off.

Blum:

You’ve just touched on an idea about an inner group of architects. You were talking about the New York group. Did you observe a similar group that was the architectural establishment in Chicago?

Chermayeff:

More so in Chicago. I think Mies had an enormous influence and even people like Harry Weese who was at MIT was at first under his spell. Everybody got on with him; he was a very powerful man. As I already described to you, an undeviating disciplinarian, you learn that, and that, period! You could then see what you could do with it. SOM I think became one of the first Miesian breakaways and then you remember Hancock, the big crisscross tower opposite the Drake Hotel. Then SOM built another skyscraper in San Francisco. That was another system where the fenestration had absolutely nothing to do with the structure, the structure was clean, Xs tied together and the glass curtain hung quite independently of that. This was a fascinating new form. Then they built an equivalent to that but it was perfectly full square, using the same system in San Francisco. I don’t know if they’re there anymore, it’s a very good system.

Blum:

Do you think the attraction for Mies, being, say, the center of this establishment, was the man or the pervasiveness of his ideas?

Chermayeff:

It’s extremely separate, that’s the kind of question that nobody could answer really. If you asked that question of one hundred different architects in Chicago, and there were at least one thousand, you would have had a different answer each time.

Blum:

What would yours be?

Chermayeff:

Mine?

Blum:

Yes.

Chermayeff:

I would have shrugged my shoulders. I don’t believe in these schools of one type.

Blum:

But it happened and that was a fact.

Chermayeff:

Architects in Chicago, you must remember, were pioneers in high buildings. After the period of Wright and the early Holabird terracotta decorated store, I can’t remember its name, on Market Street,

became

commonplace.

Everybody

was

building

skyscrapers. Some were this way and some were that way. It wasn’t particularly interesting. There was always recognition that outside a big, tall building with a large population there should be a spill space for people coming and going. Usually it had a Calder construction in the middle. There are more Calders in Chicago than you can imagine.

Somebody, I can’t remember who it was, gave money to build a much magnified Picasso from a little head which was exhibited among dozens which Picasso produced in those years. There stood this lovely thing in bronze. The square around it was always totally empty because all around were banks and you had to have an entry ticket so to speak. Blum:

Are you talking of the Civic Center Plaza Picasso?

Chermayeff:

Yes. It was really quite a ghostly place because no poor people could possibly have brought their lunch in a brown paper bag and eaten anywhere in that place.

Blum:

You must remember that from the time you were in Chicago. Today it’s very different today because there are benches, people come and feed the birds, every noon hour some sort of musical entertainment is performed; that invites people into the plaza. It’s often filled with people.

Chermayeff:

That’s since my time.

Blum:

Yes. Maybe others felt as you did and changed the atmosphere.

Chermayeff:

You produce a big public place and in the end somebody finds a use for it. In my time it was simply a barren desert of splendid paving, a lovely sculpture and a glass wall of very expensive banks all around a dead place.

Blum:

What was your opinion of the Civic Center itself?

Chermayeff:

Not much. Didn’t Harry Weese had something to do with it? I produced an exhibit as a matter of fact at the Institute with Brownjohn and somebody else working for me—Kessler I think. We made models and drew all kinds of projects, trying to make it a livable public place. It really didn’t work because there was much too much traffic around. Everything in Chicago was isolated by traffic. Places like that have to be interconnected with continuous flow of free moving people. All these, as far as I was concerned, were very interesting models of isolated buildings totally removed from the real life of the city.

Blum:

You produced an exhibition in 1950 about this subject called “Chicago Plans.”

Chermayeff:

Right. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill asked me to do it.

Blum:

It was proposed that federal government, city, and civic center all be together in one area. Was it Skidmore, Owings and Merrill that did the designs?

Chermayeff:

No.

Blum:

How did it all work?

Chermayeff:

A lot of them were done in the ID. It was a major project and we just made the exhibit.

Blum:

Was it necessary to bring all these administrative functions together?

Chermayeff:

Yes that was the purpose.

Blum:

If I’m not mistaken, the exhibition site was very different from the way in which it was eventually developed. They were all clustered on the river, is that correct?

Chermayeff:

Right, it was quite different.

Blum:

What was the thinking to move it?

Chermayeff:

I have no idea, I can’t possibly tell you why it happened. This was Daley’s reign and what pushed him this way or that way and whose money it was, I couldn’t possibly tell you.

Blum:

Did you know Nat Owings?

Chermayeff:

I knew Nat very well indeed.

Blum:

How do you remember him?

Chermayeff:

I knew him very well. A group of doctors, rather advanced surgeons, were very dissatisfied with the facilities in the existing hospitals. They asked me to design a hospital for them which was fundamentally for heavy operations with the absolute minimum distance between nurse supervision, the operating room, and the pa-

tients’ waiting and convalescing rooms. That worked out of course roughly into spokes in a wheel with very short spokes so that the night nurse could see from her desk every door in her little domain. The reason why I’m telling you this is because I did not have a practicing license in Illinois. I never bothered to get one because I was too busy with the school. I didn’t do any building in Chicago at all. I made a contract with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which I still have filed away, in which they were going to execute my design. Blum:

Was it ever executed?

Chermayeff:

No.

Blum:

It was not, why?

Chermayeff:

They didn’t find the money. That was the kind of relationship. I didn’t know Skidmore quite so well as Nat, but Nat was my immediate contact. He had a place in Aspen. We were all good friends; we dined and drank together.

Blum:

Who sought whom out as far as this arrangement went? Did he seek you out as a designer or did you seek him out as an executor?

Chermayeff:

Myself, having designed this thing in a sketch form, and said, “I haven’t got a license and I want somebody with a license capable of carrying out this job. There are working drawings and everything

else. Will you do it?” They said, “Yes.” I wrote a contract right there. They thought highly of me, just as I thought highly of them. Blum:

Was there some consideration of the Institute of Design, particularly Fuller, doing anything in Aspen?

Chermayeff:

For them?

Blum:

No, for Walter Paepcke.

Chermayeff:

No, not a thing.

Blum:

When they needed a great all-purpose tent...

Chermayeff:

No, I had gone by then. I was already down south.

Blum:

You spent some thirty odd years as an educator.

Chermayeff:

At that point I really had made up my mind that I was going to be a professor. If I wanted an architect, and I had a commission, I would go to somebody like Skidmore or whatever I respected and was available, to carry out the working drawings.

Blum:

Was this true only in Chicago because you didn’t have a license?

Chermayeff:

It would have been the same in New York.

Blum:

You didn’t have a license in New York?

Chermayeff:

I had a tiny office with Wachsmann. It was an office that showed things we could do photographically. We had no staff, except a secretary.

Blum:

But was this an office that invited clients? I mean, did you hope to get commissions, was it a working office?

Chermayeff:

Not really.

Blum:

What was the purpose of it then?

Chermayeff:

If you have people with a reputation, finally people come. I’ll give you an instance, a sort of negative instance. A very rich person, a Saudi Arabian, I think, came into the office and said, “We are thinking of building a hospital. We would very much like you to design it for us. You must understand that this would be for the elite of Saudis.” I spoke for both of us, “You know a hospital that is designed for the elite is not a hospital, it’s a pleasure pavilion. I’m sure you can find an architect who would do this. We won’t.” We threw them out.

Blum:

How many other offices would have told him that?

Chermayeff:

Probably several. After all there are a lot of decent people around.

Blum:

You left the Institute of Design after five years. Were you satisfied with your tenure there?

Chermayeff:

Until we joined Illinois Tech I thought it was an excellent school. Splendid people came as visitors to teach. The veterans were a wonderful lot of students. But by the time I had left their tenure...

[Tape 3: Side 2] Chermayeff:

By the time I had left their tenure of the G. I. bill had run out.

Blum:

Were they not replaced by students just entering college wanting to be designers?

Chermayeff:

Not that I know of. They wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go there because it was a bad school.

Blum:

Do you mean after the consolidation?

Chermayeff:

Yes. The moment the ID moved into Illinois Tech under their aegis. If you take out Mies who was a very, very special man with only twelve students, nobody had any interest. It was a terrible school. The Illinois Institute of Technology was not an institute of technology. It was only concerned with design as far as Mies was concerned.

Blum:

Did it not start as a manual training type of school with an emphasis on engineering?

Chermayeff:

No. Engineering of the most commonplace type. How do you deal with stock steel? How do you put these things together? There was nothing inventive there; it was just a run-of-the-mill place. They took anybody who’d pay the fee. It was a terrible school, but we only discovered that when we got in.

Blum:

Was it a slap in the face for the Institute of Design to be granting their degree out of the Engineering Department?

Chermayeff:

I imagine that Mr. Doblin wouldn’t have known the difference.

Blum:

Oh. How did you feel about it?

Chermayeff:

I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

Blum:

Did the Institute of Design consider merging with the School of the Art Institute?

Chermayeff:

No. The Art Institute was primarily an artist’ sort of painter/sculptor school.

Blum:

Was there talk about expanding?

Chermayeff:

No kind of experimenting or any other... They looked to the Institute of Design to provide that. Some of our students who wanted to paint might have gone to their art school.

Blum:

If money could have been found to keep the Institute of Design separate, as a separate institution, would you have stayed in Chicago?

Chermayeff:

No.

Blum:

Why?

Chermayeff:

Because the environment was wrong. If you start with a fool like Rettaliata at the top, everything else follows, it becomes third rate.

Blum:

What I meant was, if money could have been found so that the Institute of Design did not have to merge and it simply stayed as a separate school, would you have stayed?

Chermayeff:

Yes. In fact you see what we were doing, and you must remember this took a lot of selling, Moholy worked very, very hard on Walter Paepcke who was very pleased to be worked on by a man like Moholy-Nagy. They became great friends. An awful lot of the art side of the Container Corporation really sort of rubbed off the Institute of Design. In addition to that Herbert Bayer who was really attached to Paepcke and who produced the most beautiful atlas for him, he was more or less an independent consultant. He would not

have fitted into the ID. He might have given a lecture or something or shown his stuff one day, it wasn’t his cup of tea. He was famous; he did his own stuff. He didn’t need the school or me. The same happened with Callahan. Blum:

The photographer, Harry Callahan?

Chermayeff:

The photographer. And Berko, who joined while Callahan was still there. Berko now is the official Aspen photographer. Callahan really was the great innovator, marvelous photographer, marvelous photographer.

The

people

under

him

became

marvelous

photographers. Blum:

Nathan Lerner is a respected photographer in Chicago, he was on the staff of the Institute of Design.

Chermayeff:

Nathan Lerner? I’m trying to think who Nathan Lerner was. Nathan Lerner was a general workshop head, I thought.

Blum:

Today he’s a well-known Chicago photographer.

Chermayeff:

Times change. It’s nearly forty years.

Blum:

What was the most rewarding thing about your tenure at the Institute of Design?

Chermayeff:

I didn’t have tenure.

Blum:

That isn’t what I meant, about the duration of your directorship?

Chermayeff:

I enjoyed it very much. All these little battles between people like Sibyl Moholy and this man told you of it was all chaos, etc. etc. What was his name?

Blum:

Crombie Taylor?

Chermayeff:

Crombie Taylor.

Blum:

But he is not the only one, many people speak about a self-directed climate. They don’t say it in a pejorative way. They say it simply to emphasize the kind of independent spirit that was encouraged not only among the students, who were probably prone to that kind of thing, but also among the faculty.

Chermayeff:

It was. It was held together by the director who had a notion and people subscribed to that notion and worked happily in their own way to strengthen it and make it grow.

Blum:

When you were in Chicago, the period right after the war into the early fifties, did you see any change occur architecturally? Did you see anything happen that you felt was exciting?

Chermayeff:

No. The inventions and things of importance were really things that were the equipment, not the buildings. The buildings were pretty well standard. You can’t change a steel frame building overnight, it’s

a very expensive business. No, the inventions really were made by people like Charlie Eames. All these things care after. Just the some as in the Bauhaus in Germany, it was Albers and particularly Breuer who produced the most marvelous things, that finally found the market. Blum:

As you talk about the Eames chair, surely he took advantage of the technology that was available to him.

Chermayeff:

Of course. The whole point was not only to take advantage of the technology properly, which was available, but to take things that were available as technology for totally different purposes and make it into furniture. You probably remember this marvelous chair of Leujko Breuer’s which is just a sheet cut and then bent in opposite ways. Don’t you remember?

Blum:

Yes.

Chermayeff:

The seat was molded this way and the arms were built the opposite way. The legs were underneath, but it was one sheet of plywood. That, you see, just like Charlie’s things, was a true invention. Of course these things don’t happen everyday. The amount that could be profitably marketed was very minimal.

Blum:

Alvar Aalto designed furniture.

Chermayeff:

Yes, same thing.

Blum:

It caused a stir in Chicago when his furniture first came into the Baldwin Kingrey shop. Jody Kingrey shared with me the story about the time when the first shipment of furniture came and you, your wife, and others helped put it all together for her showroom.

Chermayeff:

It was the same thing. Aalto loved wood, he came from a place which had nothing but wood, practically everything he did—the most visible thing was the pavilion of the exhibition in 1935, I think it was. He produced this marvelous pavilion with a wonderful acoustic waved ceiling for dispersal of sound, made out of tongue and groove planks. Here was a master of wood. Leujko understood that, but he understood steel tube also. He went further. Charles Eames understood the new process of low-pressure molding, the impregnated plastic blanket so to speak, which could be cut flat and then molded. Fold it and it was a chair. Otto Kolb was extremely good at this. He is Swiss. I heard something from him the other day. He was recommended by Giedion, of course, and he came to the ID. He was also an extremely powerful and beautiful sculler. He went in for the annual race on the lake and won the year he arrived. He was an enormous, powerful man. His students, he had probably six or seven students who were really involved in this new process, they could do something which I couldn’t do. I simply couldn’t do it. They could draw something which looked like a skin of an animal or something which when squeezed together became a chair.

Blum:

How remarkable.

Chermayeff:

They had a non-drawing mind. They didn’t have to draw something; they had to make something.

Blum:

Did the Barwa chair...?

Chermayeff:

Which?

Blum:

It’s a canvas sling attached to a metal frame that tips forward and backward...

Chermayeff:

Oh yes. That was designed by two of Moholy’s students.

Blum:

Was it designed when you were there?

Chermayeff:

No, before.

Blum:

Was the designer Italian?

Chermayeff:

Very good, yes, excellent. By the way, the shape is fundamentally that. In other words it could be that, that, or that.

Blum:

It had this kind of a bottom shaped a little like a boomerang.

Chermayeff:

That’s all very well. I have still all the catalogs. I get then regularly. Of course I don’t use them anymore, my sons do. You know the name Stendig? Stendig was like Walter Knoll, they simply collected excellent furniture. If they didn’t design it themselves, they got good

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designers to do it or found good designs and sold them. All the classic chairs of that period you can buy at Stendigâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, at an exorbitant price. Blum:

Museums also desire them...

Chermayeff:

I gave a whole set of the metal chairs...

Blum:

The Eames chair?

Chermayeff:

The Eames chairs, which I had. Also I had the Mies chair. Remember the 5?

Blum:

Yes, the metal frame.

Chermayeff:

The metal frame with leather back, and you never see it. I had them in my own house. When we left I presented them to the Museum of Modern Art. These original chairs with fresh leather because it had by that time got stained and so on, the chairs are there and they are the original chairs.

Blum:

These are the original chairs, I presume. The chair Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sitting in is your design, manufactured in England?

Chermayeff:

Yes, by Walter Knoll and Company.

Blum:

Did you design furniture early in your career?

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Chermayeff:

Yes, I did an awful lot of rather moderne kinds of things. Whereas people like Paul Follot or somebody, they always liked to have a round corner or something. It was not my idea of treating wood. You either carve wood in depth like a Chippendale chair, or you use wood in a very, very straightforward way. Waring and Gillow was the firm to which I was recommended by my in-laws. The whole of the Gillow part was composed of a wonderful cabinet shop inhabited almost entirely, by the tine I got there, by ancient craftsmen. They were the third generation, straight from Chippendale. There’s nothing they couldn’t do with wood. When they finished a piece of wood it was marvelous.

Blum:

Now when you designed for then, did you design for wood?

Chermayeff:

Yes, in wood, wonderful things. I heard the other day, all these things I think you’ll find rather stupid, carpets and such, somebody bid ten thousand pounds for a sideboard in macassar ebony, which I had designed. Ten thousand pounds! It is ridiculous. You see in this short time that the value should go up. That’s fashion, you see—it’s a kind of a fashionable trend, my rugs. McKnight Kauffer, who did ads too like Herbert Bayer, he made some of my rug designs as well. Between us we got Wilton, the best of the carpet-weaving firms, to make all our special designs. I had a letter about three or four years ago that one man wrote to a friend of his here saying, “And my greatest treasure is…”—and he sent a photograph—“a rug by Serge

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Chermayeff which I have put under a plastic box which is now the coffee table.” This little square rug had this great preserving. He paid thousands for it. Blum:

How do you feel about that? You weren’t paid thousands for it.

Chermayeff:

No, he bought it from somebody who had it and wanted to sell it.

Blum:

Artists today are in a dilemma because they see their things, as you’ve seen your things, increase in value, be resold on the open market for many times more than you were ever paid. Do you agree with the artist’s position that they should continue to get a percentage of the increase over the years, like royalties?

Chermayeff:

Yes, of course, that would be ideal. The point is, how do you enforce such an ideal?

Blum:

How is the copyright law, with royalties, enforced?

Chermayeff:

Copyright law really doesn’t operate in such things. Let’s say that table, that heavy thing, I copyright that. Somebody will make that leg a little thicker and the top a little thinner.

Blum:

But that changes it.

Chermayeff:

It does, that’s the point. You can’t copyright things that are subject to change and in the public domain. When Breuer died, his and

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Charlie's chairs have now become commonplace. If you really look very carefully at then, they’re all just a little bit different. Blum:

What makes them so unique?

Chermayeff:

Proportion or construction, whatever. You see those two chairs over there, when I went to Brooklyn I was still very much under the influence of Aalto. I made these chairs but took away the hind legs, which is what Mies did.

Blum:

You made this chair? Based on an existing Aalto chair that you changed?

Chermayeff:

These are my chairs. You could bend a certain thickness of plywood with certain kinds of grooves that had a great deal of strength. You could make chairs this way and that way, I had armchairs made for the lounges in a new library and the theatre in Brooklyn College. They were made in Mamaroneck, New York. A very nice man did them all. I didn’t ask for a royalty because I got a commission on the whole contract, the whole theatre and everything that went into it. I was perfectly satisfied with that. It’s not like a book where you alter a word and register a copyright, or a piece of highly sophisticated machinery where you change something and you change its function. You can’t do this with furniture, it’s impossible. You see that design, the small one, the little one—that, yes, bring it here. What you left behind is two colors of the same design. It’s exactly the same design, the inside/outside. This is an in and this is free. This

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was designed for the United Nations dining room. The curtain in it was pale yellow and blue actually, variations. This you see is a mirror image. This is twenty-eight inches, that is a full width of a standard forty-eight or fifty-six inch panel that was made by a firm called Maix. This is fun you see. I still have literally hundreds of variations on that one pattern. How do you copyright that? Blum:

Just

for

the

benefit

those

who

will

reading

this

transcript—we’ve been looking at paintings of yours here in your studio, in different colors as you say of the reverse image. Chermayeff:

These mirror images became patterns repeating ad infinitum and became curtains, fabric.

Blum:

This seems very consistent with the kind of idea that the Institute of Design taught or allowed students and faculty to experiment with by taking the same design and seeing it in different ways and using it for different purposes.

Chermayeff:

This wasn’t done at the ID. I did that in my own office.

Blum:

Do you think the spirit or thinking is similar?

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Chermayeff:

Of course. You take something and you make more out of it than just one thing. The manufacturer was, of course, delighted. I’ve still got a roll somewhere of one of these designs. On the edge is printed inside/outside is “Serge Chermayeff 1936.”

Blum:

The pictures we are looking at are two of many that are stacked along the wall in the studio being prepared for exhibition this year. Where is the exhibition to take place?

Chermayeff:

Here, there is a gallery in Wellfleet. It’s a very small place unimportant gallery with a very unimportant and really not a buying public. To be a painter, professionally, you would have to have a gallery in New York or Chicago. You would have to be constantly working. Some of this stuff you’ll find dated so there’s a drawing there, which is dated 1948.

Blum:

Was that painted when you were in Chicago.

Chermayeff:

Yes.

Blum:

Did Chicago exert any sort of influence on your designs?

Chermayeff:

No it didn’t influence the design. It happened coincidentally when I was there. Whether it influenced anyone else or not I doubt because there were a lot of very good influences around, dozens.

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Blum:

When you were in Chicago you were obviously associated with people who were directors and trustees. Were you on juries, civic committees, any participation in the community?

Chermayeff:

I did a broadcast series through Bucky Fuller and others for instance, that was a public service. The exhibitions for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for the government center—again, that was done in the school by me with some assistance. Everybody was doing it right and left.

Blum:

Were you part of any planning committees, civic committees, architectural juries?

Chermayeff:

No. I’ve been on lots of juries of course, any number of juries, mostly in universities. I am considered a very exacting and almost rude critic, which I think is true. I was a ruthless critic, but people liked that, they like to be told the truth. Nobody wants to be constantly licking somebody’s ass; it’s a bore.

Blum:

Were you a member of the Chicago Chapter of the AIA?

Chermayeff:

Yes, I think I was. I think it was sort of an honorary position and I never did anything on their committees or anything like that.

Blum:

What was your opinion of the effectiveness of the role that the AIA plays in the architectural community?

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Chermayeff:

I think that the AIA, just like the RIBA in my tine in England, was composed mostly of a body of indifferent performers protected by a professional rubber stamp. They were really not of very great importance. The good people didn’t need that. In fact, Scheik, who was the Secretary of the AIA, and I resigned together, forty years ago, because the AIA would not do any research.

Blum:

What would you have wanted them to research?

Chermayeff:

I would like to have seen research like what we did in school.

Blum:

Oh what kind of a project?

Chermayeff:

My kind of project.

Blum:

Exploring the potential of materials?

Chermayeff:

Materials, or the use of materials, manipulation of material, but they did no such thing. They just copied each other, that’s all. It was one great big eclectic feast. That’s what is happening now, everybody is copying everybody else except there is no consistency in the copying because there is no style in existence now. Everything is possible and therefore there are a thousand styles, if you like to call them, but they’re really whimsical bits of nonsense.

Blum:

Are you talking about postmodern?

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Chermayeff:

Like postmodernism. I’m quite sure that in ten years time nobody will even know what postmodernism means.

Blum:

You resigned from the AIA because you were dissatisfied?

Chermayeff:

There was no research. You see, during the war nobody had any building to do. What do you do when you’re a professional man and you can’t progress by producing things for use? You think about them, that’s where research begins, you have time and no opportunity to build. That’s a kind of special period in which ideas simmer in a pot. When you are ready, off you go when circumstances permit.

Blum:

The AIA had shown no inclination to do something about it?

Chermayeff:

No interest whatsoever.

Blum:

You were one of the organizers or founding members of some earlier organizations that sought to promote modernism in England.

Chermayeff:

In England, yes—mostly among students and young architects.

Blum:

The Twentieth Century group?

Chermayeff:

A Twentieth Century group of Focus, later in California Telesis.

Blum:

What about Giedion’s international group?

Chermayeff:

There is no international group.

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Blum:

CIAM, International Congress of Modern Architecture?

Chermayeff:

CIAM was not a group for doing. CIAM was simply a congress to discuss work done, to discuss the potential of work to be done and generally to have a body from which young and inventive and new people could earn respectability. They could say I am a member of CIAM. This CIAM, of course, was an organization really to do with urbanism. It had nothing to do with individual buildings or furniture or anything else, but how do you organize the new conglomerates, the new heaps of people, what do you do with them, how do you make them go there, how do you make them come out. Those were the questions that were discussed.

Blum:

Were these questions pertinent to you?

Chermayeff:

To dozens of people. It was a very large international organization.

Blum:

You were one of the American representatives, one of the promoters, here?

Chermayeff:

Yes, but it got started way back in Europe.

Blum:

Oh, yes, but Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m saying here you were one of the staunch supporters.

Chermayeff:

Of course. There was no work to be done so we could go on thinking, because the war was going on.

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Blum:

That continued long after the war.

Chermayeff:

Not very long. It really died here. There is no chapter of CIAM in the United States.

Blum:

Was the group MARS organized as an English branch?

Chermayeff:

MARS?

Blum:

Yes.

Chermayeff:

Modern Architectural Research Society, the English branch of CIAM.

Blum:

That was organized in the late twenties or thirties?

Chermayeff:

Twenties, somewhere around there.

Blum:

Years ago you had a hand in forming a school to be located in southern France. What was that school?

Chermayeff:

The International Design School of the Mediterranean. That was a school that didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t came off. It was going to be called the European School of Design. Eric Gill, for instance, was the sculptor; Ozenfant was the painter; I was the furniture designer; Mendelsohn was a house designer and so on. This academy was thought of as a kind of center in the western world because it was on the Mediterranean. We had a most beautiful hill that we bought and it was very cheap. We

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didn’t have the money to go on from there. Blum:

Is that why it failed?

Chermayeff:

It was burnt. It had a fire. It was a beautiful forested land, they had a tremendous fire there. It couldn’t have been done anyhow because we didn’t have the money, couldn’t get the money.

Blum:

You were very young at the time-wasn’t this in the twenties?

Chermayeff:

This was in the twenties, yes. There just wasn’t enough money.

Blum:

At that time did you, or collectively all of you, have the idea of promoting modern design?

Chermayeff:

Yes, all modern design: Van de Velde from Holland, a ceramicist from Switzerland, I can’t remember. I have the document somewhere.

Blum:

It must have been a very stimulating atmosphere.

Chermayeff:

It was a stimulating idea that came to nothing.

Blum:

How did it all take shape?

Chermayeff:

One talked, one printed nice little pamphlets to invite the growth and contributions, but we didn’t have them. Mostly it was the war.

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Blum:

Did you see perhaps somehow a fulfillment of that idea in the German Bauhaus?

Chermayeff:

Yes. Anything where a lot of people of the same direction of thought get together to do something it becomes what you call the bauhaus. Every big firm is a bauhaus as a matter of fact.

[Tape 4: Side 1] Chermayeff:

An extraordinary contribution came from sources quite unexpected. For instance, when I was in Chicago and Nat Owings and Skidmore were friends and we talked about these things. The thing that bound us together was the general idea. They were really in practice, but their practice was very heavily in debt to Mies who had the exquisite detail in mind always. All his buildings, I think he described somewhere, as a collection of perfect details.

Blum:

Mies?

Chermayeff:

Mies, yes. This sort of thing grows by accident. It has no official institutional recognition or anything else, it just happens.

Blum:

All of these organizations, international and local, attracted you. Why?

Chermayeff:

Yes because they invite you, for discussion or to give a lecture or what have you, particularly in universities or university-oriented

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things. It just happens. Somebody knows somebody and knows somebody else and it goes on and on. Blum:

I know for a fact that Paul Schweikher joined the international group, CIAM. I asked him why he was a member and he said, “Because Serge Chermayeff called me one day and he said ‘Send your dues in will you please?’ So I sent my dues in.” I suppose it does happen for very simple and not very profound reasons sometimes. While you were in Chicago did you have any sort of secret project that you would have liked to do but never did?

Chermayeff:

I would like to have done a hospital because hospitals were really very badly needed to begin with at that time, remember it was war. Then you had not only wounded people and crippled people but any number of excellent surgeons and other doctors willing to change the kind of building they wanted in order to practice at their best. By sheer coincidence of war and good doctors wanted a good hospital. I never did plan that you see. It would be very, very difficult to plan. Most money during the war certainly was committed ahead of time. There was very little experimentation possible because the money wasn’t there. Things had to be produced in order to fight the bloody war. There were any number of people who were thinking about such things just like Ray and Charlie Eames and their splints. There were so many broken arms and legs and the ordinary splint was just not good enough. But the moment the process of molding, low pressure molding, was very cheap to produce with very cheap means

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of plywood, these splints became standard American army splints. Again you see, how could you foresee that? Blum:

That was technology and design coming together in a unique way.

Chermayeff:

Coming together and somebody saying this is ideal for this.

Blum:

But seeing the possibility.

Chermayeff:

See the possibility, yes.

Blum:

How would you like best to be remembered?

Chermayeff:

Most to be remembered?

Blum:

Remembered most or best.

Chermayeff:

As a teacher.

Blum:

As a teacher? Why?

Chermayeff:

I could bring out the best in good people by being ruthless. In other words, not tolerating anything under standardâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;top standard or nothing.

Blum:

Did you produce such students?

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Chermayeff:

Some of the students did marvelously. If I were to number on that list you gave me, about half of those people are deans, professors.

Blum:

That was the list from the Institute of Design faculty.

Chermayeff:

And students.

Blum:

Did you feel you molded your faculty along with students?

Chermayeff:

Again, it just happens. Anselevicius, for instance, who is now a dean somewhere in the West or Southwest—he was working as a minor draftsman in Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. I invited him to come and help us with this exhibition.

Blum:

The “Chicago Plans” exhibition?

Chermayeff:

With Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the government center exhibition. Then we became friends. You recommend a friend, and he goes to Harvard. Harvard bores him because of too many committee meetings, so then he goes somewhere else. It goes on, and on, and on, and on.

Blum:

I think Anselevicius is now at Albuquerque University.

Chermayeff:

Right, Albuquerque, yes, at an absurd address, Tennis Court number seven or something. His wife is a wonderful weaver. She got a lot of Mexicans trained to weave. Then too many people want to use the Mexican weavers for their modern art—usually for reproductions of their paintings, things of that kind, making them into tapestries.

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She’s very happy now because there is a monastery in Albuquerque. She is now teaching the monks how to weave. Blum:

You spoke earlier of drawings you had made for a hospital. What happened to those drawings?

Chermayeff:

I don’t know.

Blum:

Do you think they’re in the SOM archive?

Chermayeff:

No, I doubt it.

Blum:

Did you retain them?

Chermayeff:

I doubt it. There’s too much stuff produced, so much paper. Paper weighs tons, it occupies an enormous amount of space. You have to get rid of the stuff.

Blum:

Museums collect all that material now. They don’t allow it to be destroyed if they have a chance.

Chermayeff:

Very, very little. Of all the stuff produced I would think less than one percent is kept.

Blum:

What happened to your drawings of your work in England?

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Chermayeff:

Mine were destroyed in an air raid on September 1, 1941. They were all in storage near Paddington Station, which was barbed and the whole thing was totally destroyed. I had a couple and tried to take them with me but really the bulk of the work just went up in smoke. What didn’t go up in smoke was worse, the firemen did the job on it with the hoses.

Blum:

It was really all destroyed?

Chermayeff:

Yes, it came out like soup.

Blum:

The few drawings that you brought with you, are they with your material at Harvard?

Chermayeff:

I don’t know where the hell they are.

Blum:

If someone wanted to do more research, to learn more about you, I know you’ve published books...

Chermayeff:

Everything’s been published.

Blum:

You’ve published books, they’re available in libraries, art museum libraries, architectural libraries...

Chermayeff:

Not only that but the magazines. If you go to the working sheets published by the Architectural Journal, for years, you’ll find hundred of details from my buildings.

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Blum:

The Architectural Journal was a journal that was published in London. There was another journal also.

Chermayeff:

Architectural Review. That was a pictorial. We trained Del and Wainwright, one man had one eye which is tremendously helpful for photography. You had single focus. We had to train these two who belonged to the Architectural Review how to really photograph our work. They were still straight in front of it in one plane, but really you ought to have done it this way. Everything is accidental.

Blum:

So, if someone wanted to learn more about your career and work they should consult those two journals published in London?

Chermayeff:

That’s for details.

Blum:

They should consult the books that have recently been published.

Chermayeff:

If you look up the bibliography in Plunz’s book you’ll find that everything’s been published.

Blum:

This is the Writings and Sayings of Serge Chermayeff, edited by Richard Plunz. That’s quite an extensive bibliography.

Chermayeff:

You can look up that bibliography and find that everything has been published, sometime or another. Everything that Wells Coates, McGrath, Emberton, and myself, everything we did was published in one of those magazines. Monica Pidgeon has a certain amount of stuff, but not very much, because she wanted to compare the whole

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time with what you did and what somebody else did which is very confusing in terms of slides. Blum:

I listened to and saw the Pidgeon tape and it is a tape recording of your voice coordinated with slides. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure that I always had the slides coordinated with the proper comment. Your commentary is about your various positions as an educator.

Chermayeff:

Yes, because that was the time they were made.

Blum:

You talked about your position or your role as an educator at Brooklyn College and how it differed from that at the Institute of Design and then at Harvard, Yale and so on. The Pidgeon tapes are available in research libraries.

Chermayeff:

The tape is all right but the slides which are included are now in these little packages which are not very helpful because she mixes them up, for comparisons sake, other peoples work with the work of the man represented by that particular package. It is very confusing.

Blum:

Where is your manuscript material?

Chermayeff:

At Columbia.

Blum:

In the Avery Library?

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Chermayeff:

Yes. But actually, if you look at the bibliography you’ll find that there’s so much published that you’d have to look to Italy and to this and that and the other.

Blum:

These articles are in journals, they are available publicly.

Chermayeff:

Absolutely.

Blum:

What about correspondence? What is the nature of the archive at Avery?

Chermayeff:

Very little correspondence, I would think, in my collection.

Blum:

What was it that you gave Columbia with which they established the archive?

Chermayeff:

I gave them all the drawings and specifications that I had left. There wasn’t very much left because the war had destroyed most of them. Talbot Hamlin was a friend and the former librarian.

Blum:

I suppose another source of information would be exhibition catalogs, because you have exhibited your paintings.

Chermayeff:

The bibliography is the most useful thing that Plunz did. He did it very conscientiously and very extensively, without being asked to do so. When he started to edit the stuff but actually become a biogra-

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pher, then he started to talk absolute invented rubbish. He really can’t write. Blum:

You have said that there are some factual, historical errors in the Plunz book.

Chermayeff:

Errors, inventions, simply because he had to thicken out this book. He wrote more than he should have done and stole my royalties from MIT.

Blum:

Anyone consulting that book should be cautious about the portions that introduce each of the three sections.

Chermayeff:

In fact my youngest son, in talking to my lawyer, said that we’re trying to stop this edition. It will not be reprinted, if it ever sells out, which is doubtful. The author should be in one typeface and the short comments in another.

Blum:

That would make it clearer.

Chermayeff:

Also of course it would have to be radically cut. I counted the pages when I got this extraordinary book and he wrote almost one third of the total book. They put a price of thirty five dollars, which is really a coffee table kind of price, on a book which has got nothing to do with that sort of trade. They thought that they could sell my name. In the end they wrote a letter which said this is a book which has sold least of all architectural books that they’ve ever published. I said to the

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lawyer, “Do you wonder—thirty-five dollars?” Who’s going to pay thirty-five dollars except a few academic galleries and a few friends and so on? They only printed two thousand eight hundred, I think. This is the first edition. I don’t think they’ll ever sell completely. Blum:

According to information that I have heard, sales for such a book of limited appeal to the general public, and sales usually are about two thousand when purchased by all the architectural schools, art museums and research libraries. Two thousand eight hundred seems a reasonable amount to print.

Chermayeff:

Community and Privacy by Doubleday an earlier book of mine, has sold over fifty thousand and is still going strong in paperback. MIT Press didn’t bother to edit it so anybody who is a pro picking up a book like that will say “Christ almighty, why is this drawing of a house, or a cornice, repeated three times, with three different captions?” It’s as bad as that.

Blum:

Were three different points being made about the same house?

Chermayeff:

No, not points, just being admitted as different things. One house in particular, the O’Conner house which is just around the corner here, appears on the cover, it appears in one place as a house derived from studies made at the Institute of Design. It had nothing to do with the Institute. It was designed at least fifteen years after I left.

Blum:

Where could that idea have come from?

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Chermayeff:

The students who were left cold to finish the book while Plunz started writing his own book during that summer. The poor bloody students didn’t know an apple from an orange. They just shoved it together somehow to meet some kind of a date. Even then it was six months late.

Blum:

Did you look at that book before it went to press?

Chermayeff:

No, I never saw it.

Blum:

Then it doesn’t have your approval?

Chermayeff:

No, only my copyright. That’s what I’m going to rest my case on. It’s my copyright and yet they’ve abused it by doing this with it and the other and writing this and putting in that photograph instead of that one.

Blum:

What should a researcher do who wants to use that book to make sure they’re gathering correct information?

Chermayeff:

Nothing, except check with as many people as possible. It will be more difficult when I’m dead.

Blum:

In other words should they check with you?

Chermayeff:

That would be the best way. I don’t want to be bothered, otherwise I’d be inundated with letters like I am now. You see people write

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from England, Italy, or wherever it is and say explain this, that, or the other. I say I’m not going to do any of your research, go and do your own research, everything’s been published. You can go to any library and you can find everything in those libraries. If you’re going to do research earn your own right to publish. Don’t expect me to do your research for you because I won’t. I’m not interested in appearing in some paper you are writing and I’m not interested in you. Please don’t bother me. Blum:

It’s unfortunate when incorrect information is published and inadvertently one may perpetuate it.

Chermayeff:

That’s right. That is what my case will be in front of a judge, when everybody’s under oath.

Blum:

It’s would also be very helpful for an addendum of corrections to be added to the Plunz book.

Chermayeff:

Yes. I’ve had this in the hands of a lawyer who specializes in literary things and I haven’t heard anything from him for three months. He kindly volunteered to do this.

Blum:

In addition to that long list of published material that a researcher may consult if they want to know more about you and also write to you, we can now add to the list the transcription of this material that we’ve just recorded. It will be available in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Chermayeff:

That will be fine.

Blum:

Thank you very much Mr. Chermayeff.

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SERGE IVAN CHERMAYEFF

Born: Died:

8 October 1900, Grosny, Azerbaijan, Caucasus, Russia 8 May 1996, Wellfleet, Massachusetts

Education:

Peterborough Lodge Preparatory School, Hampstead, London, 1910-1913 Royal Drawing Society School, London, 1910-1913 Harrow School, 1914-1917 Various schools in Germany, Austria, France, Netherlands, 19221925

Teaching Experience:

Professional Experience:

Honors and Awards:

Professional Activities:

European Mediterranean Academy, France, early 1930s San Francisco Art Institute, 1940-1941 Brooklyn College, 1942-1946 Institute of Design, 1946-1951 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1951-1952 Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1953-1962, 1974 Yale University, 1962-1971 Journalist, Amalgamated Press, London, 1918-1923 Chief Designer, E. Williams Ltd., London, 1924-1927 Director of Modern Art Department, Waring & Gillow, London, 1928-1929 Private Architectural Practice, London, 1930-1939 Partnership with Erich Mendelsohn, London, 1933-36 Private Architectural Practice, San Francisco, 1940-1941 Private Architectural Practice, New York, 1942-1946 Gold Medal, Royal Canadian Institute of Architects, 1974 Fellow, Royal Institute of British Architects Fellow, Royal Society of Arts, London Fellow, American Institute of Architects Co-founder, American Society of Planners and Architects, 19421947 Consultant, Planning, Architecture and Industrial Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1942-1947 Editorial Board, American Federation of Art, 1942-1947 Consultant, Chicago Plan Commission, 1946-1948

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Selected Commissions:

De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England (with Erich Mendelsohn) Clarence Mayhew House, Oakland California Walter Horn House, Richmond, California Serge Chermayeff house, Bentley, near Halland, Sussex, England Serge Chermayeff Studio I and II, Wellfleet, Massachusetts

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SELECTED REFERENCES Abstract and Surrealist American Art Fifty-Eighth Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 6 November 1947—11 January 1948. “Architects Studio, A Place to Work and Live.” Interiors 106 (February 1947): 83-86. “Architecture at the Institute of Design.” Interiors 108 (November 1948): 118-125. “The Case of a Unique Building Plan—the Case Study Houses.” Interiors 108 (September 1948): 96-99, 116-119. Chermayeff, Serge. “Address given on the Occasion of the Celebration of the Addition of the Institute of Design to the Illinois Institute of Technology.” Chicago (17 April 1950). Chermayeff, Serge. “Architecture at the Institute of Design.” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 20 (February 1950): 50-68. Chermayeff, Serge. “Education for Modern Design.” College Art Journal VI, 2 (Winter 1947): 219. Inaugural address to Chicago Institute of Design given 4 February 1947. Chermayeff, Serge. “Environmental Design is our Task.” London: Pidgeon Audio Visual, 1980. Chermayeff, Serge. “A New Spirit and Idealism.” The Architects’ Journal (London) 74 (4 November 1931): 619-620. Chermayeff, Serge. “Painting Toward Architecture.” Arts and Architecture 65 (June 1948): 24-31. Chermayeff, Serge, with Christopher Alexander. Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963. Chermayeff, Serge, with Alexander Tzonis. Shape of Community: Realization of Human Potential. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971. Chermayeff, Serge and Plunz, Richard, eds. Design and the Public Good: Selected Writings 1930-1980 by Serge Chermayeff. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press, 1982. Gropius, Walter. “Blueprint for an Architect’s Training.” L’Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 20 (February 1950): 71-75.

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“Harvard House for Urban Living.” Interiors 116 (July 1957): 16. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Modern Architecture in England. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937. “The Institute of Design Integrates Art, Technology, and Science.” Interiors 108 (September 1948): 142-151. “The Institute of Design—a Laboratory for a New Education.” Interiors 108 (October 1948): 138-139. Jackson, Anthony. “The Politics of Architecture: English Architecture 1929-1951.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians XXIV, 1 (March 1965): 97-107. Lohse, Richard P. New Design in Exhibition. New York: Praeger, 1954. Mock, Elizabeth B. If You Want to Build a House. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946. "Open House: Institute of Design in 1952.” Arts and Architecture 69 (July 1952): 16-33. “The Passing of a Pioneer.” Interiors CVI (April 1947): 77-80. “Telesis: The Birth of a Group.” Pencil Points 23 (July 1942): 45-47. Wingler, Hans M. The Bauhaus. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press, 1969.

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INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS Aalto, Alvar 98-99, 104 Albers, Josef 2, 35, 36, 43, 98 Alferez, Enrique 23 American Institute of Architects 107, 108 Anselevicius, George 41, 116

Eames, Charles 4, 61, 98, 99, 114 Eames, Ray 61, 114 Emberton, Joseph 119 Epstein, Max 77 Filipowski, Richard 40 Follot, Paul 101 Fuller, Buckminster 36-38, 41, 48, 50, 66, 91, 107

Baldwin Kingrey, Chicago, Illinois 99 Balet, Leo 22 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 6 Barr, Alfred 29, 83 Bartsch , Helmuth 34 Bauhaus, Berlin, Germany 38, 42, 43, 47, 98 Bayer, Herbert 95, 102 Berko, Ferenc 96 Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, North Carolina 35, 36 Boulanger, Nadia 50 Brasilia, Brazil 10, 14 Breuer, Marcel (Leujko) 3-5, 15, 98 , 99, 103 Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, New York 7, 22, 23, 25-29, 104, 120 Brownjohn, Robert 18, 31, 41, 45, 88 Burnham, Daniel 53

General Panel Corporation 3, 45, 85 Gaede, William J. 26 Gidionse, Harry 22-24, 26, 27 Giedion, Sigfried 17, 23, 29, 34, 99, 109 Gill, Eric 111 Goodwin, Philip 29 Gropius, Ise 21 Gropius, Walter 1-3, 7, 15, 19, 42, 43, 80 Hamlin, Talbot 121 Hancock Building, Chicago, Illinois 85 Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 7, 8, 80, 120 Hawthorne, Lord 79 Hayakawa, S. I. 39 Heald, Henry 44, 46, 79-82 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 40 Holabird & Root 6, 86 Homans, George 11, 79 Hudnut, Joseph 80 Hutchins, Robert Maynard 78-80

Calder, Alexander 86, 87 Callahan, Harry 96 Chermayeff, Barbara 17, 47, 54 Daley, Richard J.,Civic Center (formerly Chicago Civic Center), Chicago, Illinois 87-88 Coates, Wells 119 Container Corporation of America 13, 61, 95

Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 8, 24, 32, 43, 44, 57, 59, 79-81, 83-84, 93 International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) 110-111

dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Harnoncourt, RenĂŠ 83 Daley, Gardner 21 Daley, Richard J. 89 Del & Wainwright 119 Doblin, Jay 81, 94

Johnson, Philip 6, 58, 65, 83 Josephs, Emily 21, 22 Kallmann, Gerhard 18

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Karnes, Karen 26 Kauffer, McKnight 102 Keck, George Fred 39, 46, 50-51 Kepes, Gyorgy 8, 39 Kessler, William 87 Knoll, Walter 100-1 Kolb, Otto 17, 24, 99 Koppe, Richard 17, 40 Kuh, Katherine 39 La Guardia, Fiorello 28 Lebrun, Georges 40 Le Corbusier, Charles Jeanneret 1, 10-11, 14 Leger, Fernand 40 Lerner, Nathan 96 Lieberman, Maurice 26, 27 Liebes, Dorothy 21, 22

O'Connor, Edwin (house), Wellfleet, Massachusetts 123 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 89, 90, 113 Ozenfant, Amédée 111 Paepcke, Walter 7-8, 13, 19, 24, 46, 76, 78-80, 91, 95 Peterhans, Walter 30, 58 Peters, Svetlana Alliluyeva 56 Peters, Wesley (Wes) 56 Picasso, Pablo 87 Pidgeon, Monica 119 Plunz, Richard 9, 119, 121, 124 Pratt, David 39 Prestini, James 40

Edouard

Read, Herbert 40 Reagan, Ronald 75 Rettaliata, John T. 79-82, 95 Richards, James 52 Royal British Institute of Architects (RIBA) 108 Rudolph, Paul 6, 9, 83

Maix, L. Anton 105 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Cambridge, Massachusetts 8, 80 Marx, Lora 24 Marx, Samuel 77 McGrath, Raymond 119 Mendelsohn, Erich 56, 111 Metal, Martin 16-17 Mies Van der Rohe, Ludwig 1, 2, 4-6, 24, 25, 30-34, 42, 43, 51, 58-59, 65, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 93, 104, 113 Modern Architectural Research Society (MARS) 111 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 1, 2, 7, 8, 16, 18, 20, 24, 25, 27-31, 42-44, 63, 76, 95 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl 16-20, 97 Moore, Henry 10 Morley, Grace McCann 22 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, New York 26, 101 Myers, Howard 54-55

Saarinen, Eero 51, 78 Saarinen, Eliel 51 Scheik, William 108 Schleger, Hans 39, 41 Schweikher, Paul 114 Seagram Building, New York City, New York 58-59 Sert, Jose Lluis 19 Sevigné, Madame de 15 Shand, Morton 52 Skidmore, Louis 90, 113 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 85, 88-91, 116 Stern, Robert A.M. 65 Stuttgart Railroad Station, Stuttgart, Germany 5 Sullivan, Louis 53

Neutra, Richard 40 National Gallery, Berlin, Germany 59 Niemeyer, Oscar 14

Tague, Robert Bruce 50 Taliesin West, Scotsdale, Arizona 5355 Taylor, Crombie 16, 29, 97

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Telesis 22, 109 Thwaites, Molly 17 Van der Meulen, John 39 Van der Velde, Henry 112 Wachsmann, Konrad 3, 4, 44-46, 84, 92 Walley, John 39 Warring & Gillow 101 Weber , Hugo 34-35, 40 Weese, Harry 85, 88 Wheeler, Monroe 83 Woelffer, Emerson 37, 39, 47 Wright, Frank Lloyd 53-56, 65 Wright, Olgivanna 54 Y ale University, New Haven, Connecticut 7, 120

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