ORAL HISTORY OF SERGE CHERMAYEFF

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Complied under the auspices of theChicago Architects Oral History Project

Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural DrawingsDepartment of ArchitectureThe Art Institute of Chicago

Copyright © 1986Revised Edition Copyright © 2001

The Art Institute of Chicago

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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.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Appendix: Curriculum Vitae 127

Selected References 129

Index of Names and Buildings 131

iv

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 five-

year 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

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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 theDepartment of Architecture in 2000 to scan, reformat, and make this entire textavailable on The Art Institute of Chicago’s website. Annemarie van Roesseldeserves our thanks for her masterful handling of this phase of the process.

Betty J. BlumJanuary 2001

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OUTLINE OF TOPICS

European Pioneers of Modernism 1

Opinions and Colleagues 3

Chermayeff Becomes Director of the Institute of Design, Chicago 16

Travelling in the United States, 1940 20

Brooklyn College 23

Moholy’s Philosophy 30

Differences: the Institute of Design and Illinois Institute of Technology 30

Program at the ID under Chermayeff’s Leadership 35

Popularity of Jazz 37

Frank Lloyd Wright 53

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Seagram Building, New York City 58

Chermayeff’s Interest in Painting 63

Opinion of Postmodernism 65

Urban Concerns 67

Merger of the Institute of Design with the Illinois Institute of Technology 78

Chicago Plans Exhibition, 1950 88

Associates 89

Institute of Design and IIT 93

Impact of Technology on Furniture Designs 98

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

1

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.

2

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 didn’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.

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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

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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?

5

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

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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,

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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 seventy-

one. 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,

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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 form-

making, 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. We were both engaged in developing a more

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.

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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.

10

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

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

15

Chermayeff: Collaboration rather than individuality. Everybody now wants to

beat his chest and be visible, they’re afraid of being the same as

anybody else. High fashion rose out of that elite pride. Go back to

Madame de Sevigne and everybody’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.

16

[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 wasn’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 I’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

17

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.

18

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?

19

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

20

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.

21

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

22

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 I’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

23

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-

24

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

25

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-

26

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

27

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?

28

Chermayeff: All of Moholy’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 you’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?

29

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.

30

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

31

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.

32

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?

33

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 doesn’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?

34

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

35

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. You’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?

36

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?

37

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.

38

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.

39

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.

40

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...

41

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

42

lot of trouble because the drug police really weren’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?

43

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 couldn’t accept them.

Blum: What I’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

44

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?

45

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 son’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 couldn’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.

46

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?

47

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

48

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 wasn’t a concert like one in an auditorium. What were the school-

sponsored activities, for instance, where both students and faculty

participated?

Chermayeff: Apart from our visits to the Blue Note with Bucky I don’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?

49

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 didn’t exist.

Blum: Soon after the war wasn’t it available?

50

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.

51

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.

52

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.

53

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 I’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?

54

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?

55

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.”

56

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

57

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

58

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.

59

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.

60

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.

61

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.

62

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?

63

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, what’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.

64

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.

65

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 like postmodernism. What the hell is

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.

66

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...

67

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

68

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?

69

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

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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?

71

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

72

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 that’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?

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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-

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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.

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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.

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[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

77

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 car-

manufacturing 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

78

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

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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?

80

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 money-

getter. 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.

81

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.

82

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

83

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

84

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”?

85

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.

86

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, it 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.

87

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.

88

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.

89

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-

90

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

91

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.

92

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.

93

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 wouldn’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.

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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?

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 Stendig’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 I’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 of those who will be 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 I’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 didn’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

115

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 standard—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.

119

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

120

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. I’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?

121

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-

122

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?

124

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

125

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.

126

Chermayeff: That will be fine.

Blum: Thank you very much Mr. Chermayeff.

127

SERGE IVAN CHERMAYEFF

Born: 8 October 1900, Grosny, Azerbaijan, Caucasus, RussiaDied: 8 May 1996, Wellfleet, Massachusetts

Education: Peterborough Lodge Preparatory School, Hampstead, London,1910-1913

Royal Drawing Society School, London, 1910-1913Harrow School, 1914-1917Various schools in Germany, Austria, France, Netherlands, 1922-

1925

TeachingExperience: European Mediterranean Academy, France, early 1930s

San Francisco Art Institute, 1940-1941Brooklyn College, 1942-1946Institute of Design, 1946-1951Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1951-1952Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1953-1962, 1974Yale University, 1962-1971

ProfessionalExperience: Journalist, Amalgamated Press, London, 1918-1923

Chief Designer, E. Williams Ltd., London, 1924-1927Director of Modern Art Department, Waring & Gillow, London,

1928-1929Private Architectural Practice, London, 1930-1939Partnership with Erich Mendelsohn, London, 1933-36Private Architectural Practice, San Francisco, 1940-1941Private Architectural Practice, New York, 1942-1946

Honors andAwards: Gold Medal, Royal Canadian Institute of Architects, 1974

Fellow, Royal Institute of British ArchitectsFellow, Royal Society of Arts, LondonFellow, American Institute of Architects

ProfessionalActivities: Co-founder, American Society of Planners and Architects, 1942-

1947Consultant, Planning, Architecture and Industrial Design, Museum

of Modern Art, New York City, 1942-1947Editorial Board, American Federation of Art, 1942-1947Consultant, Chicago Plan Commission, 1946-1948

128

SelectedCommissions: De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England (with Erich

Mendelsohn)Clarence Mayhew House, Oakland CaliforniaWalter Horn House, Richmond, CaliforniaSerge Chermayeff house, Bentley, near Halland, Sussex, EnglandSerge Chermayeff Studio I and II, Wellfleet, Massachusetts

129

SELECTED REFERENCES

Abstract and Surrealist American Art Fifty-Eighth Exhibition of American Paintings andSculpture. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 6 November 1947—11 January1948.

“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 theAddition of the Institute of Design to the Illinois Institute of Technology.”Chicago (17 April 1950).

Chermayeff, Serge. “Architecture at the Institute of Design.” L’Architectured’Aujourd’hui 20 (February 1950): 50-68.

Chermayeff, Serge. “Education for Modern Design.” College Art Journal VI, 2 (Winter1947): 219. Inaugural address to Chicago Institute of Design given 4 February1947.

Chermayeff, Serge. “Environmental Design is our Task.” London: Pidgeon AudioVisual, 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 (June1948): 24-31.

Chermayeff, Serge, with Christopher Alexander. Community and Privacy: Toward aNew Architecture of Humanism. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963.

Chermayeff, Serge, with Alexander Tzonis. Shape of Community: Realization of HumanPotential. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971.

Chermayeff, Serge and Plunz, Richard, eds. Design and the Public Good: SelectedWritings 1930-1980 by Serge Chermayeff. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London:The MIT Press, 1982.

Gropius, Walter. “Blueprint for an Architect’s Training.” L’Architecture d'Aujourd'hui20 (February 1950): 71-75.

130

“Harvard House for Urban Living.” Interiors 116 (July 1957): 16.

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Modern Architecture in England. New York: Museum ofModern 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 (October1948): 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.

131

INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Aalto, Alvar 98-99, 104Albers, Josef 2, 35, 36, 43, 98Alferez, Enrique 23American Institute of Architects 107,

108Anselevicius, George 41, 116

Baldwin Kingrey, Chicago, Illinois 99Balet, Leo 22Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 6Barr, Alfred 29, 83Bartsch , Helmuth 34Bauhaus, Berlin, Germany 38, 42, 43,

47, 98Bayer, Herbert 95, 102Berko, Ferenc 96Black Mountain College, Black

Mountain, North Carolina 35, 36Boulanger, Nadia 50Brasilia, Brazil 10, 14Breuer, Marcel (Leujko) 3-5, 15, 98 ,

99, 103Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, New

York 7, 22, 23, 25-29, 104, 120Brownjohn, Robert 18, 31, 41, 45, 88Burnham, Daniel 53

Calder, Alexander 86, 87Callahan, Harry 96Chermayeff, Barbara 17, 47, 54Daley, Richard J.,Civic Center

(formerly Chicago Civic Center),Chicago, Illinois 87-88

Coates, Wells 119Container Corporation of America 13,

61, 95

d’Harnoncourt, René 83Daley, Gardner 21Daley, Richard J. 89Del & Wainwright 119Doblin, Jay 81, 94

Eames, Charles 4, 61, 98, 99, 114Eames, Ray 61, 114Emberton, Joseph 119Epstein, Max 77

Filipowski, Richard 40Follot, Paul 101Fuller, Buckminster 36-38, 41, 48, 50,

66, 91, 107

General Panel Corporation 3, 45, 85Gaede, William J. 26Gidionse, Harry 22-24, 26, 27Giedion, Sigfried 17, 23, 29, 34, 99, 109Gill, Eric 111Goodwin, Philip 29Gropius, Ise 21Gropius, Walter 1-3, 7, 15, 19, 42, 43,

80

Hamlin, Talbot 121Hancock Building, Chicago, Illinois 85Harvard University, Cambridge,

Massachusetts 7, 8, 80, 120Hawthorne, Lord 79Hayakawa, S. I. 39Heald, Henry 44, 46, 79-82Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 40Holabird & Root 6, 86Homans, George 11, 79Hudnut, Joseph 80Hutchins, Robert Maynard 78-80

Illinois Institute of Technology,Chicago, Illinois 8, 24, 32, 43, 44,57, 59, 79-81, 83-84, 93

International Congress of ModernArchitecture (CIAM) 110-111

Johnson, Philip 6, 58, 65, 83Josephs, Emily 21, 22

Kallmann, Gerhard 18

132

Karnes, Karen 26Kauffer, McKnight 102Keck, George Fred 39, 46, 50-51Kepes, Gyorgy 8, 39Kessler, William 87Knoll, Walter 100-1Kolb, Otto 17, 24, 99Koppe, Richard 17, 40Kuh, Katherine 39

La Guardia, Fiorello 28Lebrun, Georges 40Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard

Jeanneret 1, 10-11, 14Leger, Fernand 40Lerner, Nathan 96Lieberman, Maurice 26, 27Liebes, Dorothy 21, 22

Maix, L. Anton 105Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(M.I.T.), Cambridge, Massachusetts8, 80

Marx, Lora 24Marx, Samuel 77McGrath, Raymond 119Mendelsohn, Erich 56, 111Metal, Martin 16-17Mies 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 ResearchSociety (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, 97Moore, Henry 10Morley, Grace McCann 22Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),

New York City, New York 26, 101Myers, Howard 54-55

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

O'Connor, Edwin (house), Wellfleet,Massachusetts 123

Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 89, 90, 113Ozenfant, Amédée 111

Paepcke, Walter 7-8, 13, 19, 24, 46, 76,78-80, 91, 95

Peterhans, Walter 30, 58Peters, Svetlana Alliluyeva 56Peters, Wesley (Wes) 56Picasso, Pablo 87Pidgeon, Monica 119Plunz, Richard 9, 119, 121, 124Pratt, David 39Prestini, James 40

Read, Herbert 40Reagan, Ronald 75Rettaliata, John T. 79-82, 95Richards, James 52Royal British Institute of Architects

(RIBA) 108Rudolph, Paul 6, 9, 83

Saarinen, Eero 51, 78Saarinen, Eliel 51Scheik, William 108Schleger, Hans 39, 41Schweikher, Paul 114Seagram Building, New York City,

New York 58-59Sert, Jose Lluis 19Sevigné, Madame de 15Shand, Morton 52Skidmore, Louis 90, 113Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 85, 88-91,

116Stern, Robert A.M. 65Stuttgart Railroad Station, Stuttgart,

Germany 5Sullivan, Louis 53

Tague, Robert Bruce 50Taliesin West, Scotsdale, Arizona 53-

55Taylor, Crombie 16, 29, 97

133

Telesis 22, 109Thwaites, Molly 17

Van der Meulen, John 39Van der Velde, Henry 112

Wachsmann, Konrad 3, 4, 44-46, 84, 92Walley, John 39Warring & Gillow 101Weber , Hugo 34-35, 40Weese, Harry 85, 88Wheeler, Monroe 83Woelffer, Emerson 37, 39, 47Wright, Frank Lloyd 53-56, 65Wright, Olgivanna 54Yale University, New Haven,

Connecticut 7, 120