Serge Chermayeff

Written by renowned architectural historian Alan Powers, 'Serge Chermayeff: Designer Architect Teacher' is a fascinating study of one of the major unsung forces of twentieth-century architecture. Architect of the De La Warr Pavilion and teacher to Rogers and Foster are only a fraction of his immense life and works. This keenly-anticipated title contains over 200 illustrations, 30 of which are in colour. 'Serge Chermayeff: Designer, Architect, Teacher' tells the extraordinary life story of one of the pioneers of twentieth century architecture. Best known for his collaboration with Eric Mendelsohn on the iconic De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, Chermayeff emigrated to America in 1940 to concentrate on teaching. Two distinguished careers spanning two distant countries and virtually a whole century have, until now, conspired to obscure his true influence on the world of architecture. This book, containing 200 black and white and 30 colour illustrations, will fill the gap in the market in the literature about twentieth century architecture.Born during 1900 in Grozny, Chechnya, into an oil-rich Jewish family, he was educated in England but was unable to take up his place at Cambridge after his family's wealth was lost in the 1917 Revolution. He eventually found himself running the modern design department at Waring & Gillow after years earning a precarious living variously as a journalist, professional dancer (including a spell in Buenos Aires managing a dance hall), and interior designer. He quickly became a 'name' along with the likes of Wells Coates, moving in the right circles at a time of intellectual and ideological ferment. He became a key member of the architectural avant-garde, developing his design philosophy based on physical and psychological comfort and visual harmony. As well as the De La Warr Pavilion, Chermayeff produced several important buildings (including his own house at Bentley Wood) before his change of continent and career focus. His teaching career began in earnest, leading eventually to posts at Harvard under J.L. Sert and at Yale under Paul Rudolph, where his students included Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.A brilliant, witty and sometimes devastatingly pessimistic lecturer, Chermayeff's academic career culminated in two books. One of these, Community and Privacy (with Christopher Alexander, 1963) was a bestseller, giving Chermayeff a second wave of fame. He had a wide circle of friends in other disciplines, from art to politics, economics and science, allowing his influence to be understood in the wider intellectual and political context. In an obituary tribute in 1997, his friend and collaborator Alexander Tzonis wrote, 'there are aspects of Chermayeff's thinking that remain as fresh, unfulfilled, topical and demanding as at the time of their inception in the 1960s, 1950s, or even the 1930s. A book about them is urgently needed.' 'Serge Chermayeff: Designer, Architect, Teacher' portrays his conviction in the power of positive thought and action for beneficial change and offers many lessons for the architecture profession in the twenty-first century.

Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, concepts, and concerns that catalyzed the cross-contamination of computers and architecture in the mid-20th century. Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives. Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.

Delivers the inside story on 6,000 years of personal and public space. John Pile acknowledges that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries, in which construction, architecture, the arts and crafts, technology and product design all overlap.

The Culture of Nature in the History of Design confronts the dilemma caused by design’s pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse through interdisciplinary conversations about the design of nature and the nature of design. Demonstrating that the deep entanglements of design and nature have a deeper and broader history than contemporary discourse on sustainable design and ecological design might imply, this book presents case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and from Singapore to Mexico. It gathers scholarship on a broad range of fields/practices, from urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture, to engineering design, industrial design, furniture design and graphic design. From adobe architecture to the atomic bomb, from the bonsai tree to Biosphere 2, from pesticides to photovoltaics, from rust to recycling – the culture of nature permeates the history of design. As an activity and a profession always operating in the borderlands between human and non-human environments, design has always been part of the environmental problem, whilst also being an indispensable part of the solution. The book ventures into domains as diverse as design theory, research, pedagogy, politics, activism, organizations, exhibitions, and fiction and trade literature to explore how design is constantly making and unmaking the environment and, conversely, how the environment is both making and unmaking design. This book will be of great interest to a range of scholarly fields, from design education and design history to environmental policy and environmental history.

Forgotten Modern reveals the work of the innovative architects building in California from the 1930s to the 1970s. With groundbreaking and illuminating examples that will alter the way we think of California architecture, Hess and Weintraub focus on those that exemplify early mid-entury modern, variations on minimalism, and organic architecture. Though architects, historians, and the public alike have overlooked many of these superb architects from California's past century, this book intends to bring them back to our attention. All the architects included here are important in helping to show the breadth of design, that styles like Organic were more widely represented than we have previously realized, and that the fertile soil of California design fostered a wide spectrum of remarkable ideas-even if not all developed a significant school of followers. Chapters Include: A New Introduction to Midcentury California Searching For Midcentury Modern Variations on Wood and Steel Modernism Organic Architecture History Plus Modernism

This book presents an expansive overview of the development of architectural and environmental research, with authoritative essays spanning Dean Hawkes’ impressive 50-year academic career. The book considers the relationship between the technologies of the environment and wider historical and theoretical factors, with chapters on topics ranging from the origins of modern ‘building science’ in Renaissance England to technology and imagination in architecture. It includes numerous architectural examples from renowned architects such as Christopher Wren, Peter Zumthor, Alvar Aalto, Robert Venturi and Carlo Scarpa. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in architecture and beyond, this illustrated volume collates important and wide-ranging essays tracing the definition, scope and methodologies of architectural and environmental studies, with a foreword by Susannah Hagan.

Fifteen tours of the city for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists and information on cultural history accompany captioned photographs of more than five hundred buildings.