A singularly Cerebral Man

 T of TW Feb 2016

Passing of a Singularly Cerebral Architect     

By Kent Barker

Whenever he came back to England, Geoff would always be sure to visit our house, driven down to the country by his long-suffering wife June.  Actually I don’t think she was that long-suffering, it’s just that she often complained he’d never learned to drive and so, throughout their 65 years marriage, and the raising of four children, she’d been the family chauffeur. Mind you I very much doubt if she would ever have dared get into a car with Geoff at the wheel.  His cerebral mind would never have stooped to such mundane things as gear changes or traffic lights or, indeed, other road users.

Geoff’s association with the place I now live began immediately after the war when my father invited him home to meet his parents.  The two had been war buddies in a decidedly eccentric theatrical troupe known as the ‘’Balmorals’.  This was the army’s answer to ENSA which, after D-Day, toured newly liberated France, Belgium and finally Germany with shows for the front-line soldiers mounted in barns and derelict theaters.

Geoff had been recruited rather late into this band of brothers as a scenery painter – somewhat less glamorous, if decidedly safer, than his role as a war artist during the Normandy beach landings.  Anyway he and my father began a friendship which lasted half a century and brought our two families into close, if irregular proximity.

After the war Geoff qualified as an architect, married June, and went off to to America, first to Harvard and then to Chicago where he was employed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, pioneers of the modern "glass box" skyscraper. Returning to England in 1954 this experience proved bankable and he was commissioned to design a modernistic headquarters for the fabric firm Sanderson. 

On one of his last visits to London Geoff could be found in the courtyard garden of this Berners Street listed building, recently remodeled as a swanky boutique hotel.  With flowing silver locks and full beard he held court reminiscing about the emerging pop-art movement in post-war Britain. He’d been part of the Independent Group of artists and designers who had staged a seminal exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956, questioning the tenets of traditional and modern art.

Before long he and June and the four children departed for the States again.  Geoff had a job teaching architecture at the University of New Mexico, but it was really just a cover for the major project he’d embarked on. He’d already met Charles and Ray Eames in London, and been transfixed by their iconoclastic approach to modern architecture.  Geoff had written about them and their extraordinary Santa Monica house in the Architectural Review.  Now he decided nothing less than a full book about their designs and philosophy would do.  And thus began perhaps the longest gestation of any work of non-fiction known to mankind.

Part of the problem was that New Mexico was rather too far from Southern California for the non-driving Geoff to visit and interview his subjects.  Even moving the family to San Louis Obispo on the Pacific Coast didn’t help much. As professor of Architecture at Cal Poly there were lectures to prepare and faculty parties to attend, and local wine to be drunk. And the deeper Geoff got into his research the more difficulty he seemed to have explaining it.  Certainly on my visits to him in California, or his to me in Kent, I found myself struggling to grapple with his concept of the Eames’ “duelist strategy of treating structure and decoration … as two ideas in disagreement with each other… becoming a paradigm for a controlled dichotomy”.

But Geoffery was clearly lapping it up and soon gave up teaching to devote himself full time to his magnus opus.  June later complained that he never worked again nor contributed any income to the family funds.  This was not entirely true because, along with her and their two sons, Geoff started designing a series of upmarket houses in the Santa Barbra area that became known as the Holroyd Houses.  Well, it is possible that June did the bulk of the draftsmanship while Geoff theoreticized or conceptualized on Hispanic/Mediterranean  architectural style, but at least he still contributed something.

Recently the local Santa Barbra museum honored him with an exhibition recreating his 1956 ‘This Was Tomorrow’ exhibit known as ‘Group 12’ and then, last year, he suddenly announced that after almost exactly fifty years his book on the Eameses was finished.  It was not a good career move. He died at the end of last month aged 92.

Geoff had a singular physical characteristic.  Cut onions never made him cry.  I’ll always remember him madly chopping away in my kitchen whenever he visited.  It’s a very great sadness he won’t do so again.

ends