Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1924 Baghdad, Iraq

Died: 2017 England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1945

Biography

Architect Julian Sofaer (né Nessim Sofaer) was born into a Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq on 10 August 1924. His father died when he was two years old and he was therefore more connected to his mother’s side of the family. His maternal grandfather, Abraham Haim, was particularly inspirational for him and partially filled the void caused by the loss of his father. After Iraq became independent from the British Empire in 1932, Haim became a member of parliament and was one of six people representing the Jewish community at the United Nations in Geneva., while his wife, Rachel Haim, was the first Iraqi woman to sit in the spectators’ tribune. The house where Sofaer lived with his mother and siblings was looted during the Farhud pogroms in 1941. On the night of the pogrom, he and his sister were at home on their own and narrowly escaped death. He later recalled that ‘There was a period of eerie silence, I suppose that was when the marauders were surrounding Jewish people. Then there was a huge hysterical cry, presumably when a crime had been committed […] We were expecting the worse. A lot of people were raped and murdered, including children’(Jewish Renaissance interview). A few months later the family fled to Bombay, India, where he was admitted to the Sir JJ School of Art to study architecture.

Having decided to complete his studies in London, he sent the Architectural Association some of his drawings and was accepted, but the Second World War curtailed his departure until May 1945. Postwar London, with its ruined buildings, deprivation and lack of food made a shocking impression on him and he later recalled that, being a vegetarian, he was entitled to receive only six ounces of cheese and one egg a week (Jewish Renaissance interview). Sofaer qualified as an architect in 1945, soon after arrival, and joined the architectural firm Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, working with them in the design of the Dick Sheppard School in Lambeth and the Grade II-listed Susan Lawrence School in London's East End in preparation for the 1951 Festival of Britain. In 1955 he set up his own practice and carried out many commissions for the London County Council (LCC) and the Greater London Council (GLC), building more than 60 schools and colleges, over 1,000 flats, private houses, office buildings and community facilities. Among his many projects was Hugh Myddelton Primary School in Islington, designed for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA, 1971) and described by émigré art historian Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the most interesting departure from standard types’ (Architectural Association School of Architecture). Sofaer was appointed on the strength of earlier school projects in which he honed methods of maximising natural light. At Hugh Myddelton School he introduced a central light well along the main building’s spine, flanking which the upper classrooms were cantilevered, permitting clerestory lighting to the lower classrooms. He carefully worked up from a golden-section base, expressed in brown brick with reinforced-concrete floors and flat roof. Other projects included a Spanish and Portuguese [Sephardi] Jews' home for the aged in Wembley (1976) and the Community Hall (also known as the Canal Club), on Wellington Estate in Bethnal Green (1980s), which provided a laundry, youth club, nursery, and play and amenity space. Sofaer also designed a synagogue in Wembley (built c.1980), and the extension of the West London Synagogue with Youth Centre and Library (1961) in Seymour Place in London (1963–64), which earned him a Civic Trust Award for its contribution to the appearance of the local environment. Sofaer's project for 'Meridian West', a modernist house on a sloping hillside in Greenwich (1963), exemplified his modernist approach to traditional materials and demonstrated a harmonic balance between a formal public front and the casual internal structures. Designated a Grade II-listed building in 2007, it was included in the English Heritage exhibition Brutal and Beautiful: Saving the Twentieth Century held in Wellington Arch, London in 2013, celebrating 24 architects who contributed to the rebuilding of postwar London and had their work 'listed'.

An independent mind, Sofaer never joined fashionable movements in architecture. He rejected Le Corbusier’s use of concrete and disliked Brutalism. An admirer of Italian Renaissance art, in his projects he constantly searched for harmony of proportions and stressed the ‘importance of working within a life-enhancing and humanist perspective’ (Tribune Mag). Sofaer was a close friend and great supporter of émigré painter and printmaker Gerhart Frankl, becoming trustee of his estate, facilitator of many posthumous exhibitions, and compiler of a catalogue raisonée. Julian Sofaer died in London, England on 30 May 2017.