Catherine Cooke

>
>
> >Catherine Cooke, who has died in a road accident aged 61, was a world
>authority on the architecture and design of the Soviet avant-garde in
>the 1920s.
>
> >Her particular interest was Russian Constructivism, the product of an
>extraordinary period of experiment in the visual arts in Russia
>following the Revolution of 1917, when the work of architects such as
>Vladimir Tatlin and graphic designers such as Iakov Chernikov achieved
>radical new forms of artistic expression.
>
> >The idealism of this intensely creative period was brought to an end
>by the social realist policies of Stalin, and the work of these artists
>was to a great extent suppressed and forgotten within Russia until
>Catherine Cooke began her research. She was responsible for a stream of
>scholarly publications on the subject in the West and for encouraging
>the rehabilitation of Constructivist art and architecture within
>Russia.
>
>Catherine Anne Chichester-Cooke, always known as Catherine Cooke, was
>born on August 2 1942 at Bishop's Stortford, the daughter of Brigadier
>B Chichester-Cooke of the Royal Engineers. In later years, her father
>was keeper of Upnor Castle on the Medway and lived at Chatham; he was
>also a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron.
>
> >His daughter inherited his love of sailing and would occasionally
>disappear to Cowes; friends were convinced that she redesigned the
>interior of the two adjacent terrace houses she owned in Norwich
>Street, Cambridge, to be like a boat. Her military background came as
>no surprise to anyone who heard Catherine's slow, precise diction, and
>her commanding air was perhaps further encouraged by being educated at
>Roedean.
>
>In 1961 she entered New Hall, Cambridge, to read Architecture. She
>later was angry about "how little real 'experience' was actually handed
>on to us", and became critical of the "poverty" of the university-based
>system of architectural education in Britain. This, she wrote two years
>ago, "sits on some very thin intellectual and professional foundations,
>but they were laid by people who have been seen as high priests of the
>Modern Movement in this country - and who were indeed among my own
>teachers"; that is, in particular, (Sir) Leslie Martin, head of the
>Cambridge School of Architecture, who had been primarily responsible
>for setting up this system at the 1958 Oxford conference on
>architectural education.
>
>Although Catherine Cooke taught at the Cambridge School of
>Architecture right up until her death on February 20, her conviction
>that such schools were increasingly failing to fulfil the aims of the
>Modern Movement, to which she remained committed, was one reason why in
>1979 she took up an appointment as a Lecturer in Design at the Faculty
>of Technology at the Open University. There she taught design in an
>industrial context, among colleagues from different disciplines. She
>was an inspired and dedicated teacher.
>
>Catherine Cooke's academic career commenced in 1968 when she began
>work at Clare Hall on a PhD thesis on planning and design theory in the
>Soviet Union entitled The Town of Socialism - not then a fashionable
>field. She had probably become interested in Russia after spending part
>of a year in the mid-1960s working in the office of the great Finnish
>modernist, Alvar Aalto, in Helsinki, but she also acknowledged a debt
>to Lionel March in Cambridge. Her thesis subject necessitated the first
>of many visits beyond the Iron Curtain, and, in Moscow, Catherine Cooke
>met survivors from the Constructivist period, and also the few Russian
>scholars interested in it.
>
>One of the latter was the architect Oleg Shvidkovsky, whose son Dmitry
>wrote The Empress and the Architect, a study of Catherine the Great's
>architect Charles Cameron, which Catherine Cooke translated. In it, he
>explained how, as "an old friend of my family, she is someone who has
>made her own impact on contemporary developments in British-Russian
>links in architectural history".
>
>Catherine Cooke's thesis was passed in 1975 and her research was the
>basis of her principal and definitive work, Russian avant-garde:
>theories of art, architecture and the city, published in 1995; but she
>also produced a stream of articles on aspects of 20th-century Russian
>architecture and design, ranging from the work of the art nouveau
>architect Fyodor Shektel to the alarming architectural developments in
>Moscow today, following the collapse of Communism.
>
>She was also responsible for editing, and sometimes translating, a
>number of books on pioneers of Soviet architecture as well as on poster
>design and the "street art of the Revolution".
>
>In addition to editing, writing and teaching, Catherine Cooke found
>time to become actively involved with Docomomo (the international
>working party for the documentation and conservation of buildings,
>sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement) and served as chairman
>of the United Kingdom working party.
>
>In her early visits to the Soviet Union, she found that many
>masterpieces by architects such as Melnikov and Ginsberg were in
>deplorable condition; that the situation has improved today is very
>much due to her writings and influence. She was instrumental in
>encouraging the Russians to be proud of their contribution to
>20th-century European architecture.
>
>With her generous frame swathed in scarves and cloaks, and topped with
>exotic Russian headgear, Catherine Cooke cut an extraordinary figure
>and was in many ways a contradictory one. With her regal bearing, deep
>plummy voice and concern for accuracy and correctness, her deep
>interest in Soviet politics as well as art seemed anomalous; seemingly
>confident and assured and always entertaining, she was a very private
>person.
>
>Too fearlessly independent to be labelled a feminist; warm, generous
>and scrupulously conscientious in all she did, Catherine Cooke was a
>true intellectual and had the air of a principal of a ladies' college.
>She was unusual in England in being interested in ideas: in particular
>ideas which, she believed, "still have extraordinary relevance". She
>was unmarried.