Julian Sofaer, who died on 3o May 2017 at the age of 92, was a brilliant architect known for his private and public work. The latter, largely in the area of schools, buildings for the Jewish community, and community facilities, included 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 (built 1963-64), which won a Civic Trust Award for the ‘contribution it makes to the appearance of the local scene’.

He projected the type of talented thinking often found whenever there is a need for change. He was a great lover of the Italian Renaissance and a highly principled modernist who had a strong sense of application to detail, and he was obsessed with form and harmony, music and the arts. He has left an indelible mark on our urban landscape.

On 14 November 2013, English Heritage celebrated the work of ’24 Architects who had contributed to the rebuilding of post-war London’ at the Quadriga Gallery by Hyde Park. Julian Sofaer was pleased to have been included as one of them.

Julian, originally named Nessim, was born on 10 August 1924 into Baghdad’s influential Jewish community. His grandfather, Abraham Haim, according to the Sephardi Voices UK—a publication which aims to ensure that the testimonies of Jews from Africa, the Middle East, and Iran are documented—was a parliamentarian who also represented Iraq at the League of Nations in 1932 when the country was granted independence from Britain.

Haim was one of five people representing the Jewish community at the Palais de Nations in Geneva, and his grandmother was the first Iraqi woman who took a seat in the spectators’ tribune. As Sofaer explained in the same publication, ‘[t]hat was quite an event for the Jewish community. She wore a European costume, had a handbag and cut her hair short, which was a major event.’

In June 1941 some Arabs and Bedouin attacked the Jewish community who were perceived as working for the British. Known among Jews as the Farhud (Arabic for ‘the destruction of order’, or ‘robbery’), this pogrom was a watershed in the history of the Jews of Iraq. Julian, together with his mother and sister, fled to India where at least they could have relative freedom. In Bombay, Sofaer first attended a Jesuit School of Art. In the year 1945 they arrived from Vienna to the UK.

In July 1970, at the age of 46, Julian visited Florence, where he met his wife Ada Amodeo, a Sicilian-born Italian literature teacher and daughter of Tommaso, a socialist dissident under Mussolini. The two continued their relationship while visiting some of the Italian cities and communicating in French, at the time their main common language. They married after Ada converted to Judaism. They had a daughter, a son-in-law, and three grandchildren.

Not surprisingly in view of his early experience of being forced to flee his home, Sofaer was keen to get involved in the design of publicly-funded projects. He took significant commissions from the London County Council and the Greater London Council, for whom he built more than sixty schools, community halls, homes for the aged, and thousands of flats. Across his 45 years of practice he worked on large scale projects, such as the Hugh Myddleton School in Islington, designed for the Inner London Education Authority c.1970, as well as smaller scale buildings such as the Community Hall, also known as the Canal Club, on the Wellington Estate in Bethnal Green. Throughout, Sofaer stressed the importance of working within a life-enhancing and humanist perspective.

Sometimes, gifts such as artistic talents and principles shown in single individuals are for the common benefit of us all. He was praised (in a belated obituary published on 30 January 2020) by the Architectural Association School of Architecture as someone with ‘an independent mind’ and as ‘[t]he most compassionate man’.

Ironically, these attributes don’t help necessarily to reveal the extent and depth of his work. Relevant documentation hasn’t been easy to find. His obituaries and references from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, the RIBA, the Jewish Chronicle, and Sephardi Voices provide useful documentation but remain essentially brief records. In the view of the architect and campaigner Sam Webb, Sofaer was ‘a hard-working and talented man’.

In his long career he turned down more clients than he accepted. As Sofaer himself put it in the Architects’ Journal in 2013, ‘it’s not easy to find the opportunity as a client to do something properly. If you build for monkeys, you end up with a monkey’s cage’. He constantly searched for classical proportions, for the correct balance between form and harmony, and according to the obituary written in the Jewish Chronicle, ‘he disliked Le Corbusier’s use of concrete in the fabric of buildings, maintaining that it had been imposed arbitrarily on the English scene’.

Sofaer, whose ambition was to become a violinist, liked to articulate the links between music and architecture. According to his friend, the art historian Ernst Gombrich, quoted by the Architectural Association, for Sofaer, a building was comparable to a harmonic chord.

A good example of his style and attention to detail is the privately commissioned home, Meridian West in Greenwich, London (built 1963-65). Meridian West exemplifies his modern approach to traditional materials, and it demonstrates a harmonic balance between a formal public front and the casual internal structures, while making the most of its hillside setting.

Sofaer often prepared numerous designs before finalising the design as built. He was determined to achieve a balanced proportion similar to that found in music. In December 2007, under the Planning Act 1990, the Meridian West building was listed Grade II for its special architectural and historical interest – a designation that will protect it as a Cultural Property for the benefit of future generations.

Sofaer’s obsessive concern with form and harmony, though, were evident in most of his works. The above mentioned extension of the West London Synagogue is another example of his ability to attain creative balance between light and void. The architect Alan Higgs praised its design for its ‘rationality, simplicity, honesty and clarity’. The Hugh Myddleton School, on the other hand, was identified by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the most interesting departure from standard types’.

One of the most striking attributes of Sofaer’s modernist style is the natural and integral sense of social purpose in his design. His mind stretched towards what he saw as humanistic innovation, and he was an advocate of the work of the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto. A multidisciplinary artist who refused to be regarded as such—who instead saw painting and sculpture as ‘branches of the tree whose trunk is architecture’—Aalto’s style focused on functionality, local materials, and a strong connection with local culture.

The Canal Club on the Wellington Estate sits on a former timber wharf, purchased by the Greater London Council in 1978. It provided a laundry, youth club, nursery, and play and amenity space. In 2016 Tower Hamlets Council undertook a review of its community buildings. The council’s Feasibility Study, conducted in September 2017, presented the cases for a) refurbishing the current building, or b) re-developing the entire site.

The Tenants and Residents Association believe that the report was biased towards the redevelopment and that figures were based on seemingly inaccurate observations about the current building. These included a 50 percent contingency added to the refurbishment but not to the redevelopment costs, and a £17,000 estimate for painting the building, alongside the building being incorrectly stated as ten years older than it was, which in return could suggest asbestos was a significant issue.

The existing community on the Wellington Estate did not get a say in the choice as to whether housing should be built or the Community Hall be refitted as it is: a community space. The Wellington Estate Tenants and Residents Association, the Save Our Space Campaign, and residents in the area have consistently expressed their commitment to a plan of ‘refurbishment’ rather than ‘re-provision’ while simultaneously giving support—after decades of policy failures—to the building of genuinely affordable council housing in Tower Hamlets.

These options of either council housing or refurbishment of the hall and site should not be seen as a dichotomy, as opposing choices. The Tower Hamlets development plan is based on a notion of ‘re-provision’ which aims at a reciprocal relation between something qualitatively different, and in doing so, it blurs the fact that the Community Hall—which Tower Hamlets Council has unilaterally and unjustifiably declared ‘beyond repair’—was originally designed with essentially a humanistic perspective, along different social and environmental conceptual guidelines.

Sofaer remained cautious about the challenges facing architects. ‘Not much changes,’ he insisted in 2013. ‘It is an insecure and treacherous profession – everything can be wiped out with a phone call.’