Architects don't come much angrier than Ernö Goldfinger. Even among his own disillusioned generation, he seemed perpetually crosser than most. Towering, handsome, self-assured ('Everyone always seems to have known me'), this Hungarian emigrant was quite unlike the pallid, fish-eyed Professor Otto Silenus, Evelyn Waugh's caricature Modernist. Silenus had come to the Home Counties spouting aphorisms from the Bauhaus via Moscow, invited by Margot Beste-Chetwynde, who had fallen on his designs for a chewing-gum factory in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. Margot wanted 'something clean and square' to replace her irrelevant Tudor mansion.

LRB 1 April 2004 | PDF Download