The studio began in 1957 as Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar Associates — three designers in their mid-twenties sharing a Manhattan office. Robert Brownjohn was the eldest and most restless. Ivan Chermayeff, then 25, was the son of the modernist architect Serge Chermayeff and had studied at Harvard, IIT Institute of Design, and Yale School of Art under Josef Albers. Tom Geismar, also 25, had trained at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design before Yale, where he and Chermayeff overlapped. Brownjohn returned to London in 1960. The other two kept the office and the work.
The first decade produced a sequence of commissions that, in retrospect, defined what corporate identity would look like for the next thirty years. Chase Manhattan in 1960 — four geometric wedges, no banking imagery, debated by the board for months before approval. Mobil Oil in 1964 — wordmark plus red O plus a complete gas-station architecture programme. Xerox, Pan Am, the Smithsonian, National Geographic, PBS: the studio worked through the roster of American institutional life as it expanded in the postwar decades.
In 2006 the partnership was joined by Sagi Haviv (b. 1974), who had been interning and working at the studio since 2003. He became a full partner in 2013, at which point the name changed to Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. Ivan Chermayeff died in December 2017. Geismar and Haviv continue the practice from the same New York studio.
