Catherine Cooke (2) (1942–2004)

Catherine Chichester-Cooke, always known as Catherine Cooke, was born in Bishop's Stortford, the only child of a brigadier in the British Royal Engineers. She read architecture at Cambridge University, where she was one of only a handful of women students in 1961. After a year working for a Finnish architect in Helsinki and for Lionel March in Cambridge, she returned to Clare College to earn a Ph.D. on Soviet planning and design theory.
She became a world authority on the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. Her major book was Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (1995) but she also co-wrote numerous other books and produced scholarly articles, and lectured extensively. She taught at the Cambridge School of Architecture from the 1960s until her death, and also took an appointment as a Lecturer in Design at the Faculty of Technology at the Open University in 1979. She was instrumental in raising awareness in the West about Russian visual culture and the dilapidated condition of many significant Modernist buildings, sites, and neighbourhoods.Her extensive collection of books, posters, and ephemera is now housed in the Cambridge University Library.