Heyward Cutting

December 3, 1921|March 18, 2012. Heyward Cutting, a resident of Concord since 1982, died there on March 18 at the age of 90. He was a retired vice-president of Geometrics Inc., a Cambridge firm of architects, industrial designers and consultants in specialized structures. Born in New York City on December 3, 1921 to Heyward and Constance (Roberson) Cutting, he attended St. Bernards School until the age of eight, when he, his mother and two younger sisters went to live in England after the untimely death of his father. There he was sent to boarding school and later to Eton College, from which he graduated in 1939. The family returned home that same year at the outbreak of war in Europe. Not yet 18, he entered Harvard but was unhappy knowing that his English school friends were joining their armed forces. In 1941 he and four other American college students made their way over the Canadian border and across the Atlantic in one of the early convoys from Halifax to Liverpool, where they enlisted in the British Army. They joined an elite regiment, the Kings Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles), originally entitled the 60th Royal Americans when it was raised in the Northeast at the time of the French and Indian War. They were the first to wear dark green instead of scarlet, black buttons instead of brass, and to be armed with rifles instead of muskets. As sharpshooters, out ahead of the line, they earned world-wide fame. In World War II they were again in the forefront as the fast-moving motorized infantry in armored forces. After exhaustive training in England, Cutting and his four friends were commissioned and sent around the Cape of Good Hope to join the British 8th Army in the Libyan Desert. Their regiment was part of the renowned 7th Armored Division, known as the Desert Rats by the red jumping jerboa emblem on their vehicles. All five were wounded at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942; two were later killed further up the desert. After a long convalescence in Egypt Cutting returned to active duty in Italy following the Salerno landings. He was mentioned in despatches for distinguished service. The war finally over, he returned to New York via Halifax in the autumn of 1945. The following year he spent several months with five caribou Inuit families at Chandler Lake in northern Alaska, making a film of their lives. Once more back home, he met and married Jeremy Hohenstein, with whom he traveled through Africa and Asia Minor, returning the length of Europe by car. After taking a degree in architecture at the Institute of Design in Chicago, founded by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy on the Bauhaus model, Cutting returned to New England to form a design partnership with Professor Serge Chermayeff of Harvard. He later teamed up with William Wainwright and two other members of R. Buckminster Fullers Geodesics Inc., developers of the prototype structures for the Distant Early Warning Line. They established their own firm, Geometrics Inc., and undertook a wide variety of commissions, including the giant dome that formed the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. Cutting served as a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he developed a strong interest in the School of the Museum and wrote, with Bartlett Hayes and Charles Kuhn, the key report that influenced reluctant trustees to maintain the School as an integral part of the Museum. In 1968 he was persuaded to join the Museum staff in the newly created post of Assistant Director for Administration, to work alongside Director Perry T. Rathbone in meeting the challenges of the 1960s. After five years of strenuous reorganization he returned to the Board for one more term. In 1978 he and his wife were divorced. He later married Joan Faulkner Randell and together they moved to Concord where they concentrated on their collection of modern British literature and the making of a garden. Cutting was a longtime member of the Tavern Club in Boston, for which he and two friends wrote a series of musical comedies and where he was known as an exacting director of others plays. In addition to his former wife Jeremy, he leaves his wife Joan, his stepson Thomas William Randell of Concord and his own three sons: Heyward Jr. of Staunton, Virginia; Francis Brockholst of Shelburne Falls; and William Bayard of Guilford, Connecticut. He also leaves his sister Patricia C. Glenn of London, England, and five grandchildren. A family burial service will be held in the Memorial Garden at Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord. Arrangements are under the care of Susan M. Dee and Charles W. Dee, Jr., Directors, Dee Funeral Home of Concord.