Following are just some of the great Architects, Designers, Artists, Manufacturers and Retailers of interest:
Ralph David Anderson, Architect 1928-1978 Ralph David Anderson was born on January 27, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois to Peter Kirk and Lillian Myrtle Anderson. He had one sibling, Robert Anderson. After graduating from Harper High School in 1946, Ralph went on to serve in the United States Marine Corps for two years. Ralph began his education in architecture while attending the University of Illinois at Chicago's branch campus on Navy Pier.…
Before CB2, Ikea or even Design Within Reach, Chicago’s Baldwin Kingrey offered modern design at a reasonable price, an unstoppable formula not just for selling furnishings but creating a trend-setting salon for the titans of midcentury design. With wares by Aalto, Bertoia and Eames, the store quickly acquired status as a laboratory for an A-list roster of design talent.…
Edgar Bartolucci and Jack Waldheim were classmates at the School of Design in the 1940s. Known for creating the Barwa lounge chair found at Hilton hotels and in places like Palm Springs in the middle of the 20th century, it was Bartolucci's and Waldheim's only foray into furniture design before they went their separate ways in different fields.…
Leroy (Roy) Binkley primarily worked in the Chicago area. Although it has been difficult to find any biographical information on Binkley, John Black Lee reported that he worked with him in Paul Schweiker's office in Chicago, and Binkley may have attended the Illinois Institute of Technology or the University of Chicago. Lee also stated that Binkley's sister was married to Paul Rand (1914-1996) and Binkley designed a house for them.…
Dennis Blair, architect, apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright. During the years of 1944-45 he worked on the Guggenheim Museum model. Best known for his design of Adlai Stevenson High School in Libertyville, Blair designed dozens of modernist homes around the North Shore including a home for music producer Dick Marx, father of pop music star Richard Marx.…
Edward Dart, known as Ned by those close to him, graduated from Yale School of Architecture, where Richard M. Bennett was chairman of the Department of Architecture as well as a professor of design. Dart studied there under Pietro Belluschi, Marcel Breuer, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Richard Neutra, Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Harold Spitznagel, Edward Durell Stone, and Paul Schweikher.…
Born in 1907 in Chicago, William Ferguson Deknatel was educated at Princeton from 1925 to 1929. There he became friends with Winston Elting, who would later be partners both to Deknatel and Paul Schweikher. After attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1930, and marring interior designer Geraldine Eager there, they both returned to the U.S.…
Eugene Deutch was born in Budapest in 1904. As a teenager, he would learn the trades of carpentry, cabinetmaking and woodcarving. In 1923, he relocated to France to work as a carpenter, and while in Paris, took classes in various handicrafts including ceramics. In 1927, he moved to Chicago to join his brother Alfred, who had a business specializing in hand-crafted items such as ceramics, wood inlays and painted fabrics.…
Born Ruth Windmüller on April 10, 1919 in Hamburg, Germany, Ruth Duckworth took up drawing after a doctor recommended that she remain homebound to improve her health. She was the youngest of five children. Her oldest brother promised to watch over her for the rest of her life, but was later killed when his ship was sunk by a Japanese submarine.…
Don Erickson began his apprenticeship to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1948, on a dare from a college professor. He was an 18-year-old who was torn between a career as an architect and a life as a classical pianist. He left Taliesin three years later, after winning accolades for the home he designed for his father. He is known for bold designs of private homes and public buildings, many in suburban Chicago Erickson’s Swedish parents had different visions of the best career for their son.…
Burton Frank was part of the first class of returning veterans circa 1944. Frank got hired immediately after graduation from University of Illinois School of Architecture by a local firm as a draftsman. After one year he started his own firm, Schiller and Frank with Donald Schiller. They were located in downtown Chicago on Chicago Avenue.…
Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and also the grand-nephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Spending much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, he had trouble with geometry, being unable to understand the abstraction necessary to imagine that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented a mathematical point, or that an imperfectly drawn line with an arrow on the end was meant to stretch off to infinity.…
Born in Alton, Kansas, Goff was a child prodigy whose family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1915. He was largely self-educated and displayed a great talent for drawing. His father arranged for him to become an apprentice at the age of twelve to the architectural firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Goff's employers were so impressed with his talent, that they soon gave him responsibility for designing houses and small commercial projects.…
Bertrand Goldberg was an American architect best known for the Marina City complex in Chicago, Illinois, the tallest residential concrete buildings in the world at the time of completion. Goldberg was born in Chicago, and trained at the Cambridge School of Landscape Architecture (now part of Harvard University). At age 18, in 1932, he went to Germany to study at the Bauhaus, working in the small office of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.…
Ernest A. Grunsfeld III (often credited as Tony Grunsfeld to differentiate between his and his father's works) attended the Institute of Design in the summer of 1945 while still at Francis W. Parker and studied under Ralph Rapson and Gregory Kepes. In 1947 he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his professional degree in 1952.…
David Haid was an architect who worked with and was influenced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and A James Speyer. Haid's own home in Evanston was an award-winning house built in 1968. "That house is so clear, so livable," said Jacques Brownson, a longtime Chicago architect and designer of the Daley Center. "I think David was one of the more important architects in Chicago.…
Robert Hausner attended Universiy of Illinois, interrupting his education during the war to join the U.S. Air Force. Upon his return, he completed his architectural degree and started his career at Shaw, Metz and Dolio. Their top client, Mack and Shear of Lake Shore Management, developed much of the controversial (because they were built on the east side of the road and blocked view of the lake) “Miami beach style” post-war high-rises on North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.…
Raymond Hazenkamp was a Land Planner and Landscape Architect who was known in the Chicago area in the '60s as being primarily responsible for the design of Sleepy Hollow near Dundee. Hazenkamp's plan for Sleepy Hollow included winding roads and cul-de-sacs that were planned in such a way as to not disturb a single tree, along with spring-fed lakes dredged and stocked with fish.…
Following World War II Michael Higgins was named Head of Visual Design at the Chicago Institute of Design. Frances Stewart was an assistant professor of Art at the University of Georgia. While working towards her master's degree, Frances studied under Michael at the Institute and their mutual fascination with glass fusing techniques quickly led to a personal as well as professional relationship.…
"I think a house, any building, should go with the land, not violate the land. That to me is a great sin. As a matter of fact, on my wall in the studio there I say that a house should be like an outcropping of the land, a rock formation, to belong to the site. That's the way I feel." Edward Humrich was born in Chicago in 1902.…
The IIT Institute of Design is a school of design founded in 1937 in Chicago by László Moholy-Nagy, a Bauhaus teacher (1923–1928). After a spell in London, Bauhaus master Moholy-Nagy, at the invitation of Chicago's Association of Art and Industry, moved to Chicago in 1937 to start a new design school, which he named the New Bauhaus.…
George Fred Keck 1895 – 1980 William Keck 1908 - 1995 The architecture firm of Keck & Keck designed modern, award-winning, affordable homes in the Chicagoland area and around the Midwest from 1935-1979 Born in Watertown, Wisconsin The elder, George Fred, known as Fred, studied engineering and architecture at state schools in Wisconsin and Illinois. Settling in Chicago in 1921, he worked as a draftsman at several offices before striking out on his own.…
Katharine Kuh was an art historian, curator, critic, and dealer from Chicago, Illinois. She was the first woman curator of European art and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Katharine Woolf was born on July 15, 1904, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the youngest daughter of Olga Weiner and Morris Woolf, a silk importer.…
John Randal McDonald was a prominent architect who worked in the 1950s and 1960s. McDonald was born in Milwaukee in 1922 and served in World War II as an officer in the U.S. Navy before pursuing a degree in architecture. After a brief stint in the fine arts program at the State Teacher’s College, McDonald decided to pursue his interest in architecture at Yale University.…
John V. McPherson was an architect based out of Homewood, IL, who was also on the Homewood Planning Commission. He designed modern homes for his clients with features such as pre-milled fir ceiling planks, pre-fabricated windows, cantilevered spaces, brick and stone walls and more. In the mid-'50s, when McPherson was designing homes for his clients, this concept of "modular construction" and "shop fabrication" of materials that were then shipped to the building site were considered novel.…
Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz in Bácsborsód to a Jewish family. His cousin was the conductor Sir Georg Solti. He attended Gymnasium (academic high school) in the city of Szeged. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his mother's Christian lawyer friend Nagy, who supported the family and helped raise Moholy-Nagy and his brothers when their Jewish father, Lipót Weisz left the family.…
Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond, also know as CBB, derives its name from the New Bauhaus School of Design, located in Chicago, descendant of the influential German Bauhaus design school and precursor of the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design. The New Bauhaus, and later IIT, played crucial roles in developing and promoting modern design. The New Bauhaus, founded in 1937 in Chicago, was the immediate successor to the German Bauhaus dissolved in 1933 under National Socialist pressure.…
Ralph Rapson, a highly influential architect and interdisciplinary Modernist, was heavily influenced Eliel and Eero Saarinen at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the first generation of Modernists in America, including Charles and Ray Eames, Lazlo Moholo-Nagy, Edmund Bacon, Harry Weese, Alvar Aalto, Harry Bertoia, and Florence Schust Knoll. He immersed himself in Cranbrook's approach to metalworking, sculpture, photography, graphic design, architecture, city planning, and textile design.…
Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bachelor of Science Industrial Relations – Mechanical Engineering, 1949 Illinois Institute of Technology, Bachelor of Architecture, 1957 H. P. Davis Rockwell, or Deever, as he is known, commissioned Paul Schweikher to design his previous home, a Prairie style modernist house, in nearby Flossmoor, which was also published. Rockwell found a love for architecture and returned to study under Mies at IIT.…
Richard Schultz has been designed quintessentially modern outdoor furniture for over half a century. Working for Knoll in the early 60’s, Schultz was hired to assist Bertoia in developing an outdoor furniture collection. By 1963, the first Schultz design was released in conjunction with the Bertoia collection. Schultz designed the Petal table to accompany Bertoia chairs.…
Paul Schweikher was born in Denver in 1903 and began his architectural training at the University of Colorado in 1921. After moving to Chicago in 1922, he enrolled in architecture and design classes at the The Art Institute of Chicago and then the Armour Institute of Technology. While studying in Chicago, he also worked with David Adler.…
A. James Speyer was born in 1913 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor's degree in architecture from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1934, and continued his graduate education at the Chelsea Polytechnic in London and the Sorbonne in Paris (1934-37). He also spent two additional years studying under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, from which he received his master's degree in 1939.…
Dennis Stevens was the youngest apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright. “I was 17, and it was about 2 weeks before my high school graduation when I first contacted Mr. Wright,” says Stevens. “I showed him an isometric drawing I’d done of a home – a sort of 3-dimensional view of it – and I had drawn every board of the framing.…
Born in 1918 in Springfield, MA, Angelo Testa would go on to be the first graduate of the Institute of Design under instructors Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Marli Ehrman and George Fred Keck, as well as one of the foremost American textile designers. Testa felt that texture was the most important element in his designs, and had a clear concept of when and how color, form and texture should be used on fabrics.…
Upon graduation from the University of Michigan with a degree in architecture, Calvin Jay Tobin, FAIA, - originally from the Bronx in New York - elected to join the Chicago firm of Loebl Schlossman & Bennett in November of 1953. His strong interest and abilities in the design of healthcare facilities immediately caught the eye of Norman J.…
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He is commonly referred to and was addressed as Mies, his surname. Along with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern architecture. Mies, like many of his post-World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras.…
Born in 1915, Harry Mohr Weese was raised in Kenilworth and attended New Trier High School. He studied with Alvar Alto (his major aesthetic influence) at MIT. Weese spent his junior year at Yale. After graduating from MIT in 1938, Harry was awarded a fellowship to Cranbrook Academy where he studied with Eliel Saarinen (later to become his mentor) and developed life-long friendships with Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, and other promising architects.…
Edmond Zisook was an American architect born in Chicago. Educated at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Zisook was an Architectural Designer and Draftsman for Skidmore Owings and Merrill from 1954-1956. From 1956 on, Zisook had a private architectural practice in Northbrook.
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