ORAL HISTORY OF GERTRUDE KERBIS

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1997 The Art Institute of Chicago

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 174

Appendix: Curriculum Vitae 176

Index of Names and Buildings 178

iii

PREFACE

"It's been hard being a woman in this [male dominated] field…but I won't give up, I can't." These are Gertrude Kerbis's words describing the situation she felt she was up against and her spunky determination to persevere when she came of age as an architect in the turbulent and rapidly changing postwar decades. Gertrude found her voice in the 1960s and was outspoken not only on her own behalf but also for all women in the field for whom she became the standard bearer. Her career bears wit-ness to the notion that it is possible to be successful as an independent architect and as a woman with a family.

Gertrude Kerbis earned her academic credentials at the University of Illinois, the Harvard Graduate School of Design under Gropius, and the Illinois Institute of Technology under Mies van der Rohe. After working for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and C.F. Murphy Associates, where she designed several award-winning buildings, she struck out on her own, often acting as developer for her own projects. Kerbis's career includes twenty-six years of teaching and much civic and professionally related service. She was the tenth woman in the history of the American Institute of Architects to be awarded the honor of fellow.

I met with Gertrude Kerbis in her studio in Chicago where we recorded her memories on 21, 22, 23, 30, 31 May and 4, 5 June 1996. Our sessions were tape-recorded on eight ninety-minute cassettes, the transcripts of which have been reviewed by both Gertrude and me. Corrections have been made to help clarify and amplify thoughts and ideas, and minimally edited to maintain the flow, tone, and spirit of Kerbis's story. Kerbis took care to recount her recollections with attention to detail and unabashed candor. I thank Gertrude for her openness in sharing her memories as will all those scholars who may read this document in the future. This narrative documents the struggle of a woman, no doubt typical of many in those years, to achieve independence and stature in architecture while at the same time deftly juggling her career and family.

iv

For her conscientious care and good judgement in transcribing and shaping this oral history document I thank Annemarie van Roessel.

Betty J. Blum August 1996

v

OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Family Background and Early Years 1 A Decisive Moment: A Visit to Taliesin 7 Studying Architecture 11 Working for Carl Koch 18 At the Harvard Graduate School of Design 24 Working for Bertrand Goldberg 34 Working for Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett 38 At the Illinois Institute of Technology with Mies 41-47, 49-52 Marriage to Peterhans 48-49 Working for the Chicago Park District and PACE Associates 52 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: U.S. Air Force Academy 56 Other Projects 86 Working for Naess & Murphy: O'Hare International Airport 96 Boston City Hall Design Competition 105 Kerbis Tennis Court Project 107 Reflections about SOM and Naess & Murphy 117 On Her Own 120 “Chicago Women in Architecture” Group and Women's Issues 123 Rehabbing the Kerbis Office Building 131 "Chicago Women In Architecture" Symposium 136 Is There A Woman's Architecture? 137 Priorities 138 The American Institute of Architecture 141 Acting as Developer and Architect 147 Awards and Critics 152 Teaching 156 Giving Service to the Profession 165 Reflections 172

vi

Gertrude Lempp Kerbis

Blum: Today is May 21, 1996 and I'm with Gertrude Kerbis at her home and studio in Chicago. Gertrude was born in Chicago in 1926 and educated at the University of Illinois, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She holds a B.S. in Architectural Engineering, and an M.A. in Architecture. Gertrude, when you worked for the largest architectural firm in Chicago, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, was it your first job?

Kerbis: No, actually when I was finished with my first degree I worked. When I finished my master's degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology and had my license, then I was employed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Blum: When you were employed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, it was the largest and most desirable firm to work for at that time in Chicago. Then you followed that by working for the second largest firm, C.F. Murphy and Associates, before you opened your own office in 1967. At that time you were the only woman-owned and -operated architectural office in the city. You had not only been a practicing architect, but an educator, and a very involved participant in related organizations. You have been a spokesperson for women of your generation in the field of architecture. In 1970, you were elected fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Kerbis: I was the tenth woman to be elected fellow in the country. It was an important event.

Blum: Colleagues have characterized your dedicated fight for equality for women in architecture as "having drive and determination that was steel-like." Others have described you as "one zingy lady." You have said yourself, "I'm not

1

going to give up. I can't. Maybe if I stick in there, some young woman, someday, will think of herself as an architect, and become one."

Kerbis: And there have been.

Blum: I'm sure that's true. Can we go back, as far as you can remember, to when you were that young woman, and trace your steps, to learn how you became an architect? Being a woman of the same generation as you, I wonder why you chose architecture and not teaching or nursing, typical feminine choices. Why architecture? Was your father connected to the building trades or architecture in any way?

Kerbis: No, but he had the spirit, I think, in some of the ways. I'm sure he inspired me in terms of having the spirit to do something and to stick with it. I think that was his inspiration. I think that is one of the things that motivated me. It's very funny, my father did take me to the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. I remember a seer was trying to get business—they would tell your fortune—and so she said, "Oh, that little girl over there, come here and I will tell your fortune." And she told me that I would be a nurse. So there you are.

Blum: Well, that seems typical for the time.

Kerbis: But I do remember something about my father. He was a laborer. However, he bought some land in Chicago on Central Avenue, and after it was proven to him that he could not resell it at much of a profit, he decided that he would build a little building on it. And so he hired an architect. I don't remember the architect or going to the office. I do remember that as my father was building the building and hiring the workmen, we would go there every week and I would climb around on the building and, as a kid, find little things to do on the site, getting in trouble, probably. We would not be allowed to do that these days unless we had a hard hat. When I look back on that, it is probably something in my past that would have motivated me and

2 made me feel comfortable on construction sites. I do feel that part of that was undoubtedly due to this experience as a little kid.

Blum: How old do you think you were?

Kerbis: I think about six, or even five or seven–somewhere very young.

Blum: And that stuck in your mind?

Kerbis: Yes, I remember all the various parts of the building. It was not a defining moment, but it was a part of my evolution in the direction of this business.

Blum: Do you remember as a child wanting to play with Tinker Toys, or blocks, or crayons, or to draw things? Or were you strictly in the doll corner all the time?

Kerbis: I don't remember dolls very much. I do remember trying to create spaces of all kinds–having a little place under the porch that was my domain. I would fantasize. Or under the dining room table, I remember, we had these carved pedestals and legs that became beds and tables for us. All these little memories are probably the same in every child but they transform in different ways. It is interesting, in developing, how a kid becomes motivated to focus on their work.

Blum: Did you like to draw?

Kerbis: I could always draw. But I don't remember it the way other people would go into periods of drawing throughout their young life. I can remember different successes in terms of drawings and art, but it's not the kind of thing I was that happy with. When I was deciding to go to college, I really didn't know what area to focus on.

Blum: This was at the University of Wisconsin?

3 Kerbis: I had already spent a year going to Wright Junior College. The college was not located where it is today. They had the building there, but they had to vacate the building because the Navy took it over as a training center for young cadets. The college then moved into Schurz High School. It was not a dramatic shift to go to Schurz directly from high school. I graduated from Foreman High School, and then went to Wright Junior College. Because it was located in a high school, at the time, it did not feel like a dramatic change.

Blum: I remember my high school curriculum. Often we were offered either home economics or mechanical drawing. Almost always, boys took mechanical drawing and girls took home economics. Were you given the same options?

Kerbis: Yes, I was. But that was very interesting. I was an athlete and so I was in the Girls' Athletic Association and I became president and vice-president. My girl friend and I would exchange these so-called offices. When I was president, she was vice-president, and when she was president, I was vice- president.

Blum: Was this only for women?

Kerbis: This was only for the girls. We were very active at the gym and we would come out of the gym all steamed up. Outside of the gym would be standing a professor, Mr. Solo. He had glasses and he would peer at the girls as they came out of the gym. He would stop us and say a few words and we would tease him and ask why he wasn't teaching and what it was he taught. And he said it was mechanical drawing. Then he said, "Why don't you come and visit me sometime?" And so that's how it all started. We then, my friend and I, took this mechanical drawing course for two years.

Blum: But you wouldn't have stayed, despite the fact that he asked you, if it hadn't met your needs.

4 Kerbis: That's right. It was something that I could do. You had to copy something and visualize something in two dimensions that was really in three dimensions. That was a little bit of introduction, but it wasn't very meaningful. It's just that Mr. Solo was a kind of character and he loved having girls in his class.

Blum: How may women were in his class?

Kerbis: It was the standard thirty or thirty-five person class and there were just one or two of us. I don't know if Mae Jean Engel, my girl friend, stayed with it as long as I did. Maybe there was a third person, too.

Blum: Did any of them become architects?

Kerbis: No. My girl friend became a dyke gym teacher. I didn't even know what that was in those days. After that I went to Wright Junior College, when it was located in a high school building. It was not a big transition, nor was it a big decision. My parents then moved to Wisconsin and bought a farm. At that time, I then decided to go to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, because they had given up their Illinois residency. Then I became a full-time resident of Wisconsin.

Blum: When you entered the University of Wisconsin, you entered as a second-year student?

Kerbis: I didn't really have much focus. My mother was a White Russian immigrant and my father was a German immigrant. We spoke English and my family was very proud to speak English well.

Blum: Did you have brothers and sisters?

Kerbis: That's very interesting. I have a half-sister. My mother had married before meeting my father and had had two daughters. My father was courting my

5 mother's sister, hoping to marry her, and in the course of one year they went through some enormous shocks. Here my mother had a husband and two children and she had a dream one morning. She said that her dream was very scary and that her husband should not go to work, he worked on the railroad. She said her dream was very devastating and asked her husband to stay home that day. He went to work and was killed in a railroad accident on the very day that she had this premonition. That same year, her sister, who lived with them, and who was being courted by my father, got spinal meningitis, or something, and died. And then the oldest daughter became ill. So within twelve months, this family was absolutely decimated. My mother was very overwhelmed. My father attempted to help her. My mother and her family owned a little house on the South Side of Chicago, in an ethnic Ukrainian, Russian, Polish community. My father felt that she should leave that community and put the whole thing behind her. He suggested that she move north and then they decided to marry. I'm not sure how long before they moved north. Then they married and had me. They bought the little building that I grew up in. We moved there in my first year.

Blum: So you had a step-sister?

Kerbis: Yes. She was blonde, and short, and blue-eyed, and she was kind of pretty. So here was me, this dark and brown-eyed girl, who was more gawky and gangly. We always had these two different, ethnic-looking kids in the family. My sister was bright—she was about five or six years older than I was—and she always did well in school. She was a good role model to emulate. There was not a big difference in the family, but she was not as motivated as I was. She went to Wright Junior College and finished in two years. Then she got a regular office job and eventually met a young man and moved to the suburbs.

Blum: Wright was a two-year school. When you entered Wright Junior College, had your family stayed in Chicago, do you think you would have stopped school at the end of two years?

6

Kerbis: I don't know. You mean would I have been motivated to go on? No, I think the key thing was going to Wisconsin. Enlarging the environment of one's development was very important. Then of course my experience of going to Frank Lloyd Wright's place, Taliesin. I was ready for a big decision.

Blum: That event has been in print. But you must tell it yourself, exactly as you remember it.

Kerbis: I was trying to decide what I was going to do with my life, while I was at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, because I just couldn't go on as a liberal arts major without a focus. In those days, a person with a degree in the liberal arts would end up being a teacher or a nurse. I was boarding at the German House. The idea was that students would speak German at meals and would have some contact with the German language. Since my father was German and since I had been to Germany when I was a little kid, and I studied German, I went to this German House, thinking it would be a little more interesting than a regular dorm. I did meet some very interesting people here. So I was in the living room, paging through Life magazine, or something, and there was this wonderful article on Frank Lloyd Wright and what a wonderful kind of experience he created in his architecture. I might have even seen some of his things before. I don't really remember.

Blum: Do you mean in magazines?

Kerbis: No, in Oak Park, or somewhere like that. My father was into taking us around the city, as kids. We would go on the elevated or street cars. That was before automobiles were very common. We didn't have an automobile.

Blum: Do you remember going to Oak Park?

Kerbis: Not specifically, but I remember being on the elevated and looking at buildings. My father always thought that looking at ethnic neighborhoods

7 was an interesting way to spend an afternoon. He was very socially conscious and took us to Maxwell Street market and all those kind of places he thought were interesting. I don't remember him saying, "This is Oak Park. This is Frank Lloyd Wright." He would not have known about those things either. But he did point out different things. As I looked through this magazine, I thought that I was good in math and science. But I had always relegated artwork to something you do in your spare time, for your own pleasure, but that you couldn't really make a living with artwork. One of the other strong things in my family is that we're very pragmatic. We had to figure out a way of making a living and surviving. I could never figure out any way to be an artist. That was like an indulgence. This whole notion of having a strong aesthetic feeling for things was really not to be cultivated as an occupation. So this business of science seemed to be the way to go, but I just wasn't completely convinced about it. But I was inspired by magazine pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings and I took them around and I said, "Isn't this wonderful? Wouldn't it be terrific to see these buildings?" And I was told, "Oh yes, you can see these buildings. They're just about twenty-five miles down the road from Madison and the German House residence." I just thought that was unbelievable so I put the magazine down and I just decided to go there immediately, it was so close. I hitchhiked. In those days, it was not the thing to do. This was 1946 and even boys didn't hitchhike that much. It was very risqué to hitchhike. Even wearing bluejeans was inappropriate for women. I remember that I had blue jeans on. I had several rides going out there. My last ride was with a steamfitter and he had a truck. I was so scared because being in a automobile was one thing but being in a truck was very scary. We were getting closer to Spring Green, and I kept asking, "Well, where is it?" and he could see how nervous I was and he said, "Well, there it is right across the fields there. If you really want, I can drive to the road and you can walk up to the house." But I was just so frightened that I got out quickly. It was now late in the fall. I was walking across the field. I was walking on corn stalks across the field and there were little rises in the landscape, like little hills and foothills. You could see how Wright had landscaped these terraces. I just walked up slowly and crawled up on these

8 terraces and got to the first patio. I was crawling around, looking into the windows, and no one was there.

Blum: Was this daytime?

Kerbis: This was about four o'clock in the afternoon. I didn't even have a plan about how I was going to get back. I noticed that everything was empty. I would have rapped on the windows if someone was there and tried to find out more about the place. Everything was abandoned and I couldn't figure it out. I now know they had already gone to Arizona. This was something I didn't understand then. Here were these incredible, heavenly looking spaces inside, and gardens, although the flowers were all gone. The stonework was just wonderful. So I was peering in, and I heard these heavy footsteps. I turned around, thinking I'd have to justify my existence, and there was this white peacock. I decided that it was getting cold and I hadn't quite gotten a sense of the place and I was not satisfied that I knew where I was or how I could see anything. I then decided that I had better spend the night. I found a small bathroom window unlocked and I crawled in this bathroom. It was a bedroom, living room, and bathroom suite. They had this terrace with sliding doors off this series of suites. There were Beethoven records, and I played the Beethoven records and I was just enchanted and I went to sleep. The next morning, I crawled out the same window and then continued on, looking at more of the buildings. Then I noticed huge signs, saying No Trespassing, which, for some reason I hadn't seen before. When I saw these signs and a plume of smoke coming from one of the buildings and I thought that I had better introduce myself and say that I was looking around. And I did, and the caretaker was very wonderful. He said, "Oh yes, you can look around." At that time it would be very rare that anyone would ever visit there. It was not a destination point for tourists like it is these days. After he gave me permission, I then marched up the road and got another hitchhike. I can't even remember the hitchhike back because I had already decided that this was what I wanted to do. I had decided that night. It was this big experience that made me want to be an architect. It was absolutely perfect from every

9 point of view: it combined all these scientific interests and it would provide me a livelihood. If Frank Lloyd Wright could do these marvelous things in space then I could probably do something in that field. It was a remarkable time. It was sort of a fate thing, how I got to go out there and get back, and then feel so inspired. It was very wonderful. As soon as I got back to the university, I changed my whole curriculum. At that time, the state of Wisconsin did not have a school of architecture. I immediately had to prepare to transfer to architecture. But I sort of was committed to doing a whole year at the University of Wisconsin. In that time, until the end of the semester, I did the research about where I would go next, which was to the University of Illinois, and for what was required. They told me I should do math and physics. A lot of the courses I had taken would be transferred.

Blum: Why did you choose the University of Illinois?

Kerbis: I didn't even think about having a choice at that time. That was where I could have or should have gone in the first place from Wright Junior College. Except that my family had moved to Wisconsin and that was not working that well. I don't know how long my mother stayed. My father was not really a genuine farmer. He just had this fantasy, because he was brought up as a farm kid in Germany, and he had left home, that he would always return to the farm. He brought my mother up there. He sold the home in Chicago and he was still working—he would be a weekend farmer and hire people to take the crops in. It just wasn't a very good investment. Maybe they were there only two or three years and they eventually came back to Chicago.

Blum: So they had relocated to Chicago when you transferred?

Kerbis: No, I was only at the University of Wisconsin for one year. I had two years of the liberal arts: one year at Wright Junior College and one at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The University of Illinois was a very famous architecture school at that time. It was one of the oldest architectural schools in the country at that time. It was a land-grant college. It was about one

10 hundred years old, even then. The new ideas in education had not happened yet. The Beaux-Arts system was still very strong. Virtually every architectural school in the country was still involved with the Beaux-Arts method of teaching. The University of Illinois was ranked as one of the leaders in that teaching method. I had no qualms about going to the University of Illinois. However, because of my circuitous route, I didn't have a group of friends that went there. I didn't know anyone there. I was always kind of a loner in these circumstances, through most of my beginning period.

Blum: But you transferred to the University of Illinois after doing your research about where you were going.

Kerbis: As soon as I finished my year at the University of Wisconsin, I transferred in the summertime. I had to get all of my credentials in shape and be accepted as an advanced student. That was kind of an interesting thing. I had done physics and I had done math, but no matter when you transfer, you never are correctly prepared to enter the level you expect. I was prepared to enter at the third year of a five-year course. But in fact I had to do some more homework. In fact, when you get into architecture, you have all these consecutive design courses that you have to take, and it's virtually impossible to do a five-year curriculum and try to shorten it. But I was determined to somehow shorten it. I immediately got into architecture. They allowed me to take tests, where I could draw and I didn't have to take the first drafting class. Thanks to Mr. Solo, I guess I was skilled enough. They gave me some credits and in the end they were extraordinarily generous to me, in allowing me to enter at an advanced level. I immediately got into the design courses. The only way to graduate in two years would be to take this engineering option which only required two years of consecutive design courses. However, I felt that I was a designer, so I decided to take as many semesters of design as I could. So I ended up taking three years of design. From the time I entered architecture that spring until I graduated, I virtually never left the campus. I was there through the summers and through every semester. I

11 was extremely motivated to get the degree in 1948, when actually I should have gotten it in 1949 or 1950.

Blum: You talked about architecture and engineering. Do I understand that the University of Illinois had two separate divisions?

Kerbis: No, there was an architectural engineering degree. It was in the architecture department. This curriculum had very strong engineers who wrote books on engineering for buildings.

Blum: You mean as professors?

Kerbis: Yes. They were in the architectural department. They were not separated out in the engineering school. It was an architectural engineering degree and they only analyzed engineering problems, in architecture, as opposed to other engineering problems. That was not unique at that time–it was common in other universities then. I think the University of Illinois had a very high level of engineering teachers. The professors were very good and had done moment distribution theory books and there is a whole series of very interesting, innovative ideas in that field. They were kind of the nerds of the school, completely different from the design studios. But they were still in the same school, which was kind of interesting. I don't know how that worked out, in terms of the politics of the school. At that time, also, I was a continuous employee in the architectural library. They had a great architectural library. It was in the architectural studio building—all of our classes were in this building.

Blum: Is that how you made extra money?

Kerbis: Yes, absolutely. I was sending myself to school, virtually. That Wright Junior College experience allowed me to be employed, so I could collect all this money that I was eventually going to use in my regular schooling. Eventually I also became a maid, in my last year, so my room and board was taken care

12 of. I had been living in a very substandard room, a basement below grade. Eventually I noticed all these wonderful old houses across the street and I thought I could get out of this basement and live in an attic. So I knocked on the door of one and told the woman that she had a wonderful looking attic. She said that she was looking for help, so I moved in and lived with them for a year, in a legitimate bedroom, with a beautiful bathroom. And she took an interest in me.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: So you enhanced your circumstances and got out of the basement into the attic. Was that where your bedroom was?

Kerbis: No, I ended up on the second-floor. I had a nice room. This woman's father had been head of the science department. He was very prestigious. And next door to that was the president of the university's house. This was a row of little estates, almost. These houses had been built years and years before. They were the oldest houses there. Some of the smaller houses had been going up alongside of the bigger houses. That's how I ended up, originally, across the street.

Blum: When you transferred to the University of Illinois, to the school of architecture, how many other women were enrolled at that time?

Kerbis: There were just a couple. There was another woman, Jean Wiersema, who became my best friend. She and I were the only women in the engineering group. Jean came from Tennessee and was a committed architectural engineer, more so than I. I was always wishing that I was in design. I was always into the compromise situation. I was really doing this to get out of school on my schedule. This was 1948. I finished high school in 1944, and I was determined to finish college in 1948 and be employable.

13 Blum: You transferred to the University of Illinois just after the war. What was the atmosphere on campus among students, knowing that some students were ex-GIs?

Kerbis: The ex-GIs were extraordinary. They were all mature people. Many of them were married or just marrying their hometown sweethearts. I had very limited funds to buy all of the papers and paints and drafting equipment that were required—it seemed like these supplies were so expensive. Each project was done on a piece of Strathmore board because we did everything the old- time way with washes and watercolors. All this seemed like an overwhelming amount of equipment that I had to buy every semester. All the GI people had their bills paid and we had a huge number of people returning. These men were everywhere on campus. Many had been officers and were going back into architecture and architectural engineering. There were very few lockers and we had to double up. I happened to double up with a guy named Bob Layer. Bob was an architectural engineering student and he came from a Fox River town. His father was an architect also. Bob took a great interest in me—we were pals. He would say to me every so often, "Gertrude, you have to take a Strathmore board." He was a very generous-hearted person. He had great loyalties to our little group. We became like a little club. I didn't really realize it, but there were a number of people in our class who became rather close.

Blum: You and Jean and several other guys?

Kerbis: Yes. We even had reunions in the 1980s. While I was in school, I was so preoccupied that I never had gone to a football game or done any of the collegiate kind of things. I hardly ever walked around the campus because I had my own little areas to go to. It's a different kind of life when you're in a professional mode. At our thirty-fifth reunion, we all went down to an alumni game and that was the first time that I ever went to a football game on campus! They were all avid alums through the years, doing all the things that campus people do. That was the life that I just didn't know about, nor

14 did I have time for. I did have some boyfriends. I did have romances. I did have some sexual experiences during that period.

Blum: It sounds to me like you were very serious minded, very determined, and very focused.

Kerbis: Incredibly focused.

Blum: In this atmosphere at the University of Illinois with many returning students, after the war experience, did that make your classes or the atmosphere on campus any different than at the University of Wisconsin when it was just at the end of the war?

Kerbis: There were GIs at the University of Wisconsin, too. All of these schools had officer training programs. It just happened that the returning group that I knew best was at the University of Illinois. Those were the ones I knew. I fell in love at the University of Wisconsin, for the first time. His name was Edwin Binney, of the Crayola family. He was from Harvard and he had come back after the war to the University of Wisconsin since he had had such a wonderful time at the officer training program there. That's when we met. He was from Connecticut. That was when I had just decided to be an architect, and I had no time for romance with a capital "R."

Blum: With these returning veterans, they had their GI bill to draw on for money.

Kerbis: I was very jealous of them. I felt they were in a much easier financial situation than I. I was very uptight about that. But that's what happens in life. This Layer fellow I had met in the first year, but I didn't get to know him well until the second year in the advanced engineering classes. I became aware of my little group then and I joined them. They all became practicing architects.

Blum: I have heard that the atmosphere on some campuses during this time was one of almost euphoria among architects, thinking that now they were in a

15 position to rebuild a new world after all the damage and destruction that many of them had seen.

Kerbis: I think that probably was true, some of that. I didn't exactly understand what they were going through. Probably the guys were thinking that. I just thought we'd all become architects, that we were all alike. They treated me just alike. I was very happy to be part of that kind of equality of experience. Some of these advanced teachers in engineering were remarkably good people. One man would have these parties each spring for every graduating class. I didn't realize that he was a deeply religious man and wanted us to do good in the world. I never even discussed ethical questions with him. But the way he treated women in classes, where we were all, Jean and I, equal with the men. In engineering and math classes, there is no inference of sexuality in evaluating the papers. In general, I did not experience much prejudice from teachers during that period.

Blum: Were you one of the better students?

Kerbis: Yes, I think Jean and I both had to be "A" students. Otherwise we couldn't have survived. But there were a number of "A" students in this little group I mentioned before. These guys were older than Jean and I—we were still twenty and twenty-one—they were close to thirty. They were much more mature than we. But we were treated equally in these engineering classes. The other thing about the Beaux-Arts system, you handed in your boards and these boards were graded on the quality of the work. There were more than fifty of these boards for these professors to grade. There was no physical presentation of your work and so you got graded simply on what your work looked like.

Blum: Did they know who had drawn what?

Kerbis: No. I didn't feel anything about this prejudice, about men or women. During the entire first degree, it was very egalitarian. I thought that was quite

16 remarkable. I didn't get a whiff of this other stuff. The thing about graduate school is that you're on another level. I could see when I was in graduate school the prejudices that were going on in the undergraduate school in the design curriculum. When you're a graduate student, you don't get pushed around quite as much as an undergraduate student. I sort of slipped into a pattern of ignoring what would eventually become a very prejudicial experience. In hiring, then came the reality.

Blum: Two women in a class of fifty were not a very big threat.

Kerbis: We were in smaller classes when we did the engineering work.

Blum: You said this was a Beaux-Arts curriculum, very traditional in the mid- to late-forties when you were in school. Mies van der Rohe was in Chicago, so many stirrings of Modernism had already begun. Did you know about him or his work?

Kerbis: But he had not been in the textbooks.

Blum: What about Sigfried Giedion's book, Space, Time, and Architecture?

Kerbis: Yes, we were buying Giedion's book. We were reading it. We were given architectural projects. When I took my first architectural registration exam, I designed a modern building because I was so interested in Modernism. But it was not accepted and I flunked design. I had to do design over again. Modernism was not accepted as any kind of design. We just didn't have that much experience with it. There was very little discussion about it.

Blum: What about among the students? If you were reading Giedion and had come across Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture, was there some awareness among students, if not faculty?

17 Kerbis: There was definitely a stirring in the classes. However, we also didn't have professors that were stimulating in that way, either. We were just in this transitional phase where every so often someone would do something modern but most other people were doing these traditional kind of things. We were just going about doing modern things but then we were not being reinforced, not being critiqued in a way that would make us better in that expression. It was the middle of the road. Giedion was explaining about this mindset, where this movement was coming from, but he did not give a clue about where it was going. Mies was doing that. When I graduated from the University of Illinois, I sent out twenty-one letters to every architect that I thought had done great modern things. People that I would love to work with, all across the country. I sent a letter to Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, and to Neutra in California. And to all the young people who were being published, like George Fred Keck and a man named Carl Koch, who was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had built some houses outside of Boston that were very interesting. He was with an avant- garde painter, Karl Zerbe. All these people were just trying to put together their impression of the beginnings of modern architecture. I sent these letters out and I said that I just wanted to have a job. Of course Frank Lloyd Wright said, "Come. But you'll have to join my school." Then they sent me this application. I don't think Mies even responded to my letter. I didn't even know where Mies was, but I found these addresses. I didn't put him in context, thinking that I could go visit his office in Chicago when I went home for a visit. It was just an abstract group of people and I didn't focus on who was closer or who was farther away. All these letters went out and then slowly I got responses. I got an offer from this man, Carl Koch, who had published a couple of houses in Progressive Architecture, and he said that he would give me a job at forty dollars a week. This was a very low wage. His office was in Belmont, Massachusetts, in his home. He had built this modern subdivision of about six houses on this hill in Belmont, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He had this special grant from the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, to design some furniture. So Koch had caught the eye of MoMA, being this cutting-edge architect. Charles Eames had been invited as

18 well by MoMA, and the museum gave each invitee something like $10,000— it was 1948 and the amount was very minimal. Eames was doing great things in California. Koch said I can come, I'll have a special project and I can work on that. It was really wonderful that he had done this. So I went to Chicago to try to pull together some kind of wardrobe to fit my image of what a young professional architect should look like. I also took my bicycle since that was an important part of my life, to get around. I had also done research about where I would stay. Belmont was an upscale residential community and didn't have much for me and I didn't want to stay in a rooming house in a crummy neighborhood one town over. I found an Episcopalian minister and his family who was looking for a babysitter and so my babysitting life continued. They allowed me to live with them if I took care of their three children while they were at evening events and I worked for Carl during the day. It was a very nice life, being taken care of in another home situation.

Blum: While you were still at the University of Illinois, you were a Lydia Parker Bates scholar. What was that?

Kerbis: I don't remember, except that I had continual scholarships. That was the one thing that allowed me to stretch these few dollars that I had been saving over a longer period of time.

Blum: You must have been a pretty good student.

Kerbis: I must have been. Carol Ross Barney once said to me, "You know I notice that you include the Lydia Parker Bates scholarship in your bio. I'm a Lydia Parker Bates, too." So it must have been definitely applied to women in the professions, or maybe women in architecture. I don't even know who Lydia Parker Bates was.

Blum: What did it give you, a little stipend?

19 Kerbis: It was only tuition. In those days you couldn't borrow money, so you had to get scholarships of all kinds. Even though I eventually became a resident of Illinois, the tuition at the University of Illinois was always very high for me. I always had to make additional money to live on. If I could reduce my tuition and lodging bills, and just eke out a living to pay for food and recreation, then I was doing very well. By living with families, they were lucky breaks for me.

Blum: So you graduated from the University of Illinois, frustrated a little by your interest in Modernism and nowhere to express it. You sent out all these letters and got a response from Carl Koch, so you moved to Massachusetts.

Kerbis: There was a group at Harvard. Walter Gropius has just built his house. There was also a development that was called Six Moon Hill. A group of young architects from Harvard that had just built some houses. This group later became The Architects Collaborative [TAC]. They were contemporaries of Carl Koch. They were all at the same development in architecture, starting to experiment. They were all returning GIs at Harvard. They were from rather wealthy families and could afford to start building their own homes in this little development, Six Moon Hill, outside of Cambridge. These were my role models. I had not seen this before, but some of the women in the architectural classes at Harvard had married their classmates and so there were husband and wife teams in The Architects Collaborative group. They were a little older than I was, but were my contemporaries, in terms of architectural exposure. They were a little ahead of me in terms of experience, since they had done these houses for themselves and were starting their own firms.

Blum: Is this what the Six Moon Hill development was? These architects were building their own homes?

Kerbis: Yes. Then they commuted in, and taught, and had their offices in Cambridge. Carl had his development and had designed and built a very avant-garde modern house for Zerbe. Anything with a flat roof, with more glass, and an

20 open-space plan, where nothing was confined, was thought to be modern and cutting edge. This was a new kind of experience. Also, this relationship to nature, bringing nature into the space—Carl did so much as to build on a granite hill and allow the granite to project into the room with a little waterfall. All this nature was absolutely in the experience and it made great photographs. Carl had this incredible studio—first it was in his garage, and then he expanded and ended up with about twelve people in his office. I was only with him for a year.

Blum: When you first arrived at Carl's studio, what was your job in his office?

Kerbis: Carl assigned me to do this chair design. I was put in this category, working on this chair and storage wall. Eventually, at the end of the summer, the whole office collaborated to help build models to send down to MoMA in New York City. It was a three- or four-month special project.

Blum: Wasn't building models something new? I thought that was not done in a Beaux-Arts curriculum, although it was done in more modern curricula.

Kerbis: Yes, I didn't know how to do that. I could do it later, but that was the first experience where we actually made a model of our design. It had metal frames with inset panels, with roll-up shades that opened up storage walls. We had to work out how a roll-up shade worked, they were so uncommon. There was a handyman who worked in the office and did the welding and soldering. I was so frustrated—there was a convention of furniture in Boston, and Carl often left the office to go sailing. So while he was gone on one trip, I decided to go to the show. I discovered at the show a crimped wire, instead of a spiral wire, in upholstery cushions. Someone had come up with a different method of developing a cushion, by taking a wire and putting it into a zig-zag crimp. Then another crimp would go in another direction. It was a very narrow spring. Before, you had big, fat, boxy springs that required eight inches, and now you had these little flat springs. I suppose everyone already knew about this, but it was the first time we were

21 designing furniture, and what did we know? So we thought that was so wonderful. Carl liked it, but found out it was more commonly used than we thought. We were going to make these very exposed and dip these wires in some kind of softening material so that you would not sit on the wire itself, but on a rubberized surface. I'm sure Eames was way ahead of us on this. We put this whole thing in tension and the handyman built a mock-up for us where we could change the position. We had a fixed point at the top and the bottom, and inside we had a suspension system where we pulled the zigzag wire and there was another spiral spring. We were trying to establish different positions for the particular comfortable dimensions for the greatest number of people. This was all very easy to experiment with. Eames was going in the same direction, too. But if you put a great deal of weight on ours, it could end up being rather uncomfortable. But it was kind of clever. We also had to devise a system to figure out, once we got these positions settled, what was going to be our framework to hold this up? And we were also trying to connect the seat and the back because very heavy people would put too much strain on the design and it would be uncomfortable. We had this device, like a bent fender, to hold the front and the back. The cushion was independent. There was a bracket system for the tension. Then there were four 3/4" Eames-like straight metal legs holding this bent fender. The little model was shined-up brass and looked beautiful and we sent that off to New York City. We were just a helter-skelter group that had never worked together before.

Blum: Were many of the people working on this project as young as you were, just out of school?

Kerbis: There were other women there, and then there was a secretary. The thing about Carl's office is that you'd have to babysit, because he and his wife would go off someplace. It was very egalitarian. Carl was very successful as a modern house architect in that period. He had all kinds of house commissions, so some of these people in the office had maybe five or six years' experience. Most of these people were older than I was. It was not that

22 common to have master's degrees—it was most common to have just an undergraduate degree. In fact, it was also not unusual to have no degree, in many offices. Not in these cutting-edge offices, but in more typical offices. It was usual to have just draftsmen rather than having designing types.

Blum: When you came to this office in Belmont, did you have any idea that you would be doing furniture, and not all these modern houses that you had in your head?

Kerbis: Yes, he had hired me for furniture. He said "I've got this grant." Obviously he told me what the grant was to justify why I was getting just a dollar an hour. I told him that I was getting a dollar an hour when I was graduating from high school, when I was earning money to go to college. I let him know this was a big sacrifice for me. But the opportunity was great. I don't even know why he even hired me, because Harvard and MIT were just jumping with all these young people graduating, wanting a job. I don't know how I got in the pack.

Blum: Maybe it was your audacity in writing a letter.

Kerbis: I don't know. As soon as the project went to New York City, I started to do drafting, doing houses. I was in the regular office and I had a house to design just like the rest of the team. In the beginning I was on this special project and then I was integrated into the office. I was the only person on the special project with Carl, and then there was this handyman that did a lot of work on the project. I was the one who would be drawing things up and trying to figure out what would be new. Then everyone came when we had to do this en charrette, when we had to work together to get the proposal out and send it to New York City. Then I was integrated into the regular office. The whole team stayed together.

Blum: Was the furniture exhibited?

23 Kerbis: Yes, although I never went to New York City—I didn't have enough money to go—it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. I know Eames was invited and I know we were invited. I think there might have been six teams across the country that had been invited to participate in this cutting-edge chair and storage unit. Maybe some of them were interior design people. Maybe Knoll was invited. I can't imagine them not being invited. I don't know the results.

Blum: You stayed with Koch's office for one year.

Kerbis: Yes, and then I was also going to go to Harvard.

Blum: When did you decide to go to Harvard? Was it as you were working, or did you finish work and then decide? And why Harvard?

Kerbis: That was easy. Walter Gropius was there and he was one of the heroes of the Modern Movement. That was why I went to work with Carl in the first place, because I was then going to start Harvard right after the project was submitted to MoMA.

Blum: You knew this before you left for Massachusetts?

Kerbis: Yes, Gropius was the main reason. After I graduated from the University of Illinois, I never was satisfied with that architectural engineering degree. I always wanted a design degree. That was just a way of saying that now I have a degree, now I have value. I make these big decisions about having these credentials and then as soon as I have these credentials, I go into a firm like Carl's where they don't mean a thing. That's just life. I had good value from the University of Illinois. I think it was incredible that I worked with Carl that year too—that had great value. I came to one decision that related to another decision. My game plan was that I was going to work for Carl, save some money and then go to Harvard. I was only at Harvard for a semester, instead of a year. After we turned in this Museum of Modern Art project I

24 went to Harvard. I was doing regular work in Carl's office designing houses. I was commuting from Belmont to go to Harvard.

25 [Tape 2: Side 1]

Blum: During the early 1950s, you were referred to as Mrs. Kerbis, but after 1970 or 1971, you were referred to as Gertrude Lempp Kerbis. Was that deliberate because you wanted to assert your own individuality, to redefine yourself?

Kerbis: I had gone through a divorce by that time and so it was my considered opinion that I should actually drop the name of Kerbis. However, my children have the name of Kerbis and so I was reluctant to do that. I then brought my maiden name into the mix, which I had rather abandoned before that. When I was married to Peterhans, I was Mrs. Peterhans, and then with Kerbis, I was Mrs. Kerbis. I definitely brought in the Lempp as a sort of composite idea. My general notion about this business of names is that I think women all are a bit preoccupied with their names because they would like to give recognition to their mothers as well as their fathers. In my development, I would rather have just one name, and that's probably this funny name of Gertrude, rather than all these appellations every time you marry someone to add a new name. The notion of Lempp was even kind of a new, but false, image. My father immigrated to the United States before the First World War, around 1910. He was running away from his home in Germany and he wanted to have his own identity also. Moreover, when we were having conscription in the United States, he felt that he should not be involved in the war because he had avoided the war in Germany. He was a conscientious objector, but they did not have those vehicles at that time. He was a farmhand and he took to the fields and went out to South Dakota and worked on those huge wheat farms for years. It was a very difficult period of his life. I guess it was extremely difficult for laborers employed on the farms under those brutal physical conditions. He worked out there and he was just a young fellow, fourteen to sixteen, I believe. He was not even of age. After the war ended with Germany, he decided to come back into the city and he was in a bar in St. Louis. Our family name in southern Germany is Haussecker. It is a very old name and of course in those days there were huge numbers of children being bred for very hard work on the farm. So he was

26 drinking beer in this bar, he felt he should have a new name and it shouldn't be that German because everyone hated Germans after the First World War. He looked at this beer and it was from the Lemp Brewing Company. He felt that it was German, but not that German and so he named himself Lempp, but he added the second "p". Ever since then we've used the name Lempp. He never made contact with his family in Germany. He was the oldest son and had run away from his father's badness, so to speak, when he was a little boy, and still was on his own and had no relationship to Europe at this time. It was not until after I was born that he actually got in touch with his family. They, of course, remember the grandfather as the kindest, most benevolent man. I don't know if he had transformed himself, but certainly there were two images of this grandfather, my father's father, after that. My grandmother was very, very fond of her first born, my father. She never knew what happened to him. It was very tragic. But of course the family all rallied around and this was the reason that I eventually went to Germany when I was twelve or thirteen with my mother and my sister.

Blum: And now you carry the name of the brewing company—your father's name.

Kerbis: It was only recently that Christian Laine asked me, for the first time in my life, if I had any relationship to this brewing company and the Lemp family in St. Louis.

Blum: Is it still in business?

Kerbis: I did find out ten years ago that there is a beer museum in Cincinnati in which there is, under glass, these hand-painted tin serving plates and other artifacts from that brewing company. I guess the brewing company spent an inordinate amount of money—that was their public relations—on these hand-painted beer mugs and all these other kinds of artifacts of the brewing industry. So I have a picture, taken through the glass, of these Lemp Brewery things. They were bought out by this large brewery in St. Louis.

27 Blum: But this was the name that you took professionally in the 1970s.

Kerbis: I took it back again, because I had been brought up with that name. My mother was Mrs. Lempp and I was Gertrude Mary Lempp.

Blum: Yesterday we left off as you were about to reenter school at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, after having worked for Carl Koch.

Kerbis: I think what happened during the 1948-49 period was that I really worked for Carl for only eight or nine months. But I did not start school in the fall. Carl had hired me for the summer project, and that somehow got extended, because I know I did architecture in his office. In fact, I did a design for a subsequent commission of his that was called the Lustron house. It was the first prefabricated house. I did drawing work on that. I did not design the house, however I did design the fireplace that would go into the house. Carl said the best drawing fireplace in Cambridge was at the house of dean of MIT, William Wurster. He had a Franklin stove. Carl told me to go out there, measure this Franklin stove, and get the size of it, because Franklin stoves were kind of small little wood-burning devices. I took all the dimensions and the height of the chimney and brought it back. I designed the fireplace for the Lustron house from the dimensions of Wurster's Franklin stove, which was used in their later houses.

Blum: Did Carl Koch work with prefabricated materials much?

Kerbis: Not a lot. That was the beginning. Carl was at the age where he was just interested. He started using wood and panel systems and they were very primitive. They still looked like ordinary houses because they had pitched and shed roofs. In the 1950s, the Harvard group was using shed roofs and some flat roofs. The Lustron house also had a very low pitch. We were all wondering how to do this and how to figure out the game plan for doing prefabrication. The Lustron Corporation didn't do big prefabricated parts,

28 they were prefabricating small elements that would be assembled in the old way.

Blum: So it was made in the factory and assembled on site?

Kerbis: The Lustron house got more or less delivered. The roof units were all kinds of small parts. Even if they were assembled in the shop, they were still not expressing how the building was being built. It was still expressing an old- fashioned way. You can see Lustron houses today that fit into the cityscape of the old-time methods of building. They imitated roof tiles but were made of metal. They were just small kinds of elements. This was still an experimental period in prefabrication.

Blum: Was this your first experience with any kind of prefabrication?

Kerbis: Absolutely. It was very wonderful that I just happened to go in that direction and select Carl to work with, and that he ended up giving me all these new opportunities. It was a very exciting time, a very important period. It seems that I had now committed to working for Carl for the year, at least beyond that first project, so I don't know what motivated me to immediately start Harvard then in the spring semester. That meant that I left him probably in January and started at Harvard. I was at Harvard then for only that one semester. Then I must have left in June or July of 1949.

Blum: Harvard was all part of your game plan, before you went East. Although the work you were doing for Carl sounds fascinating.

Kerbis: I would have stayed on. I would have postponed the Harvard graduate experience beyond that because it sounds like I had committed beyond September to him. My game plan was to go on. I always wanted a graduate degree in design. I felt that Harvard was very well known at that time because Walter Gropius was now bringing his ideas from the German Bauhaus to the United States. He was developing that. What I didn't

29 understand at that time, until after I had been registered, was that there was a two-level curriculum. Both levels would result in a graduate degree but the first level was a graduate degree in architecture and the second level was a master's degree in architecture. The first level would have culminated in a bachelor's degree in architecture, which I already had. When I ended up in this first group, which had very interesting people, I suddenly realized that this would end with another bachelor's degree, and I wasn't interested in that because I would be repeating coursework. I took the courses and I became very friendly with the group of graduate students. They were on their third level, so they were going to graduate within the next year. They were advanced students but they didn't have the professional degree. Being such the pragmatist that I was, I just had to get down to it and I didn't want this extra bachelor degree. We didn't actually have crits with Gropius, he would only give crits to the graduating students on thesis who were getting their master's degrees. The master's students worked on a project for a year and when they culminated this work he gave them crits. You got lots of people to help you in the last two weeks with completing your thesis. So many of us participated in some of the graduate projects just because it was fun and it was the place to be doing something. I'll tell you a little incident that was kind of funny about Gropius. One of the very tiny and adorable female students from South America, with a thick Hispanic accent, was finishing her thesis and she had gotten all these ringers from MIT, as well as Harvard, to help her on her thesis. She had the creme de la creme to help her, so she didn't need some of us lowly figures. We would just come in and watch them. One member of her team was this incredible renderer, who was doing these incredible perspective drawings of various parts of her thesis. He was so remarkable because he only had one hand and he had this little arm stub. Doing a perspective, you had many extra kind of tools, and sometimes they're large T-squares and so on, that require two arms. So he would use one of those big triangles and flip a triangle under his arm sometimes and then his flipper would come out from under his arm he was just doing this ballet with this little stub and his other arm. He was just remarkable. So she finished all her work and the next day we're all at her jury and everything is

30 being reviewed by Gropius, who's walking very slowly along, giving his comments. He finally came to all these perspectives and this was the only thing that he criticized. Yet we all thought this was a marvelous work. It turned out that the ringer she had gotten was Ralph Rapson, who was teaching at MIT and he was this incredible, published architect who had his drawings in the popular magazines. We were just absolutely amazed, thinking if only we could get Ralph Rapson to work on our projects. Gropius just brought her down to her knees, because that was the one thing he just hated about her presentation.

Blum: Was this because it was reminiscent of the more traditional approach to architecture?

Kerbis: No, Ralph was using poetic license as a renderer and he would just suggest things in a very artistic way and leave it to your imagination to fill in the pieces. Gropius still had a very conventional eye, even though he was starting all these new approaches that were very unconventional, at the time. Gropius must have been more than sixty years old, and he still had this old- time image of how you would draw things. Although Mies van der Rohe was doing all this suggestive image making. It's not that abstraction was a new thing to Gropius, it's just not what he expected.

Blum: It sounds like Ralph's drawing was more like a presentation drawing than a working drawing.

Kerbis: Yes, perspectives usually are. That somehow just bothered Gropius. Whatever it was, Gropius had no idea, I'm sure, who the renderer was. He took everything at face value, that it was the South American girl's work.

Blum: Were there any people in your class at Harvard that you have kept in touch with?

31 Kerbis: Yes, Maglet Myhrum, she was married to Arthur Myhrum. They had already graduated with this bachelor of architecture degree. There was a whole group of them—Edward H. Bennett, Jr., the son of Edward H. Bennett, Sr., Ralph Youngren, Robertson Ward, and Myer Rudoff, were in the graduating class. The Myhrums were ahead of this particular group.

Blum: Are these people who came from the Chicago area, or came to the Chicago area to work after school?

Kerbis: Ted Bennett came from Chicago. The others came to Chicago after their graduation because it was a very exciting time to be here.

Blum: How did the curriculum at Harvard compare to the curriculum at the University of Illinois?

Kerbis: The curriculum was quite different. The only similarity was that you were given projects to design. At Harvard you were supported in doing modern things, as opposed to this kind of wishy-washy thing at the University of Illinois where people didn't know how to go about it. But I would like to say something in support of the Beaux-Arts curriculum—the whole idea of doing watercolors and washes of classical columns and other elements of design and the composition of your architectural presentation—a high level of artistic quality was expected. The images were old-time but the techniques were still important, even after I learned about the abstract things that Peterhans and Klee were doing at the Bauhaus in Germany. The concept of texture, tonal quality, and color, all these things were still of merit and value in the Beaux-Arts system. Sometimes you felt that the deterioration of the Beaux-Arts system happened when those qualities became more important than the architecture, that the presentation technique became more important than the design solution. In architecture it seems like we always have these two conflicting ideas, the medium and the message, the context and the content. These are always at issue. Although I was running away from

32 Beaux-Arts ideas, I could see that they still had value to subsequent areas of architectural education.

Blum: I have understood that one of the greatest objections to the Beaux-Arts system was that students were asked to design a boathouse for a king with a yacht. It was irrelevant to everyday life of ordinary people.

Kerbis: Yes, exactly, but you still could find out how things worked. Even so much of what Stanley Tigerman was trying to do, and so much of what the New York school of architecture in the last twenty years was doing, where the surface of a building sometimes is more important than how the building worked. To use some of Stanley's recent teaching methods, this business of teaching how to express a literary idea in architecture, it's going back to the old Beaux-Arts idea where the abstraction of a concept is separate from real life. It's an interesting dynamic and tension, to take off from the real, pragmatic world, and it becomes an aesthetic and brings architecture to a higher level, or where the whole thing just falls apart into nothing. You can't have a completely nuts and bolts building and expect to have architecture, but on the other hand, you can't have just ideas and aesthetics and expect to have architecture without the nuts and bolts.

Blum: Are you saying that at Harvard they supported your and everyone else's interest in Modernism? However, you could use or you were encouraged to use traditional methods in drawing.

Kerbis: At that time we were doing traditional drawings. I did an experimental building in concrete and I went to Gropius and he suggested that I go beyond the engineering knowledge that I had at the University of Illinois and apply some of that knowledge. I did this concrete building because I could do a structural analysis of a concrete building, which no one would ever think of doing. It was a three-point arch and actually it was a rather ugly building and I wish I had spent more time on the aesthetic solution, rather than the engineering solution. After I finished, I thought, why did I spend so much

33 time on the engineering? I had pushed myself into a new area of engineering analysis that I didn't know about. No one else was doing it and we were all being graded on the same curve.

Blum: How did he then respond to your emphasis on engineering?

Kerbis: Well, he never made contact with me. He evidently made that suggestion to solve my frustrations. I was very upset and frustrated with my place in the graduate school. As soon as I get frustrated about something, I start objectifying it and blame it on the curriculum. Actually, there was some truth in my conclusion that there wasn't that much to gather. Gropius had done these rather remarkable buildings in Germany and then he had done his own very nice house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. But he really was not that much of an architectural teacher. When he gave crits, he would talk about the sociological implications of certain things. Maybe this was just a time in his life when this had some interest to him. However, it didn't have that much interest to me. I did find interesting his lectures of natural light and the comparisons to man-made light, fluorescents that would never change, and how if you were in an interior room, totally enclosed for days on end, that this is a very boring, debilitating experience. The dappled light through trees and the changing directions of sunlight were very important. That was terrific. I can't remember another thing that was really a gem that I learned during that period. Now I was only there a semester, so maybe it really wasn't a long enough time.

Blum: What was your exposure to modern architecture, through the magazines, books, through the surrounding countryside?

Kerbis: Yes, we were going to these new houses that were being built, and we were going to lectures at MIT. In addition to Ralph Rapson, Carl Koch was teaching at MIT, and then this whole TAC group was being formed. That group was all excited about their projects and would talk about them. The

34 dynamics of the place were really wonderful; they were right in the middle of the development of a bunch of new things.

Blum: Mies van der Rohe had been in Chicago for some years by that time, about ten or twelve years. How much information about him was coming through?

Kerbis: I had written that letter to Mies and never gotten a response. Then when I did come back to Chicago, I immediately went to visit his office. I was back in Chicago in the summer of 1949. I was hired by Bertrand Goldberg that summer and I worked with Bud for about a year. Then the next year he didn't have much work and I went to work for Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett.

Blum: Can we speak about the time you spent with Goldberg? Did you choose him?

Kerbis: Absolutely. He was doing modern cutting-edge work. I chose him for the same reasons I chose Carl Koch.

Blum: How did you get hired. Did you just walk in and say, "Can you use me?"

Kerbis: I can't remember whether he had run an ad or what. I could have walked in. I had just found a little efficiency unit in some row houses on the corner of Rush Street and Superior. His office was on the corner of Superior and Michigan, on the second floor. Jack Kearney had his little Contemporary Art Workshop on Rush Street, at that time.

Blum: So you were hired. What was his office like at that time?

Kerbis: It was an office about the size of my office now, with five tables or so. He had a little area that overlooked Michigan Avenue, a reception room, and his office, and the drafting room which was about twelve or fifteen feet—a little, tiny space—with a few drafting tables. He was rather a wild personality. At that time, 1949, he had not married Nancy Florsheim yet.

35

Blum: What was he doing that attracted you in the way of Modernism, that made him stand out in your mind as someone you wanted to work with?

Kerbis: He had done this little gas station on Clark and Maple streets in Chicago. The roof was supported from a pylon with tension wires. That was very modern looking and an avant-garde concept, but unfortunately it wasn't preserved.

Blum: That was actually his second attempt to design something with a pole up through the center with the roof held up by tension wires. His first one was in the 1930s and was his North Pole Mobile Ice Cream Store.

Kerbis: It must have been published. That's how I got to Carl Koch, he had published just a few pictures that really appealed to me. The same thing with Bud Goldberg.

Blum: How many people were in Bud's office?

Kerbis: I think there were about four people at that time. I remember Ralph Bernardini, an Italian draftsperson with only a high school degree. He was one of those typical draftspersons. He was a man who would lean on his elbows so much that he had these huge calluses on his elbows. He was an incredible draftsman, drafted like an angel. He had a little green eye shade so he didn't get glare in his eyes. He wore a little container in his shirt pocket to hold all kinds of ink pens. They were really characters.

Blum: Was Leland Atwood there?

Kerbis: Yes, Atwood would be holding the fort down while Bud went out. He was sitting at the drafting table also, even though he was an old-time gentleman. Probably he brought some business to the office.

36 Blum: I think Atwood was not licensed and that he had worked for several offices. I think he had also worked for George Fred Keck for some time. Were you the youngest and the least experienced in Goldberg's office at that time?

Kerbis: Oh yes. But Bud gave me things to do. He remembered later that he had some drawings of mine.

Blum: What kind of commissions did you work on?

Kerbis: I remember Ralph working on these incredible drawings for boxcars. Instead of steel, he was working for a wood company that was trying to develop prefabricated wood boxcars. He was doing all these strength studies and big details. Bud got interested in it because it was a study of prefabrication that was fascinating all these modern architects, trying to put muscle on modern technology and make it work for architecture. At the beginning of the end of my tenure with Bud, he sent me out to measure a co-op on Lake Shore Drive, that he and Nancy would use when they were married. The apartment building was very conventional. I had a tape and was trying to measure the ceiling and took my shoes off and stood on one of the chairs. The woman who lived in the apartment came in and saw me standing on her furniture and became very upset. When I got back to the office, she had called Bud, and he was furious with me. There was a possibility that this co-op would not allow Jewish people in their building, and I think that might have affected the way he overreacted.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Kerbis: Bud came to me and lambasted me as only Bud could do and then fired me. Later on, he relented. I didn't really get fired at that time. But I knew that I shouldn't really stay there. It was very uncomfortable. I don't remember if Leland Atwood was still there, I don't remember him when I left. Maybe Bud also did not have that much work at the time but he allowed me to continue

37 to work. However, it was not the same and I then left after I had been there for a year.

Blum: Were you the only woman in his small office?

Kerbis: Oh yes. In general, it was very unique to have more than one woman. I was almost always the only woman. On occasion there were others. Jean Wiersema, my best friend from the University of Illinois, went immediately to George Fred Keck's office. She remained in that office and married the chief draftsman of Keck's office, a man named Wehrheim. They continued to work for Keck as a team for a long time. They had bought some land out near Wheaton and formed a cooperative and built houses. Jean died of cancer at the age of 45. Chicago Women in Architecture dedicated their second exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society to her memory. When I went to Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett's office, I can't remember another woman there.

Blum: While you were working for Bertrand Goldberg, you entered the Chicago Tribune's "Better Rooms" competition and your design took second prize for the double bedroom. How did that competition attract your attention?

Kerbis: It was a very important competition. When I look back at the clippings and who entered the competition, like Gyo Obata, now the head of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum—he was working in Chicago at that time as a newly graduated architect. It had national interest and the people who won were young architects but not totally unknown. It had great response across the country. It offered money—I think I won five hundred dollars and the first prize was one thousand dollars. There were lots of prizes.

Blum: Was it a general inclination for young architects to enter these competitions?

Kerbis: Competitions were very important for young architects in the whole development of an architectural career. The tradition still exists in Europe,

38 where major commissions are awarded on the basis of competitions. When there is an open competition, there are virtually a thousand entries. It's just so out of proportion.

Blum: The report of the Chicago Tribune competition shows that there were many architects who entered. Some of the names that are mentioned as winners are John Weese, Gyo Obata, Ambrose Richardson, John Macsai, and there were several women, including you.

Kerbis: I remember Crombie Taylor's wife, Hope, also. She was an architect, but did not continue to practice.

Blum: You were in very good company. Did you enter other competitions?

Kerbis: I didn't and I really regret it. I entered the Boston City Hall competition much later.

Blum: That was a team effort. How did your team do?

Kerbis: We were runners-up. I really wish I would have entered others.

Blum: After you left Bud's office, how did you end up at Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett's office?

Kerbis: I think they must have had an ad in the paper because I didn't know much about that office or anyone in it.

Blum: You weren't scouting out another famous office doing modern work?

Kerbis: I think Richard Bennett had done Park Forest. Richard hired me and we had a great time together for the year I was with them.

Blum: Wasn't this a large office at that time? Park Forest was a large commission.

39 Kerbis: It was. They had lots of other things going on. There were departments within departments in the office doing different things, like shopping centers such as Old Orchard. It was a very good time for them, the best period for years. The whole office just meshed as a group very well.

Blum: How did the principals work together? They all seem so disparate.

Kerbis: I think they were all really great. These guys were gentlemen. Forty years later, I met Norman Schlossman, and he gave me this warm greeting—he was a very good person. Richard, even though he was a ladies' man, was also just a terrific person. And Jerrold Loebl, also. The three of them had the highest integrity.

Blum: How did they work together?

Kerbis: Richard was in the drafting room all the time. I don't think Loebl came in all the time. He just wasn't there very much. Norman seemed to be running the back office, the business matters. They didn't seem to ever be in conflict and I rarely saw them all together unless it was a social thing. I never got to know Loebl at all during the period I worked for them. Only when John Holabird started to have these AIA fellows get-togethers did I get to know Loebl in a social way.

Blum: Whom did you work with directly when you were in the office?

Kerbis: I think mostly Richard. There was this shopping center team that continued to do working drawings and stayed together. Richard was always involved in the beginning of all designs in the office. I was doing preliminary design stuff. I was not doing working drawings. I was working on some of the interior artifacts for a synagogue but I didn't have my name on anything that I can remember. I seem to have worked on something, but my heart was not in it. When I left Harvard, I wrote Gropius a letter and explained my frustration that I wanted to be in the master's program, not the bachelor of

40 architecture program. I said, "When I come back to Harvard, I'll be a registered architect and then maybe you'll take me in the master's program." I was very busy racking up experience so I could take my exam.

Blum: Did you intend to go back to Harvard?

Kerbis: In that summer of 1949, I did intend to go back to Harvard in the fall and show Gropius. I had this chip on my shoulder, I felt I had been betrayed. I read subsequently that Gropius was having problems during this period with Joseph Hudnut about the curricula. Hudnut had had his curricula changed and was having ego problems between the two of them. Hudnut was being set aside by Gropius. Had I gone to Hudnut, I would have been in the master's program immediately. But, then I wanted to get my experience, since I already had a bachelor of architecture degree, so that I could be on my way to becoming a licensed architect. While I was at Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett, Mies van der Rohe's 860 North Lake Shore Drive was being built before my eyes. Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett's offices were in the penthouse of 333 North Michigan Avenue and we had a straight shot over to the site at 860 North Lake Shore Drive.

Blum: How many women were at Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett?

Kerbis: The only women there were secretaries. There were about twenty people in the office, but I was the only woman architect. After that there were women, but not while I was there. Richard and I would get into these philosophical discussions about how architecture should look. Richard was this humanist and although he was an early modernist, he was still not a technologist. His work expressed all the textures of brick and allowed people to experience architecture in the old-time ways. He was brought up in the Beaux-Arts traditions. We would talk about Mies's 860 building. I thought it was the best thing that had happened to Chicago and he disagreed. Although he was very impressed with it, he wasn't a nut like I was. He didn't think it was that

41 important that I should quit my job and study with Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Blum: Had Richard done the 1350 Lake Shore Drive building yet?

Kerbis: That was the old-time expression, where the brick would go down to the ground and he made it look modern, but he didn't use modern techniques of expression. He must have designed that in the early fifties.

Blum: You have said that Richard's architecture was "comfortable. He provided another option."

Kerbis: This was an easy transition to understanding Modernism. He used large surfaces and forms and broke them up in a very comfortable and appealing way. He also tried to take the apartment and give everyone a view of the lake, multiplying the surface expressions. He was very clever in his designs. It just was not that inspiring to me at the time.

Blum: Was there a lasting impression that he made on you?

Kerbis: As a human being yes, but his architecture was not distinguished or dramatic to me at the time.

Blum: Some people have described the look of Richard's work as "not designed."

Kerbis: That is true. That's part of his personality. He had this incredible academic background, teaching literature or something. He was a very brilliant man. But he came on like an old shoe, a very sweet person.

Blum: In his later years, he gave the impression of an absent-minded professor. He was endearing in that way. So you left Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett as 860 was rising in the air. Did you think that Mies's school was the place to study?

42 Kerbis: Yes, this was now two years after I had written that letter to him. I now had two years of experience. About that time I was preparing to take the architectural exam. I was still working on that objective to show Gropius. But then I decided to go to the Illinois Institute of Technology. I had seen Mies's office and I had visited with students and the school. I had probably even gone to some of the famous parties that the students gave for Mies, before I registered at IIT in 1951. IIT allowed me to start the courses and would decide later when I would graduate. I was so overwhelmed by what the students were doing that I knew I had to learn something more if I was to achieve anything like what they were doing. They were extraordinary draftspeople. They knew so much more about construction than I did. I came in feeling very much that they were hot.

Blum: Was it because they were using a modern vocabulary and materials? Or was it their skill?

Kerbis: They were all down-to-earth kind of people. They were not pretentious in terms of their personalities. They could make models that I had never done. I found out I didn't know that much about construction—they knew how to take a building all the way apart. I had been leaving that up to the construction people. At IIT, it was very hands-on, looking at steel and wood with an intensity that I could never imagine. I felt I had a lot to learn. But I didn't have to start with all the rudimentary courses. I didn't take Peterhans's course at all, on visual training. I only sat in on some of Alfred Caldwell's classes.

Blum: Did you have to take Caldwell's class where students drew bricks all semester to learn the various brick patterns?

Kerbis: No. But I sat in on a lot of these classes. When you're doing graduate work, Mies makes you design your favorite building. And he would spend time with you and your project. I was so intimidated by Mies, I made this roof and

43 some glass walls and that was it. He didn't spend that much time with me. He spent more time with others.

Blum: Did Mies not spend time with you because he thought your project was not very interesting?

Kerbis: I believe that Mies was only really interested when women were fluttering around him in a certain kind of way. He was not a very egalitarian personality. Women were in a certain place. We did have a French woman eventually, and she absolutely bowled Mies over. She just knocked him out. They had a wonderful relationship and he gave her a degree within a year, although she did absolutely nothing. She was the antithesis of the perfect Mies student. He was very susceptible to women. So I knew I was odd man out. I found out later what was happening. We were the only women among the graduate students. She was hardly ever around because she didn't work very hard. We had a very large class, in various tiers. When Mies went to the more advanced students, everyone would gather around him and listen. It was during this period that I fell in love with Peterhans and I was being distracted by this love affair, so lots of things were going over my head. We married in June of 1951, and we just had the money that I had saved so that I could go back to IIT the next year. But we took the money and went to Europe and stayed there for six months. This was the second time I was in Europe, but it was my first architectural trip. We went to France, Germany and Italy. We went back to Germany and saw Romanesque buildings. We stayed with my relatives in Heilbronn. My sister was on a European jaunt with her German husband at that time. We all stayed in the Black Forest for a few days. Everyone was pleased that I had married a German, but shocked that this man was fifty-four and more than twice my age. It was a marvelous trip.

Blum: Along with your honeymoon, what did you do to further your architectural interests? Did you do sketching?

44 Kerbis: I took a journal and started to do a little sketching, but I think it was lost or thrown away.

Blum: Was Peterhans the instructor at IIT who worked with photography?

Kerbis: He was head of the photography department at the Bauhaus in Germany, and had developed the techniques of teaching that course. Laszlo Moholy- Nagy was using photography techniques but he was a generic photographer. And Man Ray, all these people were using photographic techniques, but they were interested in all kinds of other materials and media as well. Peterhans was a professional photographer who did commercial photography for advertising. He had a rather good commercial practice in Berlin. Then he developed the curriculum for the study of photography at the Bauhaus and was the official head of that department. He was still at the Bauhaus when the Germans closed it. He and Hilberseimer were there with Mies at the end of the Bauhaus. Then they all split up. Mies had an invitation to come to IIT and invited Hilberseimer to join him in Chicago. It was during an accidental meeting of Peterhans and Mies in New York, when Peterhans had come on a visit, that Mies asked him to join them in Chicago to help with the curriculum. So Peterhans decided to bring his family and work with Mies.

Blum: Did Peterhans have a family?

Kerbis: Yes, he had married a wealthy woman, a student of his. He had been married even before that to another student at the Bauhaus. I think he brought his new wife to Chicago and then they had two children in Chicago. When he came to the United States, someone told him that he should not be taking photographs, because he might be thought to be an enemy alien since he was German.

Blum: Mies came in 1938. Did Peterhans come before the war?

Kerbis: Before America entered the war. Yes, Peterhans came at about the same time.

45 Blum: So that prohibition for Peterhans would have been valid until 1945.

Kerbis: I'm not sure that it was a legislated prohibition. In any event, he gave up photography and it was very sad. He even gave up photography as a hobby. He would talk about photography when I married him, which was significantly later. They felt that one of the innovative parts of the Bauhaus was how to train architects in aesthetics and not have an aesthetic solution imposed on the architecture. They were thinking about how you could study proportion, texture, colors, the interrelationships of these things, abstracted from a building. If the building was rotten but had nice proportion or color or texture, it was too easy to justify. This was one of the problem with the Beaux-Arts system, because everything got all combined into one. I though this was a fantastic breakthrough when I began to understand what Mies and his team was actually attempting, and what the Bauhaus was trying to do, by abstracting parts of the total architectural solution and studying them separately. This appealed to me as a scientist and mathematician, that you take parts out of the whole and examine them to get inferences from them and reassemble them. Peterhans had developed a number of classic problems, although I didn't ever take his class. So I only saw the results of other students, but they just bowled me over. I know that you could work with him and you would look at something for a very long time and might move something very minutely on a proportion project. And all of a sudden, it would gel and you would see these proportions fall into place. You can train your eye to look for these optimum solutions. Some of these really worked on me, even though I hadn't taken his class. Once he found some hairs of mine in the bathtub and they formed some curves. So he made a project where you would just study curves and complementary curves. He developed a wonderful series of classic problems.

Blum: Did you ever take a class with Hilberseimer?

Kerbis: Oh yes. I spent a great deal of time with Hilbs. He would challenge you. He used the Socratic method where you would have this dialogue with him.

46 These men were very penetrating thinkers, at least to the sloppy midwest intellect that I was. He maintained an intense verbal exchange. You would repeat what you thought his idea was, sometimes you might have read something that he had written. Then he would contradict you and you were forced to defend yourself and take an opposite position. It was a very stimulating experience studying with him. Eventually, in 1954, I came to work on my thesis project, which was a study of a flexible building for a merchandise mart in the Netherlands. I thought if Europe was going to have free trade, then they would have to have a free trade building and a huge hall. This would be a great prototype. I studied the Merchandise Mart here in Chicago and one of its problems was that the spaces were all the same. They couldn't display a beautiful rug up in the air in three dimensions, they had to lay it on the ground. They couldn't see anything vertically or from on high. I realized I had to have a three-dimensional kind of space and that these ideas were leading me to linked atriums, where you looked down and around at these displays. It was a very innovative idea. So I wanted to hollow out this building and make a variety of long and tall and short spaces.

Blum: Did your idea for this thesis project come to you after your trip to Europe?

Kerbis: Yes, that all came afterwards. That trip definitely influenced my thinking. Before I started my thesis, I had been at IIT for a year and a half, and it was time to start my project since it would take another full year to complete. So Mies had his own ideas for that year. His idea was that I would work on the Convention Hall. So he selected four of us. Pao-Chi Chang, Hank Kanazawa, Yujiro Miwa, and I would be the design team for his Convention Hall project, which he was going to do pro bono. I don't believe he was ever commissioned to do the Convention Hall but he was going to use students to work with him. At this time, Peterhans was given an offer to teach in Max Bill's school in Ulm in Germany.

47 [Tape 3: Side 1]

Blum: Did Peterhans accept to go to Germany to teach?

Kerbis: Well, we needed his salary because we came back so broke. So now he was going away and if his income was going to be terminated, it was going to be very hard for us. Mies asked me now to be on this team, so I joined the team.

Blum: In spite of the fact that Peterhans was going to teach at this German school?

Kerbis: Well, that's just it. I may have given you the wrong impression first. So anyway, I joined the team and I worked on the project. I only worked on it for a half a year. I then decided that I couldn't stand it because the reason I had come to all these goddamn graduate schools was that I wanted to work on my own project and to do my own designs. I was so frustrated that no matter where I was going, I was still doing this rudimentary stuff where I was working on other people's ideas, when I wanted to do my own major work. So I asked Mies if he would mind if I could get off that project and start my own project. I proposed to him this new project. He was so angry with me, he said, "You mean you don't want to work on my buildings but you want me to work on your buildings?" He was absolutely right, and on the other hand, I was paying my money. He was very upset that I would drop out. And so I dropped out of his team. And he never looked at me again. And he was my leader and I couldn't graduate without him. I was as determined as he was—he was an old German and stubborn—we were the same. I got this from my father. I was determined to do my thing and so there I was. I started on my thesis project in the same drafting room as his project was going on.

Blum: Couldn't Peterhans or Hilbs intervene for you?

Kerbis: No. What happened is that I was just abandoned. Eventually, Dan Brenner and those guys formed a team. This was like four months later, for four

48 months I had been working in a vacuum! They became my review team. I had been on my own. No one gave me crits. So when I got finished, they said, "Well, we've got to do something with her." I eventually worked for a whole year on my project. I was just there. I didn't get my degree until 1954, and I had entered in 1951. I was there for three whole years. So Dan Brenner, Jim Speyer, and Hilbs were my review committee. Then I found this out later— when I gave Hilbs a copy of my writings, he said that Peterhans had written them. I was so angry that I couldn't talk to him for two years. I was going through life making all these enemies! Hilberseimer hurt my feelings so badly. I had given him the same review copy that I had given to Peterhans and the only comments Peterhans had made were the ones that were in ink that Hilbs had on his copy. So it was very devastating. Again, it's a sexist thing! These men!

Blum: Did you interpret it in that way?

Kerbis: I think so. Hilbs was much more egalitarian than the others. They just couldn't give up their birthright. They were born in a period and they were bound to be part of that period.

Blum: The fact that you were married to one of the three most important people on staff, didn't that make it a little easier?

Kerbis: It was very hard, because they were all . . . Part of the problem was that some of these men, I think even Mies, maybe thought it was my fault that I married. They thought it was bad that Peterhans had married me.

Blum: What happened to the marriage that he had when he first came to the United States? Did they get a divorce?

Kerbis: Yes, it was not very amicable. She virtually had to run away from him just like I eventually did. Both of us just had to kind of abandon Peterhans because we could no longer live with him.

49

Blum: I thought maybe Mies and Hilbs were angry at you because you broke up his marriage, but his marriage was over before . . .

Kerbis: She had left him the year before I came to IIT. I think Mies and Hilbs had loved her because she was a wonderful lady and made a beautiful home. They had brought all their old Bauhaus things with them and she was a great cook. I think she did fit well with them. But then she had left Peterhans and taken her children to California and worked as a cook with an artists' colony near the Napa Valley and San Francisco. When we were married. I was with Peterhans for two or three years and the children from his previous marriage came to visit us several times. Peterhans was not paying them child support and when I got in the game, I insisted that we did pay child support. After we divorced, I think he stopped paying them again, I'm not sure what transpired.

Blum: You think this was another dimension of Mies's and Hilbs's attitude towards you?

Kerbis: It might have been. Peterhans's second wife was a very fine person. But Peterhans was alone for at least a year before I came on the scene. I came on the scene in 1951 and I did marry him, unfortunately, rather quickly. I came in January and we were married in May and then we took off on our trip to Europe and when we came back and I was a student again.

Blum: You were a student again, working on your thesis, and he was in Germany?

Kerbis: Yes. So then we were together, maybe it was for only a semester. These time frames . . . I wish a had kept a journal so then I would remember them. Anyway, what was happening is that during this time I had to give Mies some time because of this business of Peterhans not coming back when he should have come back to teach. So that made me feel very guilty. I'm sure Mies didn't even think of it one way or the other. I think he just wanted

50 another body working on his projects. One of the things that happened to me while I was on the convention project… I was in the studio whenever Mies came to give his group their crits. I also participated in the early part of the conceptual idea, of course, so although I didn't give him any more time after four months, I did continue to have it in my blood, his ideas and how he was dealing with these long-span structures. This long-span structure became an element in my future interests later on. I simply was reacting in a way that was different as to how the structure should be solved, rather than how Mies was solving it.

Blum: That brings up an idea about Mies's responses to ideas that came out of the student group. Was he accepting of ideas? Or did he simply want his ideas carried out?

Kerbis: Well, he defined the problem. Then, of course, you made these studies for the problem he defined. What I found, in my interaction with him having to do with my own thesis, I was attempting to define another kind of problem and he was not interested in that. It's all in how you set the problem up, and rightly so; his definition of these problems was so profound. He had set this whole damn architecture in a direction. When you came up and said, "Hey wait a minute, let's try this and this." That was rather presumptuous of you. If you expanded where he was going, then it was wonderful, but if you were over here and were trying to put a light on this little element, then he definitely was not open to those kind of ideas. It had to be within his scope of work, so to speak.

Blum: Did he make any reasonable contribution to your thesis?

Kerbis: No. He absolutely never looked at it. It would have been wonderful if he had, but he absolutely had blinders on. He just wouldn't even look at me in the room. I did not exist. He just turned it off. I think he had to have made a conscious effort to avoid me because my model was approximately three feet square and at least six feet high.

51

Blum: How did he and Hilbs mesh? And Mies, Hilbs, and Peterhans, how did the three of them mesh?

Kerbis: That was very interesting. Hilbs could not, within his way of studying a city, build an all-glass building. That was an absolute contradiction. Because you would now be exposing the north side, almost fifty percent of the building, to a very hostile environment—the northwest corners and all that. You should be enclosing them and dealing with the orientation in a different way. He was very much into expressing and studying orientation. It was as though Mies and Hilbs had respect for each other but they didn't tread on each other and they didn't address each other's areas. When Mies was laying out his buildings in Detroit, the high-rise and low–rise, Hilbs contributed to the development of that and Caldwell did the landscaping. Also in the planning of the IIT campus, certain things came in, but Hilbs was not asked his opinion on these things. Just as Mies shunned me, they just did not deal with each other in certain areas. It was very interesting, one of the high points of the curriculum at IIT is the spring semester when they would put on this big show and have an open house. All the classes would display their work. Mies had a commission, maybe it was the Arts Club. Mies had sent away for reams and reams of Chinese silks—shantungs and so on—and these incredible swaths of silk in all these beautiful tones of color. This was in the 1950s and we didn't have Chinese silks then, or they were just starting to come in. I loved fabrics and I was just oohing and aahing. Mies asked Peterhans, who was teaching the visual training, if he could use any of these colors in any of his visual training projects. So Peterhans had access to this room full of stuff. Once Peterhans and I were in this room together and we were furling these marvelous pieces and showing them against each other and contrasting them and looking at them and just eating them up in the full dimension, not just studying them in little pieces on a sheet of paper, like Mies maybe had visualized how Peterhans would use them. I do not know what was going on, but Mies took one look at Peterhans and me in this room and he absolutely blew up at Peterhans in front of the students. It was just awful.

52 Peterhans had an ego also—all these three men, although probably Hilbs was the most modest—so they were like these two giants. Peterhans did not get the best of Mies and had to sit there and take it. That hurt Peterhans. It was very embarrassing. Mies treated him like a young student that was out of control. I could see that Mies was absolutely in control of everything in the department. Peterhans was definitely subservient in a way. He had to suddenly account for his behavior with this young woman. I do not know the dynamics of that situation. We rarely socialized with them. On one occasion, we were invited to Shirley and Skip Genther's apartment for a dinner for Mies. It was one of the highlights of the year. It was so important and it was up in their apartment at 860 North Lake Shore where they had joined two apartments together. It was a beautiful space and a wonderful evening with wonderful food. She had prepared Mies's favorites—steak and other simple things. It was the only time that we socialized with them. It was too bad, because Peterhans probably missed out by marrying a student. All of a sudden he was relegated to student activities. Or maybe he never had socialized with Mies like that. Well, maybe with Gazina, Peterhans's second wife. She might have been an acceptable hostess for them.

Blum: How did it your marriage impact your determination to study?

Kerbis: Our lack of funds had the strongest impact. When I had saved these funds, and then we had spent them all, I felt that I still wanted to continue to study. The first summer we were in Europe but the second summer of our marriage, I applied for a job with the Chicago Park District, to be their architect. It turned out this was an ad for the chief architect. So they went through a series of written and oral interviews and a test. I turned up to be number one on this roster of names and because it was civil service, they had to hire me to be chief architect of the park district. That was a very sexist and very retro operation in the early 1950s.

Blum: How old were you?

53 Kerbis: I was twenty-six or so. Blum: So you were the chief architect of the Chicago Park District at twenty-six.

Kerbis: And then I had the possibility of studying these parks and future parks and finding out what is a field house and what is appropriate for these communities. And doing studies. They had vast resources for studying communities. I had these incredible dreams of building into that job. But they were not ready for me.

Blum: Were they not ready to do that work? Or were they not ready for a woman?

Kerbis: Both. What happened was I would have monthly evaluations and I would get these strange evaluations.

Blum: Who evaluated you?

Kerbis: Someone in the department—architecture was in the engineering department. There was a huge network of bureaucracy. It was incredible. I was late, I was dressed badly, all these strange comments were on these evaluations. So I was interviewed by the Civil Service and they told me that these evaluations for the last four months were a problem. I told them this was an expression of sexist prejudices. I said this is very serious and there must be someone who wants to get rid of me and I'm being set up, and so on. I was advised by their lawyer on this. Civil Service has all these standard vehicles to register a complaint.

Blum: Is that what you were thinking of doing?

Kerbis: Yes. And then after we spoke, I thought, "Oh my God, if I'm going to spend all my time fighting this, I might as well go back and finish my master's thesis!" It ended up just being a summer job, rather than something more interesting, had I lasted. While I was there, though, I had heard that Alfred Caldwell had done these incredible drawings of some gardens for the South

54 Park District, but all the files were then in the archives of the Chicago Park District. So I went to the archives and pulled them all out and I thought they were unbelievable. So I kind of rediscovered him all over again.

Blum: Was he teaching at IIT at the time you were there?

Kerbis: Yes, he was, but I never saw his work because he had never published anything. I thought he was a real genius when I saw what he had done and how he had done it. His Park District drawings were just from heaven. He had used the Latin names of all these plants and he used them in patches and it looked like a flower garden, but they were all the letters of the names of the plants. It was just like a work of art. It was just wonderful. There were these highlights of my career with these great examples of work out in the field.

Blum: Wasn't the time in school, from 1951 to 1954, when you also had a child?

Kerbis: Yes. I actually had Julian while I was doing my thesis project that year. I was employed by Skip Genther, at PACE Associates. I knew I was pregnant when I was employed, but we were desperate for funds. We were so poor. IIT pays very low wages. I think IIT and the Art Institute probably pay the lowest of all. So Skip hired me and I don't believe that I said I was pregnant. I worked virtually up to the last week at the drafting table. I got farther and farther away from the drafting table as my stomach intervened.

Blum: What were you doing for PACE?

Kerbis: PACE was designing the White Pine housing for a copper company in northern Minnesota. At that time, John Macsai and a whole group were in the office at PACE. I think I wasn't there longer than six months.

Blum: But you were working on these houses? Was it a new town?

55 Kerbis: It was a totally new town. He did houses and community centers and roadways and so on. They had several engineers. I can't remember if I was hired as a draftsman or a designer. There was nothing really distinguished about what I did there. I don't think the whole project was that distinguished. It was just little modern buildings.

Blum: What was Skip Genther like to work with?

Kerbis.: He had a heart of gold, but he was like Bud Goldberg. They had very passionate personalities. When they find something wrong, they can blow their tops very quickly. They had very short fuses. They just had pressures on them that were very intense. Everything was on the edge. Skip always was wonderful to me, at that period, when I worked for him. We only had a bad time later when he blew up. It was his first semester teaching at the University of Illinois. We were both teaching the same class and I said something and he took a swing at me and I stayed away from him after that. He physically—it was such an abrupt and such a surprising reaction, so far off, just like the business with Goldberg. It was such a strong reaction to a sort of benign kind of comment that I made. I know Bud Goldberg felt bad later because he expressed that later on, but with Skip we never spoke about it again.

Blum: In 1954, you graduated with a master's degree in architecture, you had a child, and you were divorced.

Kerbis: While I was finishing my thesis, I was kind of holed up with my mother and father living in a one-bedroom cottage, with a porch. Julian and I moved in on them and we turned their living room into a nursery. I slept on the porch. Then I was doing my thesis in this unheated attic. The spring was like an eighty degree oven. I was back at home while I was finishing up with Peterhans. My mother was helping with the baby and I stayed with her. They were living in Jefferson Park and I would commute on the North Western train. It was very difficult but it was just wonderful. My mother took care of

56 the baby during the day. She was unbelievable, absolutely superb with him. But I always had it in my mind that I just couldn't impose on them, plus I wanted to have a life. So I was hired by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. I then found a house. One of my architect friends, Jacques Seltz, was working with Alfred Shaw and he had a house on Dearborn Street, 1405 Dearborn, the second house from the corner on Schiller and Dearborn. Shaw was doing some Army or Air Force bases in Spain, so I was the house-sitter for Jacques and his wife while they were away working on the project. I paid them rent. So I had this four-story house, which was totally in disrepair. But it was a fantastic amount of space. Jacques' wife was trying to remodel the house, but she was more of a Socialist and was always going off to meetings. So Julian and I moved into the house and I registered Julian at the Bateman School, which was around the corner in the McCormick Mansion. By this time he was now two years old. Until he was two, we were back and forth living at my parents' house. The requirement at the school was that he be toilet trained. So Julian had to be toilet trained at all costs and he was not very cooperative. So that was our life. Then all of a sudden, Peterhans told me that he now had cancer of the throat and that he couldn't take care of himself. By now we had already been divorced for a year. It was a divorce that his lawyer had written up and everything was agreed to. I would take responsibility for Julian and there would be no support, everything was finished. And now, all of a sudden, Peterhans felt that it was important to come back into my life. He didn't like his single life and he told me that he was still in love with me, blah, blah, blah. He then said he had this health problem and that he needed care.

Blum: Was he still teaching at the time?

Kerbis: He was teaching. Then he was discharged from the hospital and he moved in with me on Dearborn. I had a huge house, so there was plenty of room. After a while I decided to call his doctor and check up on his condition, maybe it was four months later, it had gone on for a while. It turned out that it was a cancer in his tonsils that was very easy to excise. There was no problem. I

57 realized that Peterhans was using this as a ploy to work on my sympathy. So I thought that was a terrible trick on me so I felt I had to get out of this again. I had to make a break. And my friends were coming back from Spain and wanted the house again. So I found a place along Lincoln Park West, south of Fullerton. It was an efficiency apartment. Julian and I moved in and I did not give Peterhans a key. He became furious with me that I would abandon him. He would follow me and now we call that some kind of harassment. If I went out to dinner, he would pop out from behind bushes. He sent me incredible letters which I should have kept, they were so incredible, but I wanted to burn them because they were so outrageous. But compared to what you hear now, they were not as outrageous as I thought then. One of the most horrible things he did was while I was at SOM as a designer and had a position. I was working on the Air Force Academy our office was on Wabash, separated from the regular office. Peterhans entered the office—the drafting room was the entire floor—and he started screaming that I was a whore and that I was this terrible person. It was so terrible, he was absolutely out of control. I was running away from him and he was running after me. It was down-and- dirty. He was just off his rocker. That was in the middle of the summer and I had moved in the beginning of the summer. He spent the summer pursuing me and doing all these terrible things. Then, as soon as the new semester started, it was like the faucet was turned off because there was a new female student and he had eyes for her. She had dark hair and blue eyes. But he picked her out. He was in his late fifties them. He died when Julian was eight. And he married the other woman right away. But he continued to keep this hostility for me and he planted his new wife at SOM. I was still using the name of Peterhans since we had a child. They married about three years after Julian was born, in the winter. Anyway, his new wife ended up being hired by Bruce Graham at SOM, so there were two Mrs. Peterhans working there now. I was the one getting all the calls and she was just this young draftsperson who could hardly speak English answering the calls. And Bruce, with his political machinations, was trying to set things up against Walter Netsch's team. There was now a woman on Walter's team named Peterhans and a woman on Bruce's team named Peterhans, so all those office

58 politics were going on. Of all the places where Peterhans could have placed her to work—IIT was feeding many offices with students at that time. Although when I came, SOM didn't have the volume of business—the Air Force Academy was a big deal. Walter's team was just developing then. The pattern of hiring from IIT, which Nat Owings started, was continued by Walter and Bruce. When I came into Skidmore, it was very diverse in hiring. Walter hired a very diverse group—there was Ralph Youngren from Harvard, Robertson Ward from Harvard, and Myer Rudoff from Harvard. John Macsai and Robert Diamant were from different places. With Bruce it probably became more IIT oriented. Peterhans's fourth wife probably worked into that whole pattern.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Blum: Gertrude, when you graduated school in 1954, you went to work for SOM, the most desirable architectural firm in the city, according to what I hear from people who were looking for employment at that time. Did you select SOM, or did they select you?

Kerbis: I selected them. It was a very large project—the work among young architects—the United States Air Force Academy team was being developed.

Blum: Did you know it was SOM's job? Had it been published by then?

Kerbis: I don't know if it was published. But it was known to young architects in Chicago that they were now going to start this design work and that they would need a staff. So I interviewed with Walter Netsch. I don't remember that there was an ad in the paper, per se. I made an appointment with Walter and he hired me. As he was hiring, I would say that early team had at least twelve people, so he was hiring a large group of people. They were coming from everywhere in the country because he was trying to get the choicest graduates of schools at that time. It was a very young team. There were a few that were kind of holdovers from previous relationships with Walter at SOM.

59 There were others in the team that were not and had just been hired for this project. Blum: How many of this group, new and not so new, were women?

Kerbis: I don't think at the time when I was hired there were any women. Later on, there was Caroline Henderson from Indiana. She came aboard later. There were not very many women in the work force then.

Blum: Why was this group for the Air Force Academy project separate from the general SOM offices?

Kerbis: Well, we originally started at 100 W. Monroe and then as the academy project got underway, they rented another space on Wabash near Monroe.

Blum: Did the group get larger?

Kerbis: It became very large, because then we were starting to make very large models and that was the objective. Robertson Ward set up a research lab and he was hiring people in his little team to do research on materials. So there was a whole variety of things going on as we moved from 100 W. Monroe to Wabash, which justified this entire space. Then we may have taken up even more than one floor. But I do know that the design team was all just on one floor.

Blum: You were hired as?

Kerbis: Just as a designer. It was rather generic in the beginning because we didn't even know which would be buildings or where they would be located. We just simply had the beginning of this program, from which we now were going to extrapolate buildings and relationships. It was just a list of buildings and what might be in them. Then we didn't even have a specific site.

Blum: So was there a program?

60

Kerbis: Well, there was a program, but it was just being developed. The site hadn't been selected. So we were involved—a number of us flew out with Walter and Gordon Bunshaft—we flew to Colorado Springs. We rented a helicopter and flew over the site. I was with the team that actually flew over the site. There was this consulting team that Pietro Belluschi and Eero Saarinen were involved with—maybe to select whether this huge, thousand-acre site was going to be recommended for the Air Force Academy. See, there were questions about the site, in terms of "Where shall it be? In Colorado, or in Texas, or in Wisconsin?" Then all the politics, in terms of which state would it be located in, and where would it be located in that state. I think Saarinen and Belluschi were involved in that original site selection.

Blum: Was this the advisory committee? Weren't there many more people than Saarinen and Belluschi?

Kerbis: Oh, yes. There was a whole team. They were probably the most prominent architects. However, I remember that as we went around and looked at the site it was determined that it would be in Colorado and then it was determined which piece of land it would be. Then this land was purchased. When I came aboard—Walter could not have come aboard too many months before setting up this team—we then had the job of selecting the particular mesa. There're these foothills coming down off the mountains. So our team went out to look at the configuration of the various mesas and decide which we'd actually build on. Then we'd get more specific on the master plan of the entire site. It wasn't only the mesa for the academy, but there was housing and all the other parts of the academy, the enlisted men section—there were villages for little housing groups and so on. It was a very large project. It was very exciting. So we needed that information about the site. We looked at the site, and we came back and we had the master plan to design.

Blum: Had it been decided what would be where?

61 Kerbis: From our visit, it was decided where the academy itself would be located. Then we took on all these other support facilities to get electricity and to understand what to do to supply water. All this kind of stuff had to start. You work with civil engineers. It was very complex, but a very exciting project. It was very thrilling to be on the team.

Blum: Was this the first time you met Gordon Bunshaft?

Kerbis: Yes, it was the first time.

Blum: What is your impression of how much input he had?

Kerbis: In the beginning of this project, in the first six months of this project, he would come out every weekend or every other weekend, and frankly, on occasion he stayed for weeks. In addition to that—I understand he didn't do this in the New York office—but he actually worked in our drafting room. He worked with us and we were going one-to-one with him. In the New York office, there was more separation between him and the drafting room. With us, he would come in and we'd be all going to the coffee machine and having our breaks together.

Blum: Did he strike you as just a regular guy?

Kerbis: He was just one of us. It was kind of interesting. I would say that this probably evolved into another thing, where he was, later on, as Walter was able to take on more and more responsibility—I do not know the evolution of that relationship, whether he just saw Walter personally on later occasions— but during the hot time of the design project, he was there all the time and very readily available. Our first goal was, of course, to develop this master plan and then to determine which facilities were going where. We weren't into buildings yet. We just kind of made little boxes in the beginning for where the buildings would be on the master plan model. And tiny, tiny little boxes for the houses, and so we'd have a spread of little boxes for where the

62 housing areas were, and so on. Our objective, of course, was to figure out where the major roads were going to go, because the roads had to start going in before we built anything. So there were certain priorities that had to be established. This was a very interesting period to start, very early in the project. Our first presentations had to do with the building program and then site planning after the site plan was determined—we understood later that Saarinen had actually selected that mesa also for the location of the academy. It had a very attractive configuration but selection has to do with size. Can the academy fit on this? When you're looking down and evaluating what's flat and what can be cut.

Blum: But a mesa, as I understand, is sort of flat.

Kerbis: But these really are not flat. Even a very, very low grade would appear flat. And also, I got to know very much about civil engineering and about cutting and filling. So the ideal objective, of course, is that you would not need too much outside fill that you would have to truck in from God knows where. You would use whatever material that you were cutting. That was called a balanced art. We were also very fond of thinking that we would be able to, even though the mesa was very small, project it and have these large walls, and we would be able to accommodate the academy. There was a knoll at one end. We also took some elements of the plan, later, and put them in the valley, because we needed very large playing fields for the athletic facilities. They couldn't use the playing fields very often because they wore out. There was not enough grass, so they'd play on another field which had more green, and then that would get worn out and they'd play on another field. That was our notion, I don't know if they eventually irrigated the entire valley and then just played on one field. Anyway, we had all these notions that we were trying out. After doing the master site plan, then we would start developing the disposition of the master plan. We would start developing the specifics of the mesa. We started working on designing the buildings and doing research on the buildings themselves.

63 Blum: As the plan developed and you were at the stage where the buildings were being designed, how did you come to join the group that did Mitchell Hall, the dining room?

Kerbis: That was when Gordon was still very much around. In the beginning, we were all taking some of these programs, we were putting a physical, three- dimensional expression on some of these functions, such as the gymnasium building that was not going to be on the mesa itself—it couldn't fit on the mesa. It would be in the valley, then it would be relating to the playing fields down there. Then I was assigned, just accidentally, to start designing that little building, the gymnasium. This early design phase was not building, per se. We were still developing these little boxes. We were trying to do a box that had so many square feet. Should the dormitories be two-story or four- story? How big a box should the dormitories be? Are we going to have many boxes for the teaching area? Should each be defined like a school, like a campus?

Blum: As you were working on the gymnasium, were all twelve of you in this newly formed group working together?

Kerbis: It was all teamwork. Everything was teamwork.

Blum: How much input did Walter Netsch have?

Kerbis: He was the team leader. He was the boss so when you would do something you would talk to him about it. So he gave us feedback. We had these ideas and we worked on them, and then he reviewed them. Even before that, there was a period where we were working on the program and as we were developing the program, before we started the three-dimensional stuff on the model, we fed this program back to the Air Force Academy, just on the development of the building program and how large they should be. What we did was color coordinate the various rooms and we developed flow diagrams of how the functions would be related. It was completely unrelated

64 to the third dimension. We put these spaces in two dimensions. It would be, for instance, a number of dormitory rooms of such a size. We put every building in a diagram on these large sheets, or maybe several sheets of thirty- six by fifty-some inches. We transformed the program to drawings and they were color coordinated. It was very readable. I think this was Walter's idea. It was very clever because you could start to see the mass of the building even before you started to think about architecture. You saw relationships. This was presented to the Air Force Academy. I was not there at the presentation, but I thought it was very clever, to transform what was words into the beginning of a two-dimensional representation. I also thought this was good for the academy review people because it was a transition to get them into architecture without them telling us that we should design historic buildings similar to West Point, which was what came up later. Because I was not going to these meetings, I was not involved in trying to persuade them. But we got feedback all the time about how things were going. This is also why Gordon was so important, not only to review what we were doing, but to prepare an argument to persuade the client. Walter had some significant buildings behind him, but this was pretty heavy stuff.

Blum: Well, he had done the Naval Academy building in Monterey, California.

Kerbis: He got the Air Force Academy job because of that building group. That was a small complex by comparison. In any event, the big challenge was how to persuade the client to accept these ideas. That was a very good introduction for them, not to talk about buildings but to talk about square footage and relationships. Then we eventually got to buildings.

Blum: Do you know how much input in this whole process—between the client, and Walter, and the team, and Gordon—Skidmore, Nat Owings, or John Merrill had in this process?

Kerbis: Yes, absolutely. They were part of the team, and they were the ones who were interfacing with the client.

65 Blum: Who, specifically?

Kerbis: Merrill. I think that Skidmore was not involved because he was in the New York office and Gordon was the New York representative. I think Merrill had been an officer in the Air Force, or maybe in the Navy. I'm not sure which division. And he was an engineer, so he was an important part of the presentation team.

Blum: And Owings? From what I hear, he was the mover-and-shaker.

Kerbis: Absolutely. He was the key salesperson. I think Walter worked very well with Owings. I think it was Owings who selected Walter and probably determined when Bunshaft should taper off when Walter was able to run the entire show. I think that Owings continued to come and meet with them, and go to meetings, long after Gordon came and worked with us. He was very effective in the design period of the buildings. We did these enormous models that were the size of this room, which is thirty by twelve feet, and they all came in parts. And we also ended up with a professional model- makers' studio, the Richard Rush Studio, when we determined that that was going to be the final presentation. In the beginning, for instance, a guy named Carl Kohler did a little folded origami to suggest where the chapel would go. That folded paper stayed there, no matter how many variations of the master plan, because it was such an effective symbol. It always stayed the symbol of the chapel.

Blum: What was the form of this little origami paper?

Kerbis: It was like a pointed accordion, much like the actual form of the building. For years, we looked at this, and it was firmly implanted in Walter's psyche that this was an obvious solution. Then he transformed it into architecture. But it was interesting because sometime these little informal things—you don't know where these ideas come from. It was a very simple little thing. We said to Carl, "We don't want to think about the chapel right now, but it should

66 look different from the regular buildings. So what would you do?" So therefore, Carl did this little thing. We were just like little magpies working over these little things.

Blum: Was it a cooperative atmosphere?

Kerbis: It was extremely cooperative. There was bumping and shoving and I remember John Hoops, about four o'clock in the morning, shoved me and did something accidentally, but then he walked away from me and didn't acknowledge it. I was so angry at him that I was going to do something so terrible. I took this paint container and I was about ready to hurl it at this guy when all of a sudden I saw Walter out of the corner of my eye—he was always trying to keep the peace because we were absolutely strung out by then. So I just had to swallow my rage. We were very much a team, working together.

Blum: You have been quoted as saying, "I kept butting in and making suggestions so much on the Air Force Academy that I got a part of it to do myself." And that was the dining hall. Is that true?

Kerbis: That's exactly it. I had now been working on transforming these two- dimensional diagrams into real buildings in order to make this presentation at the next few stages. I was transforming this physical education building and I just happened to have come from IIT, where that campus was being built. There were not many people from IIT on the team. I can't remember anyone else.

Blum: Were most people from the East?

Kerbis: Most were from the East. Some were from the University of Illinois. Some had received the Rome Prize and Walter had gotten their names and hired them that way. They were arriving from everywhere.

67 Blum: Do you think the preponderance of easterners had to do with the fact that Walter, although he was born in Chicago, had taken his training at MIT?

Kerbis: Yes. He called his good friend, John Burchard, who was the dean at MIT, and got references that way. So we got a group from MIT. They came from a number of places. I don't remember, in the early design stage, who might have come from IIT. Anyway, I had decided that the gymnasium building was huge and would be very interesting. There were many gyms in the building; there were various rooms. I thought it would be great— rather than fool around with all these different kinds of rooms which were all huge—to do a tension roof on the gymnasium. So I did this very elegant gym building and I had silver wires. It was a very pretty solution. It was also a great solution for the model, because these silver structures were sparkling and all the other buildings were in foam board or paper, so it was very attractive. It was a very attractive complex. While I was doing that, I kept butting in about other things. Some of the other designers were doing this and that and I just was full of myself, thinking I had all these great ideas. That was when it was count down time to select what was going first—we made this presentation and now we were going to decide what were the actual buildings we were going to do. We were now finished with the overall master planning of the job and had to get very specific. This fellow, Carl Kohler, took on the housing part of the project and did a masterful job. He then took on a team to do the whole housing area. It was that kind of thing, if you had a particular interest, or whatever, they would decide who would do what. I think Carl had a particular interest in residential design. In any event, Carl was very talented. Anyway, I kept butting in about things. This was the time when they had to design the three major buildings first; they would be the first priorities. So the dormitory, the academic classroom building, and the food service would go first. So Gordon said to me, "Well, you should do the food service." I was absolutely delighted to be on the key team, because that was the one that was going to go first. The down side was that it wasn't the cushy job—it wasn't the best job because I didn't have a team. The others now were assembled into the team leaders and Ralph Youngren had the academic buildings. He

68 had to take the other people that were left and assemble a team because that was a huge building. All the classrooms were stuck in that one building. As I said, it could have been a campus, where you would have individual buildings. One of the determining things about that was that the academy site was too small. We really had to cram everything into it. We could have made a better selection, except that it was a gem of a site. Anyway, we really couldn't afford to make a huge campus. And then Bill Rouzie did the dormitory, Then he selected his group to work on the dorm buildings with him.

Blum: If Gordon said you could work on the food service building and everyone else had chosen their teams, were you the only one working on the food service building?

Kerbis: Yes, at that time I was, because it was a very small building in relation to the rest of the campus. And the physical education building also had to continue to be designed. And there were other buildings that had to be designed.

Blum: Did you remain the only person working on the food service building?

Kerbis: Yes. It was a very small square footage building. Of course, the key thing on that building was that we had to get a kitchen consultant. It's one thing to have a program, but it's another to have someone who knows all the equipment. So I also got a consultant, who told me all about the equipment we needed because I had never done a food facility before. That was a learning period for me. I was the primary person throughout the project. When the engineering and technological thing became important, I stayed on the team all the way through the working drawings, which was very unusual. That was not necessarily the way things were done at SOM.

Blum: How were they usually done?

69 Kerbis: Usually, the designers designed the building and the elevations and some things on the inside, and then they turned it over to a working drawings team. But I stayed with the dining hall all the way through the working drawings phase.

Blum: The roof was built on the ground and then just lifted into place. I've read that this was a first and changed the way things were done for long-span roofs from then on. Where did that idea come from?

Kerbis: That idea came in the construction process itself. Actually, the technology, these hydraulic lifts, were being used in Texas in the concrete industry. Then U.S. Steel, who got the contract to do the steel on this particular job, decided to apply that technology to this building. That was wonderful. The thing about architecture is that once you get the dynamics of energy of people going, their interest in a project can transform it. You get the synergy of other people's ideas. I don't know who at U.S. Steel thought of lifting, but it was definitely during the construction process. The other thing, they would have had to do was to make this entire falsework up in place and it would have been more expensive to build a wood falsework to start the construction of the roof in place. That would have been very laborious and time consuming and a waste since you'd have to take it all down and move it out later.

Blum: So where did the idea to build it on the ground and then lift in it place—just the roof itself—where did that idea come from?

Kerbis: Through the concrete industry. They were pouring flat slabs on the ground. They didn't have to have a formwork. They built a slab of the first floor on the ground, on grade, and then they poured the next floor on top of that first floor that would stay in place. Then they jacked up the second floor in place. Then they kept pouring these slabs and elevating them. That's how this whole jack device came about. Slowly it got transformed. Ours was the first time it was applied to steel. It was very clever. Later Mies used the same method on the Berlin National Gallery.

70 Blum: Was it your design for this huge, long, roof?

Kerbis: The design didn't actually come about in order to make it easier to build. I had just come from working with Mies's Convention Hall project, alongside the team. I was always fascinated by Mies's ideas of a long-span structure. I was very turned on by his solution but I had reservations about how he resolved it. In any event, I was very interested in doing a long-span structure, as I had done on the gymnasium. The end result of the gymnasium was that it did not become a long-span structure. Jim Scheeler designed a more conventional building. Just as I had put a long-span structure on the pre- design of the gymnasium, I also was trying to figure out how to do it again on the dining hall. It was easy to justify, because the program said that the entire dining hall space should have complete visual and sound contact with the so-called poop-deck. The officers and the officers of the day would be up there, looking over the entire academy corps, and giving the orders of the day. The officers were up at this upper stage and the entire cadet corps was assembled below them. The other thing was that they were all supposed to march into the dining hall at one time, three times a day. If you're going to have to have visual contact with the officers, it would be very hard to do that behind columns, or to arrange your seating in such a way that it would avoid columns. That was a good argument for our long-span solution. That's what they really preferred, not to have columns. It was very easy to justify. The two-way truss grid had also been used by Mies in the Convention Hall.

Blum: So that was in your mind?

Kerbis: Absolutely. His two-way truss, and a non-directional building. He has this Convention Hall design where you could enter from all sides and he had a two-way truss system. The dining hall was supposed to be the center of the campus where everyone would meet together three times a day. I also felt that it should be a non-directional building, where you could get at it from all sides. The previous designer, for the paper model thing, had done this rectangular building. I didn't feel that was appropriate. Walter felt the

71 origami shape was appropriate for the chapel, but this little rectangle was inappropriate in relation to its form on the campus composition.

Blum: Was that your only concern, the form in the campus plan, or, as you got into it, was it that everyone got an equal view of the officers?

Kerbis: It was both an interior and exterior concept. When you make good decisions in the beginning, the subsequent decisions can be very supportive of the good early ones. It all starts to fall in place. Sometimes you have to fight it, but it's rare.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Kerbis: From an internal functional view, the dining space itself was effective for this relationship of the officers to the cadets.

Blum: How did Walter, or Gordon, or whoever was overseeing your part of the project, respond to what you chose as a design?

Kerbis: Both of them were overseeing me. The design fit. These were not hard decisions. They were very supportive, I would say. They accepted and liked what I did. My first scheme, that I presented to them, was a two-way truss. But how I resolved it was much different from the way Mies resolved the Convention Hall project.

Blum: It has been said that your design was one of the first to be analyzed by a huge Uni-Vac computer at the University of Illinois. What part did that play in your design?

Kerbis: That came later. The concept of this building was that it would have this huge two-way truss system. I wanted to have a glass pavilion. Mies had his enclosing walls in marble, at the edge of the truss. Mies enclosed the maximum amount of building and he located the columns supporting the

72 structure at the outside edges of the building. This was on his Convention Hall, which was a huge span also. It was even larger, almost a city block square. He had what we call a moment, or the end condition of the column to a support—the intersection is called a moment. These moments were very large, so to break them down, to physically capture the moment, he had a bunch of struts and supports like a bracket. He made the column into a bracket. The bracket was three-dimensional. It went in both directions away from the column, as well as into the space itself. This bracket wasn't a single bar or support; it was broken down into a tree-like form. The outside of the building cut through this bracket. Pao-Chi Chang, when she was doing her studies for her elevations of the Convention Hall project, played up the elevation of this bracket in the outside expression of her elevation. I was very dissatisfied and I sat in on Frank Kornacker's discussion with Mies and the group's discussion on the Convention Hall project and the configuration of this bracket and how it should look. Pao-Chi did a fabulous expression of how it should be expressed from the outside. But it was very awkward to me that this projected into the space, and I did not like it. Mies accepted it. One thing about Mies, he did accept things from an engineer, if the engineer was a professional. Mies didn't know that much about engineering and accepted whatever Kornacker said. So there was no discussion of that bracket. Mies just wanted to make it look good. But then they would have what I thought was an ugly bracket cutting into the space. There was no consideration of an alternative. I probably didn't even have an idea of a solution at that time. But when I was designing this non-directional, two-way truss system on the dining hall, I felt that there ought to be another way of dealing with that moment that we would come to. This was a three-hundred-foot span, as opposed to Mies's six-hundred-foot span, so we didn't have the scale. His was very huge and mine was a relatively small space. I felt that there was another way to do this. One way to do this in a building was to continue an overhang and create a cantilever. Then the countervailing moment of the cantilever beyond the columns would negate the moment inside the column line. Then I had this neat idea that we could have this enclosing porch going around the entire building that would be created by this cantilever.

73 Sometimes you think, does the porch come first, or does the structural solution come first, or does the functional solution come first? But it all sort of came together. The functional solution was that the cadets were now lined up entering the building. When they are lined up to come through doors, there's always a longer period of time to go through the door itself, so there's a huge line of cadets waiting to get through the door. So now there was a covered area for them to assemble. They were able to be protected from the snow and the rain and the wind. It was a very fortuitous solution for both a functional and structural problem. Since it was such a major building, I felt the columns should be expressed independent of the glass surface. So I pulled them out and tried to dramatize them by giving them these shadows and so-on, and I configured the columns so they'd stand out a little better.

Blum: Was this very different from what Mies was doing?

Kerbis: Actually, it was so different that the IIT people would call it "Gert's Hat," because it was like a big brim going around a person's head. I had some big- brimmed hats at that time—they were being worn in the 1950s. So this is how the building was originally conceived. At that time, we had two columns on each side, or a total of eight columns holding up this major roof. It was rather dramatic. I also had glass going around the entire building and that was a stretch functionally, because I wanted people to come in from every side. I wanted the officers elevated. I wanted the stage to be free of the windows, sort of like a free-standing sculptural element in the space. Now I had to deal with the service areas, serving pantries and dish washing areas and hot tables to get the food to the cadets. At that time I did not yet have a kitchen consultant. I was doing this on my own and from a purely architectural point of view. I was stretching the service functions a lot. We subsequently got a kitchen consultant to justify what I had already done, this crazy kind of relationship of the food to the people. No matter what this kitchen consultant would say, it didn't fly with the Air Force Academy people; we just couldn't make it work. Actually, the Air Force had kitchens all over the world and they knew a lot about kitchens, and they weren't about to take the word of

74 the best consultant in the United States from the hospitality program at Cornell. We couldn't persuade them and so I had to change the building. I had to get the cooking and dishwashing areas up from below into the dining hall space itself. That's when I had to make the building larger in order to accommodate the additional areas, as well as make the kitchen service work better. We ended up increasing the size of the building. We cut into the building, making an opaque wall at the north end. The other three walls were glass. The north end now had the kitchen facilities. We cut through the opaque wall in the center to create what we called a "poop-deck" where the officers would sit. They were a whole story up, elevated ten feet above the cadet dining floor itself. They had a circular stair going up there. It created a little focus of light coming through the window. In addition to forcing this pattern onto the Air Force Academy, one of the other remarkable things was how to solve the structural problem of designing the steel to accomplish this. The two-way truss had never been designed before. Mies had proposed it on the Convention Hall project, but it was a design idea and had never been accomplished. Even at that time, using the two-way truss, Mies's engineer hadn't considered how it would be done. They weren't even at that step. Now, we had to figure it out with all the steel and all the various connections and the configuration. The end configuration kept the outside edge of the building roof truss at one height, and in order to gain greater depth required by this long span, we were able to pitch from the outside edge to the center, increasing the height of the truss construction to a fourteen-foot depth at the center, at a two percent slope. So we were able to achieve this gradual increase in structural depth, which was required. That two percent is just enough to get water flowing off a sidewalk—it's almost imperceptible. Everything was designed at a two percent pitch. In order to get this pitch, we had very deep trusses that were fourteen feet deep in the center of the building. On the outside edge of the building, they were only seven feet high. Every truss was gradually increased in height and depth. The stresses were also changing at every fourteen foot bay. Every bay of fourteen by fourteen feet, with this varying depth, had at least a couple dozen steel members and

75 their connection that had to be computed. Every joint had to be designed with the exact number of bolts. All the stresses had to be accommodated.

Blum: Even though you were an engineer, were you able to do all this in your mind, or on paper?

Kerbis: No. That was one of the problems. Although the concept of designing the truss was easy, what was difficult was that these were simultaneous equations. So the stress would be transferred to each subsequent bay. It was very complex to do all this work—just the man-hours would go on forever, until someone thought to do it on computer.

Blum: So all this was submitted to the computer, and it did the analysis?

Kerbis: Some of the engineers working in the office had been hired specifically for this project. Just as there was our design team, there was an engineering team and a mechanical team. All these teams were being assembled that would do the analysis of the structural systems and the plumbing and so on. They had been the cream of the cream, even some doctors of engineering from the University of Illinois were hired by SOM. We were able to work with them, and they suggested we use the Uni-Vac mainframe computer at the University of Illinois. It was twice the size of this room.

Blum: Was this one of the first uses of this computer to analyze such a structure?

Kerbis: It certainly was one of the first structural analysis applications of the computer. They were just building the computer and I don't know what functions they were expecting the computer to accomplish at the first stages of development. This was either 1954 or 1955. It was all at the right time for the application to be done on the computer. Our little team of engineers went down and plugged the figures in. I don't know if they used a computer subsequently on the chapel designs.

76 Blum: After all this analysis was done and everyone knew what to do to build that dining hall, then the roof had to go up. This was really a dramatic event and was recorded in many of the journals. But you didn't attend, why?

Kerbis: No. We were finished with the working drawings… One of the reasons I stayed with the working drawings is that steel expands and contracts, and when you have three hundred feet of steel expanding and contracting linearly, you might have several inches of changes of length in three hundred feet. You can't break it up. In a standard building, you can have expansion joints and buildings are built that way. Every one hundred and fifty feet you can have a joint and the building expands into this joint. With a three- hundred foot span, you had to accumulate this big expansion from the winter to the summer. This kind of a building, with a continuous structure, we had to design a glass wall that had to be attached to the steel and to the ground. When the roof expanded the wall tilted out. The corner would expand one way and this another. It was a great architectural problem to make these connections. I was really concerned because you can destroy a building in the detailing if it's not controlled. I really persisted through those difficult details. I had people helping. So we did all the working drawings and it went out for bids. U.S. Steel got the contract to erect the steel. They conceived as they developed the project that they would use an application that the concrete erectors used in Texas. They would use the ground as the work surface and built the entire building on the ground. At the location of all the columns they would erect these hydraulic lifts and elevate the entire roof at once. They finally erected the roof and in several hours they had an instant building.

Blum: Why were you not permitted to be there to see it happen?

Kerbis: I don't know. That's one of my regrets. Walter was running his own operation by then and he…

Blum: Had you been to the site to see the progress of the building?

77 Kerbis: With such a large design team, I was never able to go to the site after the first visit.

Blum: Did any of the other people go to the site?

Kerbis: Oh, of course. Ralph Youngren, Bill Rouzie— they all went.

Blum: Did this have anything to do with your being a woman?

Kerbis: I have no idea, but I presume it did. I had also not gone to any of the meetings in the development of the building either. I did not present to the client. All the other chief designers had relationships with the clients as they developed their solutions. In fact, my kitchen consultant went to the meetings, but I never attended.

Blum: Did you ever speak with Walter about it?

Kerbis: Oh, sure. Well, you know, he just ignored me. And that building received national attention when it was launched, because it was seemed like the building was built in two hours. It was an instant building. I really regretted not seeing the actual construction. Another time, when I felt we should have some input—Walter would say, "Well, we'll take care of it Gertrude."—was this business with all the detailing. I asked, "Did the building really act like that? I want to know if that expansion and contraction that we had worked on for so long with great difficulty to solve had happened." I wanted to know if it had really happened or if it was a figment of my imagination, or whether the weight of the building would hold it down. I had so many questions that were just begging to be answered. So they said, "Oh, Gertrude, we'll just take care of it. Yes, it changed in length an inch and a half." I was correct, but rather than me going out and working with the engineer, he would say, well you had that question and this is the answer.

78 Blum: Bob Bruegmann, in his book on the Air Force Academy, reports that it was unusual at that time, in the mid 1950s, to have a woman head up a team and an African-American head up a team.

Kerbis: That's true, although I don't think Don Ryder was the head of a team. He worked with Bill Rouzie on the drawings. Don Ryder was an active member of a team.

Blum: Was he invited to these higher-level meetings?

Kerbis: No, Bill Rouzie would go, so I doubt that Don Ryder ever went to any of these meetings. We were kept in a closet.

Blum: Is that the way you were feeling at the time?

Kerbis: Oh, yes. It was terrible. I also know, through the years at these large firms, even after the Air Force Academy, that I was not being able to represent myself. For instance I always felt that the reason I never designed a high-rise building was that the commercial world was not ready to accept a woman designing an office building. I think Gordon Bunshaft allowed Natalie de Blois to design her first high-rises in New York and be involved with the client. I was never allowed to do that. Where my being hired might have been a breakthrough, they never allowed me to go further. I was the token when an image was required.

Blum: Was this pretty standard at the time that women were protected because it was a man's world?

Kerbis: Oh sure. I don't know if protection was the right word. Maybe hidden. I must say that at one time I considered working for Holabird and Root and I was interviewed for a job with Holabird a few years earlier. They offered me the job and they took me through the office to the drafting room and then they said, "Well, you'll be working in this other room. That's the interior room. We

79 will not allow you in the architectural office." So if I had accepted that job, I would not have been in the drafting room with the rest of the architects, but I would be in this other room without a drafting table in the main room. I would still be doing architecture, we didn't even discuss interiors. I did not accept that job. That was the perception of where a woman was at that time. Holabird and Root was a crackerjack company. They did the working drawings for Mies's buildings. They did all the cutting-edge detailing of architecture in that period, the early 1950s. The feeling was, I should be glad I got this opportunity.

Blum: Did you ever get credit for your work?

Kerbis: It was very hard. You see, even now, in a recently published work, I feel that the distortion persists. It is a reflection on all this backlash.

Blum: At that time, big companies, especially SOM, were caught in the web. The company got credit for the work and the individual designer was never mentioned. That was the broader picture.

Kerbis: Yes. What I was asking for is to go to the meetings and to get firsthand reactions from the people to what I had worked out. Then I would know the limits of where I could go. Looking back on it, sometimes when you don't go to meetings, you get sold short by your leader, whoever is transmitting your presentation. I feel I was sold short, especially in the glass elevations. Walter came back and said, "Nope, you're going to make these glass sizes different." I had made these beautifully proportioned elevations with the panels of glass and the doors and the pattern of it all. Had I gone to the meeting, I would have seen the alternatives in a much better way. Walter just came and said this will be like this and this will be like that. Sometimes you could persuade Walter and sometimes not. He'd go to a meeting and come back and that was the law. To this day, I hate the elevations where the glass was divided, as it was actually built.

80 Blum: Today, people know what your contribution to the Air Force Academy was. Recently, Franz Schulze published a book on Mies and talked about his Convention Hall as an unbuilt project that was worked on by students. He also talked about Mies's subsequent designs, which were the unbuilt Bacardi building and the Berlin National Gallery. I know that you wrote a letter to Franz regarding the Convention Hall project and the input it had in your work, and how you think your treatment of the dining hall influenced Mies in his subsequent designs. Will you comment on this?

Kerbis: Having worked on the Convention Hall in Mies's little student design team, I left that team and did my own thesis. However, I sat in on some of his design decisions for the Convention Hall. Some of those ideas I later worked into the dining hall. I took the two-way truss system as the basis of this structure. However, I used my own solutions for the exterior wall. Then when I finished the working drawings, I took a little vacation in New York where I visited the construction site of the Seagram building. Gene Summers took me around. While he was taking me around, I was bubbling over with my intense two years of design experience of the Air Force Academy dining hall. At this time I did sketches for him—we were discussing the experience of the Convention Hall, which he knew about—showing how this was a different building and I had pushed the glass back and continued the cantilever. He knew how this was the next generation of the idea, and how it handled the moment connection, and how it did away with these tree-like forms, and what a great contribution it was. We were talking as two Miesian followers just building on his leadership. When I read Franz Schulze's account that Gene had given him of the genesis of the Berlin National Gallery, I was very surprised that Gene had not mentioned the input of our little meeting. Maybe Gene just forgot. There was no recognition that this was quite a bit different from what Mies had been doing on the Convention Hall design.

Blum: This was the comment of your letter to Franz. You thought that between the Convention Hall and the Berlin National Gallery some new ideas had been

81 exchanged. Also the idea of building the entire structure and lifting it with hydraulic lifts—they used that in Berlin as well.

Kerbis: When we used it, it was extremely innovative and it had never been done before in steel.

Blum: But as long as it was successful, do you think that it was more generally applied to buildings after that?

Kerbis: After Mies's building, yes. But I don't know that it has been used since then. I don't know that there had been another application that justified its use. It's so much easier to build a building one floor at a time.

Blum: You said you talked to Gene Summers as though you were both Miesian followers. Did you consider yourself a Miesian follower?

Kerbis: Absolutely. I was one of the gang. But there was a whole range of Miesian followers. Each personality would take his gifts and transform them in a different way. Some of them were more followers than others. For instance, I visited England a couple of weeks ago, and I visited Norman Foster's office and looked at all of his great buildings that are being built right now. These methods that we developed in Chicago, that I was working on, are now alive and well in London; they are at the cutting-edge of the London scene, while they are not being applied in Chicago. The beat goes on with the energies of the people who were inspired by Mies and are transforming these ideas in new applications. I think that's what is interesting.

Blum: I know recently the chapel of the Air Force Academy received a twenty-five year award from the AIA. Has Mitchell Hall received any award, or has there been a general Air Force Academy honor that you've received?

Kerbis: One of the problems at SOM that I wanted to mention was how you got an award. It was not enough that you did a very good building, the problem

82 was whether the firm would allow your building to be submitted for an award. It was not egalitarian. You had to have the approval of the partnership to even submit it for an award. Sometimes, politically, in the dynamics of Walter's and Bruce's arguments, if you were on the wrong team, they didn't want you to get an award. It wasn't that you couldn't get it or not, you just couldn't get to submit it. After I finished my dining hall, I was integrated into the general office and I was given buildings to design. Both of my first buildings I got all sort of awards for. I got an award for my Clubhouse at Lake Meadows, and then several awards for the Skokie Public Library. That library got all kinds of awards; it got the National Building Award from the American Library Association. There're also levels of awards at the AIA, so you might get a Chicago chapter award but you'd have to resubmit for a national. But it could be that SOM would decide not to submit a project for an honor award at the national level. Usually, all people who got city awards would get their projects submitted for the higher AIA awards. But none of my work got submitted for national awards. It was very frustrating to me.

Blum: Do you think that was the big problem for Mitchell Hall?

Kerbis: Absolutely. Mitchell Hall was always kept under wraps, because Walter wanted the chapel to be the most important. The chapel was built about three years later, by then we were all off the teams. Walter was very selective about how any kind of honor was given. He did not allow any project submitted for publication as an individual thing. It would always have to be the academy project as a whole. The entire business was very political.

Blum: Up until the time of the chapel, the Air Force Academy was published as the work of SOM. When the chapel was in design, it was then published as the work of Walter Netsch. Walter seems to feel that the chapel was such a way- out building that SOM didn't want to be known as the designing company for that kind of controversial structure. They let him take the good or the bad that came out of it. That's his perception of it.

83

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Kerbis: During the 1950s, it was a very vital time in Chicago in that many of the designers interested in technology were arriving and either visiting IIT or the Institute of Design, which was a very avant-garde school at the time. The Institute of Design had an architectural program and Serge Chermayeff was the head of the school. He was at the cutting-edge in architecture and there were many interesting people that he was inviting to town. Two people were teaching as well as working on their own projects—one was Konrad Wachsmann, who had a group of graduate students who were working on an airplane hangar, and so they were developing all these prototypes. Eventually, Konrad got together with Mies and he would visit with Konrad on Saturdays. Some of the people at these meetings were even graduate students and they would sit around and talk about the project and architecture in general. I remember that Robertson Ward joined that team and he was working on the Air Force Academy, and he participated very much at the Institute of Design. Ward had been part of the design studio at Harvard, where I had gotten to know him. He had come to work on the Air Force Academy in Chicago and was hired by Walter and he also participated at this Institute of Design symposium. So, as a young architect, I also went to some of these meetings. I never worked on the hangar myself; I did not participate in that study.

Blum: Was this before or after the Air Force Academy job?

Kerbis: I do not know the context of that. It had to be when we were finishing the Air Force Academy design, because I don't think Robertson came to Chicago before then. I think Robertson came in 1954, so it must have been during this time. That was a very exciting period and I know I joined in some of the discussion groups. Therefore, I had already graduated from IIT. I had received my master's degree in 1954. It must have been right about that time.

84 It was a very exciting time because we were talking about technological solutions in architecture, and these were things that interested me as well. Blum: I know that Konrad Wachsmann went on to write a book about the technological innovations, and the roof of Mitchell Hall was in that book.

Kerbis: It was used as an example in that book. I met him then and he asked me to join their group. These two people, both Konrad and Buckminster Fuller, had asked me to join their group, but I was too involved in my own things at that time and did not participate in their projects. Konrad eventually finished that huge project for the hangar— lots of students did work on that project— then eventually he went on to California. He got a new teaching assignment in California and he had some very interesting things that he did out there. And he developed the book from resources of both these teams that he worked with. That's how he knew about my project at that time.

Blum: The comment, in his book, about the Air Force Academy was that it marked a new and faster method for fabrication and raising long-span roofs. The name of the book is Turning Point.

Kerbis: It was important because it got built. That was what was interesting. Maybe some people had ideas, but they just didn't get built. Mies's Convention Hall didn't get built and so it was important to get something built at that period. Also, Konrad hadn't built any of his ideas, although he had done some incredibly innovative thinking and we all were on the same groove. Just to have a building built the way we were talking about these theoretical notions was a real achievement. We really value that point in the evolution of ideas more as we grow older and realize how few of these ideas got built. Bucky came a little earlier than Konrad. When Bucky came a lot of us architects went to his talks and then joined him later at parties and spent time discussing his ideas. Then he invited me to join his team. He was actually teaching at Southern Illinois University and he was in transition to teaching there. I think his studio was in the East, and he commuted. He did, at this time, ask me to join his team. I don't know if I had the option at that time of

85 going with Bucky or going to IIT, or going with Bucky or going to SOM. I don't remember what the year was. Blum: Do you mean this was in the mid 1950s as you were finishing up at IIT? Or before that?

Kerbis: I do not remember whether this was in 1953 or 1954.

Blum: Why did he ask you to join a team? What was the project?

Kerbis: I don't remember the specific project, but he was definitely bringing together a team to work on some of his original dome constructions. I don't believe he had received some of the significant commissions yet. I think he just did these projects and was able to sell the project to the U.S. government later on.

Blum: Did you accept his offer?

Kerbis: No, I did not. Looking back at it, it was very fascinating at the time, but it was a big risk, and I don't know if I was ready to make another change and go into—the rewards were not quite as interesting as I thought some of the other rewards were, I guess. When I look back on it, with my later fascination for Bucky's ideas, I still think that I want to work on the ideas he started, like continuous tension and discontinuous compression. It's such a fascinating proposal that I, to this day, want to study that. That's why I retired, so I could do that. That little sketch over there is a model of a piece of furniture using Bucky's ideas.

Blum: Do you regret not going with him?

Kerbis: I'm sorry that I didn't.

Blum: Did you work with his team at all?

86 Kerbis: No, not at all. I don't know what years they were in Chicago. I know Bucky and Konrad did not have their teams going at the very same time. Maybe Bucky was here a little earlier. Blum: But you're talking about your interest in technology.

Kerbis: Exactly. It was a very profound direction. Many of us felt that it was an important direction to go in architecture at that time.

Blum: After the Air Force Academy, when you proved your interest in technology—it was ground-breaking at the time—you went back to SOM.

Kerbis: I went back to the central office itself. The Air Force Academy team was separated. I left the Air Force Academy team after my project went out for bid. I then joined the central office.

Blum: Did you get reassigned to another group that was working on the Skokie Public Library?

Kerbis: I physically left the Wabash office and went back to the Monroe Street office, which was the central office, and I had a number of interesting projects assigned to me. The partner in charge was Bill Hartmann and he had a number of project managers and administrators with him in that office. I did know that there were dynamics between Walter and Bruce Graham—I knew that there were these competitions. There was also Bill Dunlap, another project manager, and Jim Hammond; there were a whole number of these managers.

Blum: Weren't they officially called "partner-in-charge"?

Kerbis: There were partners-in-charge, of which Jim Hammond was one. Bruce Graham was not yet a partner-in-charge. Bruce and Walter still had not been made partners. I think Walter was made partner before Bruce was made partner. In any event, they were project managers or chief designers on these

87 projects that would come along. One of the very early projects that I got assigned to work on with Bruce Graham was a hotel for Michigan Avenue. Our client was Herb Greenwald. We formed a team, and Bruce was very aggressively working up the corporate power ladder. For some reason we were assigned to this project and we met with Herb, both Bruce and I. Maybe this came a little after I did the library, because this was sort of the beginning of the end of my stay at SOM. We met with Herb, and Herb described his program for the site. We then worked on this project. Bruce and I were working together. Bruce sort of came on to me. Bruce, I learned later, had an unhappy marriage at that time. I was very straight laced, in that I would not go out with a married man. I was very straight about that. I did date single people, but I would never go out with married men for some reason, I guess it was my background. I really felt that his actions were way off. So Bruce and I had some words when he came on to me, on a personal level. I rejected him and I said that it just totally would not work. It really was because he was married, because I did find him attractive. Now when I remember Bruce, there are some physical parts of him that I still find interesting. I remember his hands. So, that's how close we came to each other.

Blum: How was it working with him?

Kerbis: This was very upsetting to Bruce. He definitely found this rejection very unpleasant. He did not like this. So we were now not on a very friendly basis, as this job was evolving. Obviously I had an idea to build a certain solution for this building. Bruce had his solution in another way. So all of a sudden, as a team, he said, "Well, I think this is the way to do it." And I said, "Well, I think this is the way to do it." So consequently, we now had two directions. So we made our presentation to Herb, and all of a sudden Herb gave me the idea that the proposal that I had, this little germ of an idea, was more interesting. Bruce was going to bull his way to show that his idea was a better one. Before the next meeting with Herb, Bruce broke his leg and was out of commission. I ran with the ball and did not present his idea at the next meeting. Bruce came back to the meeting, but we had not gone in his

88 direction. Bruce was furious. He said, "I'm going to get you." He eventually did, he got me fired. There was a strategy. I did not leave at that time, but we were enemies for life, after that. He really went after me. So there were a number of these events. It was a professional as well as physical kind of thing where Bruce and I couldn't work together. It's sort of hard to tell which came first, the physical rejection or this competitive kind of thing with Herb's project. What happened to end the project—this was the project that Herb went to get financing for in New York when he died. So that was the end of that. I was off the project by then.

Blum: You have said in one of your many interviews that in 1959 you left SOM after trouble with Bruce Graham. So this must be the tail end of your stint with SOM. Before this, you did the Skokie Public Library, which was an award- winning building. It was said to establish new standards for libraries.

Kerbis: It was a very good solution. I got that assignment and it was a very wonderful evolution because I had Jim Hammond and he was the perfect gentleman. No come-ons; he was absolutely superb. We had a good client and librarians are usually well-read and forward-looking. I love working with librarians after that experience. That was really an excellent time.

Blum: Who was on the team with you?

Kerbis: It was a teeny-tiny team, again. I was the designer. It was such a small building, just a little suburban one-story building. It was probably smaller than 10,000 square feet. It had a couple of atriums, which were a little unusual then. There were some innovative things, technologically. It was a little brick courtyard building. It was inexpensive.

Blum: How did you get assigned to this project?

Kerbis: I don't know how. The hotel building, that was a high-rise; that was important. Greenwald was an important client. So that was highly

89 competitive. But these little throw-away jobs, where a librarian would come in and say they wanted a 10,000 square-foot building, it was a very modest size. It was not a kind of project to run after for the partners. Blum: Was it Bill Hartmann who assigned projects to certain people?

Kerbis: Yes, probably. He and his team of partners discussed it and then divvied up the small projects.

Blum: The Skokie Public Library was an award-winning building and you went on, almost at the same time, to do another project, which was at the Lake Meadows Club. It was, as I understand it, a country club facilities in the heart of an urban renewal project.

Kerbis: Right. The Lake Meadows projects were all high-rise buildings. They had devised some support buildings, like a shopping center. There was also a little school building designed by Jim Scheeler. He was also in transition. A number of Air Force Academy designers were trying to make this transition back into the general office.

Blum: Wasn't Ambrose Richardson connected to the Lake Meadows project?

Kerbis: Ambrose was a master at planning, and he did all the big stuff in the beginning. I don't know when they did the shopping center—that must have been very early on when they wanted to have a shopping place for the community of high-rises. My work was at the tail end of Lake Meadows. They wanted to build an upscale apartment building and this little school. Jim Scheeler was assigned the high-rise apartment building to design. That, again, was a classier assignment than what they'd give me. Then they allowed me to design this little club building. I then helped Jim in the high- rise, a little bit. Someone had this idea that we would have this little club building for all the residents. It would have some tennis courts. They decided not to have a swimming pool because there was a problem with black and whites swimming together in the same pool. There were prejudices against

90 that. Lake Meadows decided not to open up that can of worms and be exposed to criticism one way or another way. So they made their decision not to address that problem. That was a place where we should have had a swimming pool— it was perfect. One of the other ideas was that they would have an ice-skating rink. The air-conditioning in the summer months was operating for the apartment building, and in the winter downtime we could have a little ice-skating rink using the same equipment to freeze the ice. Then the technology of doing an ice-skating rink on a tennis court and tucking in the Freon and the pipes underneath, and the concrete slab, and so it all became a little problem. So we designed these multi-use tennis courts, which in the wintertime would be used as an ice-skating rink. Then I developed this little knoll and it was kind of a cute building. It was an exposed timber building and it was very tiny. But structurally it was very innovative and it was kind of a precious and very effective building. It was a support building for the whole complex, but it was directly related to the apartment building and the tennis courts.

Blum: Was that an experience that you remember with a good taste in your mouth?

Kerbis: Yes. The designing of it, working with Jim with his high-rise… I think I may have helped a little in planning the high-rise. I know it's not my kind of building in terms of the detailing, but I do remember the earlier plans. The high-rise was his building. It was the smallest of all the high-rises down there. But there were no row houses; it was all high-rises. The concept was very much part of the 1950s.

Blum: Today the concept is viewed very differently.

Kerbis: We found bad parts of that approach, but it still seems to survive as a development.

Blum: I have also read that this club was an award-winning facility. So, at SOM you had done the Air Force Academy Dining Hall, a large, important project; the

91 Skokie Public Library; the Lake Meadows Club; an abortive start on a high- rise with Bruce and then in 1959 you left SOM. You've already described the problem with Bruce. Kerbis: I will say that after this problem with Bruce, I was assigned to do, finally, a high-rise building. I was assigned to a bank in Indianapolis, on the Monument Square circle. The project manager on that was Bill Dunlap. Bill Dunlap was a very macho lover-of-ladies, with many, many affairs. We started this project together. He was definitely the main man, in relation to the client. He might have been a partner, I'm not sure, by the time I was working with him. He definitely was working in the front office. He did not have a drafting table like Bruce did. But he had very strong design views, even though I didn't ever see him working on a drafting table. It was a very difficult project, because it was the typical office building above a bank. It was going to be rented out as offices and so we were involved in that whole period in the 1950s about how to design an office building in the most effective way. One of the main design tools that we used was the planning module. This was not only a technological concept of doing windows and glass and ceiling systems, but it was also a method of organizing offices and the kind of space you were going to create. In the end, it would also be a tool of renting these offices. These were the ways you could plan these spaces and the hierarchies you could assign—a certain kind of person would use a two- bay office, and a three-module office was further up, and a four-module office was a partner, and so on. There were these ideas about planning offices which started with space and ended with technology, or vice versa. This whole period was very much a part of the times. When Mies did 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive, these were technological ideas. His module was a window- wall technology, and of course, he ended up running the apartment ends of major walls on the window-wall module. However, the module itself, working out with the ceiling system, with the floor system, with the materials and the size of the floor unit, all this kind of stuff, was just being thought about and done at this period. So now we had this crazy shape, a curved building. What kind of module would you do with this building? Bill said, "This is the module we're going to do." I said, "No, we can't do this kind of

92 module." So Bill said, "We are going to have a module in the front, on the inner wall, and the module is going to be wedged-shaped, just like you'd have a radian emanating from the center of that Monument Square place, which was a circle. It would be reflected on the back wall and it would, therefore, be a bigger unit on the back and a smaller on the front. I said, "Bill, we can't do this. We can't have these radians. We've got to work with similar materials front and back." I was intensively working on how to make this work as a building that had a back elevation that related to the front. So I said that we could now have a common module on the inner and outer wall. Somehow we would do some geometry so it worked out. It was very hard. I am interested in geometry and I felt that this could be done in a very clever way by solving this geometry. I didn't know how to do it yet, so we had this theoretical argument. I thought it had to be better than Bill's idea. Now, the problem I came into was that I had a son who was waiting for me at home during this period. I was supposed to get home at five or six o'clock. But as usual, all of our problems, working for SOM, had us working overtime and going into charrettes, working at night. I always did lots of overtime. In the beginning we were not paid for overtime, but I think eventually we were paid a bit for overtime. For some reason I was able to work this into my domestic schedule. But when I hit this high-rise building, I was so pushed by Bill. I was pushed by the challenge of trying to do it another way. I was just pulled apart by trying to solve this problem that I knew I could solve, and these were the kind of problems I loved to solve, in contrast to my project manager, Bill. I was now working intensively. It turns out that Bill Hartmann also is a very good mathematician, and knew… I was very surprised, because Bill Hartmann was this managing partner that ran the office and was a kind of an avuncular character, being bald and a little heavy. He never was very controversial. Although there was a period, I understand now, after I heard the stories of how he took over. He was very aggressive. So we were working on the geometry and it always seemed that Bill Dunlap would come and give me crits at five o'clock and I wanted to leave and get home because I had to make dinner for Julian. I didn't mind, once everything was settled at home, to work on it more, or even come back to the office. But in any event, we had

93 these five o'clock tussles. I thought maybe that Walter would give me some support in this, because Walter, later on, became very involved in geometry—that was his life. But Walter didn't give me much help. It turns out that Bill Hartmann now came around with Bill Dunlap and I was able to persuade someone beside Bill Dunlap that this design could be a viable scheme. So I proceeded on my merry way, thinking that I was going to be able to effect a solution with this project. Much to my dismay, I would continually win a skirmish and loose the war. So Bill Dunlap, without hardly giving me any attention and no arguments for a week or two… All of a sudden I was taken off the project. Bill selected another designer that he could work with. So I lost my office building. I was then canned from SOM. At this time, the Air Force Academy team was slowly being disbanded, because all of the designers were being peeled off. One of the master planners of the academy was Stanley Gladych, who had been a distinguished Polish freedom fighter and later became an officer in the British Air Force. He was a very remarkable fellow. He had done a major part of the aesthetic solution for the site plan of the academy. He then had left the Air Force Academy team and was not invited to come to the central SOM office. He then found a place, probably a year before, at the C.F. Murphy office. He was now putting together a team in the Murphy office to work on the O'Hare project. He's an architect, but his major skill is his master planning ability in developing a site. He now was in charge of the O'Hare Airport design with C.F. Murphy. He was slowly picking off some of the design people of the academy team that he felt he could work with. It was an interesting time, because there were so many skills that had been developed in the academy work that could easily be transported to this new office on this new project. The timing was marvelous about how that all could work. So he had discussed with me the possibility of coming over there to work on his team. I didn't really take it seriously for a long while, until I actually got fired.

Blum: Was he speaking to you about this before you left SOM?

94 Kerbis: Yes. And then I was fired and definitely ready to make the change. I would not have gone over there had Stan not constantly said, "Come over." I can't remember who I interviewed with. Carter Manny was the head and I can't remember if I sent him a résumé. It had to be Carter, because Stan was working with Carter. John Burgee had not surfaced yet and become Carter's assistant yet. At that time, John was not even in the firm, I don't think.

Blum: Were you one of several women who were on the team? Or were you the only woman?

Kerbis: At that time, I think I was the only woman. Caroline Henderson, from Indiana, was eventually on that team. Later there were other women. But then there were maybe a couple of hundred people working there. There was a huge working drawings department and lots of other specialties.

Blum: After you left SOM, and you had, for reasons of your gender and your personality and their jobs and their own internal office politics at SOM, you had a mixed experience in a way. You had wonderful opportunities, but there was a down side to each of them. Why did you go into another large office?

Kerbis: At this time, I also went to New York and visited SOM in New York because I thought there was a possibility that I would go to the New York office.

Blum: Did you want to stay with SOM?

Kerbis: Well, that was what I wanted to investigate. It was at this time that I met Natalie de Blois in New York. I went to the New York office and I think I spoke with Gordon. He did not give me much time, but I somehow got introduced to Natalie. We went out to lunch and we had some extended time together and I expressed the possibility of coming to New York. I don't remember if she encouraged me or discouraged me. All I know is that she

95 was having similar problems. But, let's put it this way, in New York, she had already been made an associate partner.

96 [Tape 5: Side 1]

Blum: You said Natalie was made an associate partner?

Kerbis: I don't remember the various categories. She was at least on the first rung. She had been assigned to design high-rise buildings. My heart's desire all throughout my entire professional life was to design a high-rise. I never had the opportunity. There were some very bad near-misses, such as that Indianapolis building. Natalie had already gone through that.

Blum: Were you encouraged after speaking with Gordon and Natalie to pursue this and go to New York?

Kerbis: It seemed that I could have done it had I pushed it farther. Natalie also let me know that it wasn't so wonderful for her.

Blum: As a woman?

Kerbis: I'm not sure that she didn't have trouble with being a woman and getting her due in New York. But she's a real tough cookie and she was in a more liberated… There's no question that Chicago is a more reactionary town, socially, in terms of women's liberation. On both coasts, I think the West Coast as well as New York, they were much more advanced in terms of accepting women—not necessarily in the architectural profession, but in the workaday world. They put me under the table, so to speak, and only gave me very small crumbs. Natalie had already gotten significant jobs and was meeting clients without any question. I don't know whether this was because of Gordon or others in addition to Gordon. Also, the climate of the workaday world in New York, they simply could accept women. I was led to believe that they never could accept them in Chicago. So the Chicago office was very sexist, much more sexist than the New York office was. So I thought I would have an opportunity in New York. However, I came to the problem of my child and getting that situation set up in New York; that whole thing didn't

97 seem like it would be as easy to do. Then it turns out that Natalie decides to come to Chicago. She was a transplanted associate partner. She had already been given her wings, so to speak, and had come to Chicago with her status established as an associate partner. It was not that the administrative team gave any breaks in Chicago. They were not struggling on my behalf or on behalf of the female, although Walter will give you the impression that he was this egalitarian leader. In fact he did not really give me much support when he should have. However, I think his brain would have accepted that maybe he should have given me some support, but also maybe he just didn't give that much support to any of his team, in general. I would not look upon that as something against women, I would look upon that as part of his personality. He was heavy on taking attention for himself, but not on giving attention to others. Eventually, the Chicago office did go in that direction only because by this time people were wondering what was happening in Chicago, there were no women coming up, and maybe they should be doing something on behalf of women. I think there was definitely a turn and there were some pressures among the partnership, since it was legislated on federal projects.

Blum: By the time that change of heart took place, you were long since gone. Right after SOM you went into another large firm.

Kerbis: As a matter of fact, during the 1950s and early 1960s, there were not that many small firms. I think Harry Weese's firm was a small firm, or a smaller firm. But on the other hand, the large firms were doing things that interested me, where I could do some special things and where I could tuck myself in and do my little things and not have to deal with this woman thing again. What I was interested in was just getting the project. Then after that the next thing was to get the project recognized, to have an award if it was good enough. That sort of thing just did not happen sometimes for me.

98 Blum: So you started at C.F. Murphy and you were assigned to the O'Hare project and given the restaurant area. Did you think at that time that maybe you were given more women's work, more kitchens to do? Kerbis: At that time, I had a very salable skill because I had done a big kitchen. At that time, I didn't care. I just wanted them to give me the job and I would try to do it. Later on, I sort of laughed about it, but I transformed these kitchen serving areas into a special architecture. That's what I found most interesting, not the fact that I was getting assigned this kitchen work. The kitchen work was actually kind of small in scale in relation to the big project, the master plan of O'Hare and the development of the various components of the project. I just thought that it was good that I knew something about this project. Probably Stanley could sell my services to whoever was hiring—I think it probably was Carter—here was a person who knew everything about this field, just give her the project and let her run with it.

Blum: You're speaking of the Seven Continents, which is what the building for the restaurants is called?

Kerbis: Yes, Stanley had worked for at least a year, and maybe even longer, on the master plan of the O'Hare site. That included the configurations of all the parking positions, the fingers, the repair areas, the runways, and that geometry. We had helped him a little bit, and I had been on the generic team as well, in developing the master plan. But he had done much of that before I got there. Stanley had this master stroke; he really loved these huge components of master planning and he could do it very well. We gave him all the support to execute this master plan. So the locations of the buildings and the ticket counters, the geometry of the master plan was being developed. He explained, this is this building, this is this building, and now have the intersection of these, and there is going to be passageways and bridges that are going to connect these buildings, and there's the receiving dock. So this was the geometry that I was faced with. Do you do a square, round or octagonal building? It turns out there were slightly different angles for all of this stuff coming together. Also, there were certain traffic patterns of the

99 people going to the parking lots and the roadway system, and the various levels of the buildings. I was given this original geometry and I had to make something work there; that was essentially the next problem. Also, we were really interested in developing modules and techniques of relating our exterior and interior in a kind of an easy transition from all these buildings. It was a hub of that particular area at the time it was built. So then I set about trying to solve the geometry of the place, with all the levels and elevations and so on. It wasn't difficult to use a circle because nothing else was working because these transitions had to be made effectively. I had a whole series of different modules to work with. Then I had to think of the modules of the building and how to divide it up. All that was kind of an interesting problem.

Blum: Was this furthering the challenge that you had in the Indianapolis project?

Kerbis: It certainly was. That was a wedge shape, and now instead of taking a radian out, I was taking it into the center and filling the center of the opening. And then it became apparent that there were infinite walkways; getting off a plane and transferring at O'Hare became a mile-long walk. We were designing buildings that had endless passageways that had the same proportions and the same ceiling height and the same walkway width, using the same materials. It was very monotonous and boring. I felt that this hub should express a transition and change in feeling—an atrium. All this time, since the beginning, I'm into atriums, from my master's thesis. I felt there should be a big space in the center where these passageways would end up and when you go to this hub you'd know this was a transition to another kind of space—that you came in from an airplane and now you'd know that you were going to go into the ticketing, or back to the parking areas to pick up your car, or get a cab. This was a very unique building, but I felt it should be something more. Whenever you try to do something special in architecture you give it more than its original function requirement. As a designer you try to look at it as the kind of element that raises it up and transforms it into something special. It was easy to give it an atrium and the idea of making it a special building and to have this transition. My problem was that I could not

100 expand the building because I had all this traffic that was crashing around the feet of it at the bottom of the columns; I could not expand or open this building up. If I were to move the building off this intersection, I could expand it, but now I couldn't go against the geometry. So I had this incredible problem of fighting for the geometry and fighting for a bigger space. Consequently, I felt that the inner atrium became way too small and it was not the distinguished kind of space that I would have hoped for. Also, we had incredible budget demands—I just couldn't expand the building willy- nilly—it was unjustifiable. But I do feel that it was a terrible compromise to make the atrium as small as it was.

Blum: Were there technological innovations in that building that you developed?

Kerbis: There were some very interesting technological developments. Again, I loved this concept of a long span and if we could give this inner space and give it the appearance of not having columns, and not enclosing it and having vistas beyond that little atrium, to make it an experience of continuity without encumbering it by enclosing it with columns. I thought I could pull it off. Therefore I attempted to go to a long span in that building like what I had done at SOM. Without any columns this was a very special challenge. One of the things that had been developing at O'Hare was that this would be, in addition to having new expressions, we would also use new materials. This then became a more plastic building. The whole development of a circular building would lend itself very easily to concrete, as opposed to steel. Everything could be poured in these curvilinear shapes and we would express the building differently from the other buildings on the O'Hare complex.

Blum: Was this acceptable to others who were working on the O'Hare project?

Kerbis: Yes. Everybody came on. Eventually I did have a falling out with my dear friend Stanley Gladych. It certainly was not in the beginning, it probably was near the end.

101

Blum: Was it over your building?

Kerbis: I don't even remember if it was about my building. He said that he couldn't work with me. But this was long since after the building had been conceived; it might have been at the time of the window wall. I do believe that Stanley gave me enormous support. He was a gentleman. He had fallen in love with one of the secretaries at SOM and when he came over to Murphy they started a family. He was a very high-minded person, which was very nice for me. When we did have our falling out, it was much later in the game. Maybe I was even off the O'Hare project by then.

Blum: I have read that your sun curtain was never realized. Was that something that you took pride in?

Kerbis: Oh, yes. That was kind of a neat idea. Our problem at O'Hare was that these airplanes were so dramatic the way they were taking off, the jets were virtually going up at a forty-five degree angle when they were taking off and it was very exciting. Great quantities of people would actually hang out a mile away and watch when these airplanes were taking off. This was a very exciting time of airport design. People loved lining up and watching these airplanes. Now we don't care about how these planes get up in the air, but at that time it was a very dramatic experience for people visiting the airport. So we wanted to have large expanses of glass so that people could see these airplanes take off and not be encumbered by low visibility from little, bitty windows. But when you got large expanses of glass, you allowed large amounts of sunlight to come in, so you had sun control problems. We also had the problem of the sound of the take-offs and landings. We had to study how much sound was going to be disturbing inside the airport. So we had to study the exterior wall with a great amount of sensitivity. When you're just sitting around and you can move around in the assembly area when you're waiting for a plane, there wasn't that much of a sun problem. If you didn't like the sun, you could move around to an area with less sunlight. When

102 you're eating in a dining room, you're pretty much a captive client, so if you had these huge amounts of glass and you're seated right by the window, you're burning up and it's not very comfortable. Yet you wanted glass to see out, you wanted them not to be disturbed by the sound, and you wanted them to be protected from the sun. So this whole notion came about if you have this circular building—it was one of those morning-after things where you have a brainstorm—I thought about the sun coming up in the east in the morning, when you'd want the curtain to be in the east, then when the sun circled around to the west in the evening, we had a full circle. Why not follow the sun around with a moving curtain, rather than a whole series of curtains that would stay there and you'd have to tuck them up or bring them down in place. Also, our orientation was such that our quick food operation was in the north and that was the view to the parking lot, which was not such a hot view anyway. The people there were getting food and moving on quickly, not staying to look at airplanes. They'd be in and out, so we could leave the curtain parked in this unattractive part of the building during the night schedule. When the sun came up, the solar sensor in the roof would have this machine push the curtain to the east. When the sun went down or it was cloudy, the curtain would scoot around to the north. It was one of those things where we felt we could add the curtain—we took it out of the construction bids—later when we did the interior phase, since it would be like a blind. The interior decorators were not that enchanted and couldn't think of how to design this solar curtain with their aesthetic sensibilities. Unfortunately I was off the project by this time and I couldn't force this on them—it was their budget. I was powerless and hardly equal to the chief interior decorator.

Blum: You have said more than a few words about the fact that you felt slighted because you were not invited to the opening of O'Hare Airport. Would you talk about that?

103 Kerbis: I should say that I had been at C.F. Murphy for three years before I remarried and I left to start my own office. We wanted to build our own project, the tennis courts.

Blum: You were at C.F. Murphy between 1959 and 1963. Then not again until 1965. Kerbis: I left for a number of years and then I returned for a few more. I was interrupted. It was during the interruption that this solar curtain got undone. When I left the office, I was not around when they had the official opening of the field. Then I heard from my friends that there was going to be this big event and that the President of the United States was going to open the airport. Mayor Daley had this special relationship with President Kennedy so he could ask him to come. This would signify the Mayor's great achievement as a builder in Chicago, and Kennedy accepted the invitation to dedicate the facility. They decided to serve all of these distinguished guests at a formal sit- down dinner that was going to be at the circular restaurant. I heard about this before it happened, but I had not received any word and so I, as was my want—if I don't get invited, I start getting upset—I felt that this was a great slight, so I sent a letter to the President of the United States, to the Mayor, and maybe even to my Congressman. I really made a ruckus, I said that it was because I was a woman. I felt, again, that I was powerless, that I was not given a partnership, that I was not brought into the inner circle. I felt it was because I was a woman. Anytime all these slights would happen, where it was a power struggle, I always ended up with a question of why didn't I have power? The bottom line was always because I was a woman. I would constantly think that way. Maybe there were completely other explanations. For instance, maybe the power struggle was so great between Walter and Bruce Graham, that it was the reason they never even thought about women until they were pressured. Maybe that power struggle was so intense, I don't know. So I decided to take a stand. I did get an invitation finally. And we did go to dinner. And Carter then says, "Well, you were going to be invited after all." But I do know that he definitely heard about what I did from somebody—through the Mayor's office, maybe. I felt I had to go beyond the Murphy office to get an invitation—maybe had I gone directly to Carter . . . I

104 don't know. But I took this opportunity to make a statement and it was effective. I did shake hands with President Kennedy after all.

Blum: You left C.F. Murphy in 1962. Wasn't that about the time that you and a team had an entry in the Boston City Hall design competition? Kerbis: Shall I describe a little bit about the construction of the Seven Continents roof before we get to that? I said it was unique but I didn't say how it was unique. I said it was a long span. It was a circular building. The way we looked at circular structures was that we look at what we have in our experience, the bicycle wheel, with the hub of a bicycle wheel and all the little spokes coming out to the center. We were interested in developing this concept of tension and pulling something against something, and knowing that a tension structure can be the lightest structure—just like from Bucky Fuller, this continuous tension and discontinuous compression, his concept took root in me. It was so clever of him to have developed these ideas. That was my gospel according to Bucky. Now this was another application of this quiet structural sense that I have been born with; these things appeal to me and my brain gets captivated by these ideas. The question was, how do we develop— we know about the spokes of the wheel and the center and we know about tension and Bucky's ideas. We would have a little ring in the center and I had some cables. We know about domes and how domes work in the circle. But then how do you make a dome? Domes were not that appealing to me as an architect because I felt that domes were an expression of the old days, early bearing wall concepts; it was not an expression of the new ideas about architecture that we had. Also, we were dealing with flat-roofed buildings and we couldn't encumber the airspace. We wanted to limit our buildings to be as low as possible, so they could see more from the control tower. It should be a flat roof, so how could we accomplish this long-span, tiny structure on the roof and be effective? About this time concrete engineers were developing post stressing precast concrete in slabs and beams. This reduced the amount of concrete and made concrete buildings lighter. So I knew of this construction technique but how could I apply it to the Seven Continents Building? The main dining level required large glass walls

105 overlooking the airport. The exterior columns holding the glass supported a circular concrete beam which had openings to receive one hundred cables which were used to support the roof. These cables were attached to a tension ring at the center of the building. Now how could we put these things in tension? What I did was I cast gradually enlarging slabs with simple-minded reinforcing sticking out of each slab with a hooked end. These loose slabs were attached to this cable system by the hooked reinforcing bars. It was all a very simple-minded and easy to build process. However, the next thing was very interesting. We weighed the slabs down. We had to figure out the size of the weights and where to put these weights—the engineers did all this. As we pulled down the entire surface, we created an inverted dome—we have pictures of all of this—it was like a dimple. Now all of these major cables were being stressed. When they were put into stress, the dome, instead of being a shallow dome, was enlarged because the cables were stretched farther. The openings between all these slabs were also enlarged. We came back and filled these openings with grout so the grouted cables formed new ribs. Then that was allowed to set up. Later we were able to remove the weights and the surface was attempting to return to its original curvature. So when we have snow loads, it inverts and relieves the stress on the wire, because that reverses all the stresses on the dome surface. Even as we speak, that roof is a very tight roof because it's constantly in this tensioned state. The roof is only five inches thick and it has a two-hundred-foot span. With a two- hundred-foot span you'd normally expect at least a ten-foot beam to go across it. It was a very clever "less is more" application of material. It was very effective. Then in the center we had a little skylight over the circular steel tension ring. There is a problem when you have an inverted dome like that, it's like a bucket and collects water. So we had to reverse the curvature of center surfaces. We had to build up the surface so that the water could be directed into drains. There were three openings in that roof containing drains and vents. But I'm very proud of that post-tensioned concrete, it's a very effective roof surface.

106 Blum: As quickly as things change these days, the fact that the building is still standing and functioning is proof of its value. Were you allowed on the construction site?

Kerbis: I wasn't officially allowed, but a man named Karl Zintl, who does cost analysis for architects, was project manager in the construction phase. I was allowed on site and all those construction operations were very exciting. I didn't have to have permission. I could just go on the weekends, or whenever. It was right nearby, so it wasn't a big problem to get to. I was around and I saw that building go up.

Blum: In 1962 you left and that was the time of the Boston City Hall competition. You were on a team with others.

Kerbis: It was with Y.C. Wong. He actually started that submission. T.C. Chang, who was on the O'Hare team, invited me to come and meet with them. Y.C. was not on the O'Hare team, but T.C. was, and so was Otto Stark, who was Stan Gladych's right-hand man on the site plan of O'Hare. They started this Boston City Hall entry, then I was invited to join them. Sam Sit was the structural engineer on the team.

Blum: Your group came in for an honorable mention?

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Kerbis: It was considered a runner-up submission in that there was a group of about six teams that were selected to continue to the next phase, whereupon we were given funds, something like $10,000, to do the next phase. Each team was paid to submit a more detailed proposal of their design. So then we had to also ally ourselves with a substantial firm so that in the event that we were awarded the contract we could have an in-place engineering group that could help us complete the project. So we selected the C.F. Murphy offices, because most of us were from there, and then we asked them if they would

107 join our team. Of course they were more than happy to join us because this would be a substantial commission. Then we had a contract with them about how we would break up and how each person would participate. Y.C. was the lead player in this and he had his lawyer draft this contract. We also were having problems because Y.C. was doing most of the work in his basement— none of us had offices. I was working at home also. So when we developed this team, C.F. Murphy provided us a space and we did the next two or three months of work in a bona fide office. It was kind of nice.

Blum: Well it was quite an honor to make it into the next phase. Who were some of the other teams that you were up against?

Kerbis: They were some of the top teams in the country. The people who finally won were from Boston, Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles. They have a very fine firm to this day. Their design was executed in a Brutalist concrete expression and the very interesting thing about their proposal was the way they developed the site. It was a very difficult site with a thirty-foot drop in the elevations of the main entrance with a highway that went alongside of it. They had a very interesting landscaped park solution. Thirty or forty years later, the government of Boston has found that this is a white elephant; the building did not adapt with the flexibility and growth that was necessary through the years. It was a very site-specific and program-specific solution with many intricate spatial developments and structural anomalies, little strange expressions. It just did not work as an office building. So we're back to that cusp of the problem of functional expression versus Mies's idea of a space that does not have individual expression of the functions. So the functions within a space are more or less flexible. There was a great reaction against that—Mies called it a universal space—when he developed that, although many who called ourselves Miesians agreed with his philosophic direction. But the reaction at the time of this competition was against this— they wanted to have a more individualistic expression by the architect. This was thirty years ago. There was a long period where this reaction prevailed. It's kind of run full-circle now.

108

Blum: So time has proven Mies's concept viable?

Kerbis: Absolutely, especially so with particular projects, like the Taj Mahal will be an icon of a very specific application and it will remain an icon. There are some specific buildings that you want to have time bound, like a church, or a Gothic cathedral. Mies was trying to solve the problem of space for our time, for the modern age. It was he who found that hook where he raised these expressions into classic spaces. He went on to do the Farnsworth House, which remains an icon in our time.

Blum: In 1962, for about two years, there's sort of a gap in the literature. I don't know what you're doing. Is that a time when you stayed home with your children? You were pregnant at the time.

Kerbis: In 1961 I married Donald Kerbis. When I became pregnant, I gave notice to C.F. Murphy. I guess it was 1961-62. I had just given notice to C.F. Murphy when the competition started, so I continued on the competition for the next season. Donald Kerbis was a grammar school teacher and in the summer he was a tennis pro. He had a little baby, Lisa, and I had Julian Peterhans, who was now eight years old. We attempted to form a blended family with our children. We also decided to have a child of our own. Kim was born in 1963. But our other objective was to develop our own property. We had conceived of building the first indoor tennis facility in the Midwest. There were some air-supported structures in New York City and many people had joined that club in midtown Manhattan. Also there was something in Connecticut where people played tennis indoors through the winter months.

Blum: What is an air-supported structure?

Kerbis: This is like a big balloon. It's a tight membrane and they keep blowing air in it to keep the roof up, otherwise it would collapse. So Donald Kerbis had the skill to do this tennis business and he felt that he would love to give up his

109 teaching job with the Chicago public school system and have his own wintertime facility. Previously he would work in a country club in the summer and in the winter he would work in the teaching business. I immediately developed what we thought was the prototype for an indoor tennis facility. It was a very interesting design. We were very naïve because we thought there were so many acres of inner city that were blighted that we could get some land in the city and we would create this neighborhood tennis club. So I made this prototypical, non-site-specific architectural solution and my husband and I went around to get investors. We spent a solid year trying to get that project built. We would be the managing partner and we were offering investors all sorts of things to create a partnership. We had to get a group of people to help us, lawyers and accountants, and we had to do a business plan—I had never heard of a business plan. We finally did succeed by various people giving us advice, but after getting pushed around. It was a very good time, but because it was a new type of business and also, the whole idea of financing marginal businesses, we were a marginal business. The whole vehicle of money available to young entrepreneurs didn't exist. We did form a limited partnership. We did find lawyers and accountants. We found a great number of people on LaSalle Street. We got to these very important people because they were tennis nuts and they wanted to play tennis. There were also people from the North Shore who worked downtown. We had easy access to them. But it was still very difficult. While I was at C.F. Murphy, I had purchased my first love-car, it was a Morgan. A Morgan is a roadster made in England. It's built with a frame of wood and the sheet metal is attached to the frame of wood. I had been reading Road and Track and found that this automobile was in Redding, Pennsylvania. After five o'clock one evening, my Murphy buddies tucked me into a bus to go to Redding, Pennsylvania. I traveled all day and into the next day, and at five o'clock I got to Redding. The man who had a little house in the country had come to the bus stop to pick me up. He drove me to his house, we made the deal, and I got into the car and drove back. So when I met Donald Kerbis in the springtime where I brought my son to learn to play tennis, I drove up in my classy little sportscar. It's in the manner of an MG, but it's much more

110 elongated and it's a very elegant car, it's a two-seater, a gorgeous looking car. So I had this car, and I had left Murphy, and Donald was still working but we had two children and we had all these things that we had to do with our limited amount of money. So what happened eventually is that we sold my little car in order to survive throughout the year, because it was so difficult for us. It was a terrible sacrifice. It was such a terrible sacrifice that when we finally did put a club together Donald Kerbis bought me another Morgan to make it up to me. I guess he thought it was such an important part of our relationship. So it was a very intensive year of trying to be a developer, and a developer of a very specific kind of project—it was not just an apartment building or townhouses. We became more clever after a year. I remember Donald had just one suit and every time it went to the cleaners, it seemed to get thinner and thinner. In the meantime we found out that we couldn't get our business plan to work in the city because of the land prices, even if we were to go farther and farther out of the Loop area. We finally decided that it had to be in the suburbs. My original little city plan of being surrounded— we had taken a city block and were surrounded by streets—that was definitely not doable. Donald was teaching at Northmoor Country Club in the summer, which was in Highland Park. He had a very significant following in the North Shore among these people who were his clients. He became rather famous and people came from all around. He was very enthusiastic and a fun person to play tennis with. He was very skilled at this and this was what he loved to do. The only way we could get a loan to build the building was to have a specific site that we owned. Then the site could be developed and the land could be the collateral for the subsequent construction loan. We also needed a very large site. We went out beyond the edges of the townships and we would spend all our weekends traveling, looking for sites. We had all sorts of realtors who were also tennis people who were looking for us. We ended up buying a very small parcel of land along the Edens Expressway and Berkeley Road. There was an interchange there and we were able to get on Frontage Road that goes along Edens expressway. We had this very narrow parcel between a railroad and Edens. It was just shoe-horned in there, but this was just the small bit of land that we

111 could afford by borrowing money from my father. So now we had the land, then I had to design the building. So that couple of years were very intensive in building and developing this project for Donald and myself. We developed this limited partnership. Some of our contractors became partners because we couldn't pay them. One team in specific was the H. S. Kaiser Company who were mechanical contractors who did heating and ventilating projects. Both brothers were tennis people and they subsequently built their own project at Fullerton, which they called the Lake Shore Tennis Club. It is a very large club and it's very successfully run by a son.

Blum: What was it like designing a facility and having yourselves as the clients?

Kerbis: We worked incredibly, day and night, together. It was a very intensive experience. Sometimes we were just exhausted. But Donald was a very interesting personality because he was very ambitious at that time and he had never been a landowner or a building owner, but he always wanted to have vacations and have a nice life. So when things got too rough—and we had these children—he would just go out and make arrangements for a little vacation. After we divorced, I found that I was working all the time and I never would think to do these things. One of the biggest things I miss about him, after being divorced from him, is that he was also thinking about having a life and being normal. He was this balanced personality. On occasion we would go off alone. I would say we had a rather balanced life because of Donald. I would probably have gone off the deep end earlier because when I focus I really get into it.

Blum: When you were designing the tennis club, between the two of you, if there was a difference of opinion regarding a certain detail, who had the last word?

Kerbis: Donald just let me do the building. Then he developed the clientele. He developed the club, the entity. That was it. The issue was, we developed a program for what we could afford. He is nine years younger than I was and so essentially he was very flexible in terms of the building. He didn't have

112 any preconceived ideas. He just wanted to have a club. He was very enthusiastic. We found out later, our business was copied so much, that we had provided the testing ground for subsequent entrepreneurs who were going to build these types of clubs. They exploded all over the suburbs. Indoor tennis became very hot. Donald's work became the model for how to run it and what to offer and how many lockers and so on. Everyone came and looked at the building. Then they found ways of making it cheaper. The model that eventually developed was quite different from our little building; our building was very unique. I was still into this innovation in technology, so that building became very unusual. One way we thought we would build the building was with this system of frame building using prefabricated steel. There was much competition which reduced its cost. They're used in farm buildings—they're long-span structures with steel pitched roofs. The pitch would be over the net so you would get loft. The high point would be where it should be. It was a functional application for that structure type. We were thinking we would use that type, from time to time. However, we were located between this railroad and the Frontage Road and at that time we were told by the zoning commission that we couldn't go over a certain height. At that particular location, which was between these two towns, there was also an overhead bridge, so we had to lower the building into the ground. So we built a twelve-foot basement and then built twenty-four feet above grade. Then we had our tennis courts down on this lower level. The overall height would be thirty-six feet and that would be fine. But we had limited land so we couldn't have outdoor courts. We had always wanted outdoor courts so that it would be a all-year club. So we were very naïve, we started to build these four tennis courts and then we had these four tennis courts on the roof. But my problem, in terms of developing the building, was that we were coming up with a very ugly solution. The typical way to build was to have a basement wall and then we would start the concrete block wall twelve feet above the tennis surface. Then we would have this ugly problem where people felt that they were in the basement—it would be a real second- rate experience. We couldn't have that, and Donald was with me as I developed these ideas, but he pretty much left me to do this since I was the

113 award-winning architect and I was supposed to know what I was doing. He just gave me support and input when I needed it. So I then said it had to be a concrete panel and it had to be continuous from the tennis court. So what kind of panel, and how would we build this? I developed a curved panel, it was called a hyperbolic paraboloid. This means that a flat panel would be twisted at the two opposing ends and would therefore create a curve as the panel went up. So from the base to the top of the panel it was twisted and also the panel where we rested the roof structure was a smaller dimension, a reduced span, than where we started in the bottom. So it was a bigger base and reduced at the top. I thought we would build this very easily. Also, it required a very innovative structural analysis because it is a curved concrete surface. However, I've always had, right from the beginning working at SOM and the structural engineer team there, these very brilliant structural engineers. It was at Murphy's where I met this engineer who subsequently designed these concrete walls. His name was Ulrich Gygax. He was not directly working for C.F. Murphy but for the Benesch firm that was hired to check O'Hare's structural calculations. Ulrich Gygax was a Swiss engineer who was very interested in complex things. The way Mr. Murphy, Sr. organized his office was that the team in the office did all of the basic structural design. Mr. Murphy then felt that we would hire a consulting engineer to check all of our calculations. The head of the C.F. Murphy structural department, John Roche, was very wonderful, but he was on the way to retirement—it was he who probably convinced the Murphys that they should have an outside team check all the work. That's how I got to know Ulrich and he became my structural engineer. But after this John Roche finally retired, he had been with them for thirty or forty years, they took their next in command and there were many subsequent failures, like the Grant Park Parking Garage. There were other problems that turned up, as there have been in other firms.

Blum: But you kept in touch with Mr. Gygax?

114 Kerbis: Gygax has done all my work since then—Gygax and Ludwig Steiner. Steiner became Bud Goldberg's chief engineer and he did many of Goldberg's innovations. So there was a team, Gygax and Steiner, designing this curved wall. Because it was such an innovative thing—in Highland Park, all they built was fancy residential houses and a store now and then—we had to walk the plan examiners of Highland Park through this project. They had to be assured that this was a serious and substantial building. Blum: When you say you developed a curved wall, I've seen the building and photographs of it in journals, it looks to me like it's pleated or folded. But you're calling it curved, which gives me the feeling of a circle or an arc.

Kerbis: Each panel was eight or nine feet wide and two panels would create a tripod at the bottom and an inverted tripod at the top where the apex came in; the curve was in the vertical plane. The reason it is a very interesting form—it is a form that has been used in roofs—is that the entire linear curvature is more open and easier to read because it is composed of straight lines. The vertical lines at the bottom start coming up and they are tilted all the way to the top. This vertical line would project at the center and project straight up at the tripod edge. It's just like a pleated skirt. Also, the horizontal reinforcing opens up in a certain way, because it starts out being very long at the base and top and are short at the midpoint. The differential is made up by the concrete filling in the spaces and creating the wall itself. Concrete is a plastic material and so it's a very efficient way to build a very strong wall.

Blum: It sounds like this was a very big challenge for you, technologically and design-wise, but it was criticized by a tennis player who said that these points were dangerous if a player ran into the wall. Would you use that form again today if you had that commission on your table?

Kerbis: There were some people who felt that it appeared uncomfortable. But the other thing was also the business of bouncing balls—they would bounce against the surfaces and it was kind of unpredictable. And also the business of—we had these panels insulated, but they were underground—how to heat

115 the space became a bit of a problem. Also maybe the distances from the back line to the wall should have been increased. There was a whole bunch of things that we had to get to know about that building. We ended up hanging a drop surface over the walls so the balls would bounce more predictably. This whole business of how to get to use this building was something that we all had to learn about. I think this is true that some of the people maybe would have been more comfortable with more space between the court and the outside wall. If I do it a second time, these are the things that I would do differently. There was definitely that criticism. I have subsequently found out that even in a gym a three inch projection of a pilaster coming down was found objectionable. Certainly a two-foot projection was going to be a problem, even though you would ease into it. That is definitely one of the issues that would be addressed. Also in subsequent design solutions, these steel buildings had columns that were definitely close to eighteen inches, so those also were encumbrances into the run-off space that encloses the edges of the playing area. It was one year to get the financing and the site and all that, and it was another year before we built the building. What happened was our general contractor sent it out for bids, and when he was confronted with building these panels, he was unable to build them. He decided to withdraw from the project. Now he had started construction and it was his team. He was from Highland Park and he was a graduate engineer. He was like a gentleman-contractor, he was not a rough-and-tumble contractor. He decided that this was too much for him, and that he couldn't afford to lose all this money, and he had to do more conventional buildings. So he completely withdrew. Now we had this club that we started and we had promised all our investors. Donald had done a cracker-jack job of getting membership and people who were interested in playing tennis at the club—we had a lot of public relations and he had articles written about the building in the papers. We just had to build it. So it ended up that I became the builder and I got the precast concrete company that was hired on by this contractor. He quit the job because this concrete company withdrew. They said that they couldn't do it, so he said he couldn't do it.

116 [Tape 6: Side 1]

Kerbis: I started working in the office of the precast concrete company. To do the formwork, which was complex because of this two-way curvature, everything was operational, but they felt that after they got into developing the shop drawings and the specifics of each panel, that it was going to be too labor-intensive. They weren't about to lose their company to do this project. So it was our problem because we had done so much and come so far. We got the financing from Deerfield Savings and Loan, we had their support. We were very befuddled. My father, also, he had given us money for the site and he was participating and hoping that we would do well. He was part of our team. The final problem was that every time a reinforcing bar came to the end of the panel it had to be welded to a vertical steel strip. It was not a fancy weld, but it had to be a very strong structural weld. All the concrete panels have these steel edge bars and all the reinforcing bars had to be welded to them inside the concrete panel. Probably, looking back, it was overdesigned and it didn't have to be that hard. It maybe could have been every other one or every third one, but we had promised every one and so there was a great deal of welding. The problem was, where do we get all these welders? How do we reduce welding costs? We needed so many. My father had an idea, which was a real breakthrough, and it made this project move forward. He said we should go to an inner-city school and see if we could get some students who want to learn to weld as a project. We went down to a private trade school on Fullerton near Racine in Chicago. My brother-in-law worked for a trade school, Allied School of Mechanical Trades, on South Michigan, so we were a little familiar with what a trade school was. So this trade school on Fullerton launched a program where they were going to train inner-city delinquents to weld. The government really went for this. Maybe there were other students, but most were inner-city high school kids. The government supplied the flux and some of the welding materials, because the trade school packaged this up and got financing. We would pick up a busload of kids each day from the inner city, maybe Cabrini Green, because that was the closest low-income neighborhood, and truck them out to a suburb beyond Highland

117 Park. There were almost two dozen kids with their little bandannas and their kinky hair and they learned how to weld like the best welders in the world. This went on for two semesters. It a fantastic idea my dad had. When we finished this project, the school got all sorts of commendations from the government, the kids were graduated with all these special honors, and I was asked to be speaker at the graduation. Everyone was a winner. The contractor was able to make money because these kids were paid just a little bit, something very minimal. It was a tough winter, so as these panels were now being welded and the concrete was poured, we had to store them. There were a hundred panels and we had to pull them out of the form, which was a repetitive form so that the panel could be flipped this way and that way. When we started to put the panels up, we had a foundation that had a slot in it that could receive these panels. We found out that two panels formed a tripod and we could plop them into the slot in the concrete and they held themselves up. Most typical panel buildings had to be stabilized and held in place. Ours was so neat, it was one of those serendipitous things, just like building the dining hall roof or the other roof, where these things ended up being kind of easy to build. It was just super. After that it was so exciting. Donald was so thrilled that we were again underway and we had our groundbreaking and our panel raising, he wanted to celebrate everything and inform our members that we were indeed underway again.

Blum: That was certainly a learning process for you, in more than just design.

Kerbis: Yes, because I became involved with the construction and my dad was invited to go out with us and look at things. Our members were our investors. It was just terrific. We had this network of people who would help us, and Donald had support from his clients from Northmoor Country Club.

Blum: After this project, you went back to C.F. Murphy for two years?

Kerbis: Yes. I had a little office on Ontario Street. Richard Gray was also starting his gallery—we had our offices in the same building and we would commiserate.

118 He had been trained as an architect and was part of our network of friends at that time. This was during the two years when it was tough going because we were building the club and we had no income because Donald gave up his teaching. We were on our own.

Blum: Were you on leave from Murphy in those two years?

Kerbis: No. I had left completely. I thought I was not coming back. I also was doing some other work. Richard Gray gave me a commission to build some houses out in his Sleepy Hollow Resort, in Benton Harbor, Michigan. I built a couple of very interesting little houses out there. Recently, I ran into one of the first owners who still lives out there. Richard became a client so we had a little income. And there were others that came about at that time. So one day I came back to my office and I noticed there was a card stuck in the door—it was from Charlie Murphy. He did not know how bad we were hurting, but he offered me the chance to come back to work for them again. So of course I accepted and I closed my little office up and I went back to work for two years.

Blum: As you look back to the two large firms that you worked for, SOM and C.F. Murphy and Associates, what do you remember as the differences in the way you were treated as a woman?

Kerbis: The Murphys were very much gentlemen. Mr. Murphy, Sr. was still going to work every day. He ran a rather tight ship. Charlie was next in command and Carter Manny was after him. Then Robert Murphy became involved, he was another son. Mr. Murphy, Sr., was the job-getter. I had virtually no contact with Mr. Murphy, Sr., as a designer. However, it was a family business and it was a much more personal business than SOM. The so-called corporate structure was run completely differently—it was much more personal. Because everyone knew that the family owned the business and they were in charge, there was not that much cutthroat competition among the next in line who were climbing up the ladder. Everyone knew where they stood in the

119 hierarchy. It had that quality. I don't know when Carter was given partnership points, when all that was officially put in to the works. Also, at the time I started working, it was Naess and Murphy, and they were busy buying Naess out—I don't know much about that. Naess was a design architect and Murphy formed a partnership with him because he was a salesman type and Naess was the genuine architect. Mr. Murphy was not a registered architect, although he was grandfathered in as a registered architect. Naess had his team of designers and they did things in his manner and they built the Sun-Times building and the Prudential building. All of that was not too shabby an architecture in the fifties and sixties. However, the young turks . . . actually this was the 1950s expression of what was done in the 1930s. The Prudential building was built on a office module, but it wasn't like going crazy expressing the module like we were doing.

Blum: But in 1967 that kind of design was not considered cutting-edge.

Kerbis: Exactly. Then what happened was, because Naess was so clever the success of the Sun-Times building got the Miami Herald commission for Murphy. That was a very nice easing-out of Mr. Naess to develop those drawings and go down to Florida and retire and continue building for the Miami Herald. That was the parting of the ways. That was sort of what was happening in the office, where there were two teams, very similar to SOM, and two design philosophies. Probably it was really hard. Now I see the split at that time as a transition to the IIT school philosophy that the firm came to represent.

Blum: So you were hired back at just about this time as a new design person.

Kerbis: A fresh face. Some of the old O'Hare team were still there and they were part of the new team as well. When I was at the generic office at SOM, they rented space in the Inland Steel building, after they built it. One of my projects was to design the SOM offices, which I did. The SOM offices in the Inland Steel building were my basic design. I planned it so there was a Bruce side and a

120 Netsch side at the end of a huge drafting room. It was a long-span structure with no columns, so I used this as a huge generic space with a drafting room.

Blum: Did you have anything to do with the interior furnishings?

Kerbis: No. I did the preliminary plan. Eventually it went into working drawings and I don't think I was involved in that. I did the basic layout and worked with the partners about how big the offices were going to be and all that. I think I was actually on Walter's team when I did that.

Blum: So Walter's side of the room had a little more light, or something?

Kerbis: It did. They overlooked the First National Bank.

Blum: What did you do at the Murphy offices?

Kerbis: I also planned the Murphy offices. I used those big pieces of self-standing glass which had never been done before. I had experience with these very heavy glass panels which we used at O'Hare to cut down the sound. I was familiar with the feeling of using very heavy and dense chunks of glass. That was very dramatic. All the executive offices had these sheer glass panels. In construction they had to take the alley wall down to move this glass in. They had cranes lifting these big glass pieces. But it got attention—it was published. Charles Murphy, Jr. was very interested and he devoted his whole life at that point to doing all these little details and working with the interior designers. The basic office layout was mine, but it got turned into an interiors project, which was when Murphy got involved. George Larson was the interior person when we were doing the O'Hare Seven Continents Building, but I can't think who was on the C.F. Murphy office project. The C.F. Murphy offices were a cracker-jack job.

Blum: Why did you leave in 1967?

121 Kerbis: Over the next two years, I was not given very important work. Some very important jobs came into the offices and I felt that I should have been given a leadership job. Jerry Horn, one of the designers, left also. There was a whole group of very good designers. They got McCormick Place and I wanted that job, and the firm went out and hired Gene Summers to do it and I left. Gene Summers wanted to do that job.

Blum: So you left feeling that you had been bypassed?

Kerbis: I was definitely bypassed. They're very gentlemanly, but I still had that feeling that they wanted a male leadership person who would represent them in these meetings with the city and the corporate world. I didn't make the cut.

Blum: So you gave them notice and you put up your own shingle.

Kerbis: I went back out on my own again.

Blum: You were the first woman to officially own and operate an architectural office in Chicago. As you made this change, you were aware that you were taking a big risk? What were your concerns at the time? I can see what the risks were, but what was your security?

Kerbis: Our tennis business was underway. I don't believe that starting an office a second time was much of a risk. The thing that gave me an opportunity, from a financial point of view, was that our tennis business was now generating income and had been a success. It was such a success that we now bought 120 defunct acres in Michigan. Formerly it was a campground for handicapped children that had not been used in years. We purchased this camp and turned it into a tennis camp. I was again involved in building tennis courts and remodeling this and that. We had enough income from our club to purchase this land in Michigan and to build this development with a new mortgage. We had a bona fide business going. So it was less of a risk at that time.

122 Blum: What was the first outside job that walked into your office, or that you went out and got?

Kerbis: I cannot remember.

Blum: In about 1968 you submitted a plan for urban renewal and it was to be a development town. There were lots of residences with gardens and so on. It was Balmoral Park, in Crete, Illinois.

Kerbis: At these times, it was before there were official laws to give percentages of government work to minorities and women. What was available were these urban renewal properties where one could make a proposal to buy land and develop it. This was the cutting-edge of many development projects, including Rubloff's Sandburg Village. Even when I was with Murphy, many developers came to the Murphy office and asked the firm to do proposals and submit designs to develop certain land parcels. There was great competition for that. That was what was happening at the edges of some of the marginal architectural practices at the time. I also had done work for some of these people—I had done some of these proposals while I was at Murphy. The thought came into my mind that if I could do it for a developer, then I could do it for us. One of the earlier proposals I made for Donald and me was to develop this inner-city tennis club. But then it became very complex with swimming pools and ice-skating rinks. That was in Lincoln Park, near DePaul. I did not win that proposal. Balmoral was located in Crete. The reason I got that project to do—it was a huge land planning development project of the Balmoral racetrack—was partly because my offices were located at 664 North Michigan. It just happened that the Balmoral Racetrack's owner was William Miller and his offices were in the same building. It became a big scandal eventually, because he had to testify on the politics of getting his racing dates. It turns out that he corrupted Governor Otto Kerner. Mr. Miller was trying to make his racetrack make sense from a financial point of view, but it was always marginal. He was a very rich man from other holdings, but he did not have great income from

123 the racetrack. So he now decided he would have a fair, and he would plan alternate uses of his racetrack. So I was hired to solve that problem. We had articles in the newspaper and he was a very clever salesman.

Blum: Was it ever built?

Kerbis: He did have some seasons where he did have a fair of some kind, for a number of seasons. But in terms of his investment… It was a multi-million dollar project and he never really executed what I had planned. It was more a kind of a proposal.

Blum: You have stated that there was a time when you were doing drawings and would sign with your initials so that people wouldn't realize that a woman had done this work.

Kerbis: All that had really happened much earlier. When I was starting my firm at these two locations, on Ontario and then Michigan Avenue, I was more or less of the opinion—it was very important to me—that I just be what I was, a woman. I felt that society should change. I was developing these ideas about a macho architecture and the phallic high-rise symbol, but I felt that there were other ways of designing high-rises and that society should change and accept us as women. We would have a new society when women were more a part of determining what that society was. That was when I was just sort of starting to define myself.

Blum: This was also a time of great unrest, in the late 1960s, the climate around all of these movements was churning, moving, changing. Is that what prompted you as well?

Kerbis: That's when I sort of took a stand. I was of the age when I had done all these things, covering up and trying to be macho myself. Say I was on a building project, guys would swear, well then I could curse better than anybody and I could be as macho as any of them.

124 Blum: Do you think that swearing in front of you meant that they accepted you? Or was it that they were thumbing their nose at you?

Kerbis: It was not what they were doing so much, it was that my mental attitude was that I had gone from trying to excuse myself for being a woman and bending over backward to say . . . I had already now practiced for twenty years and I had done some things and I said, this is what I am, it was what was happening to me at my time of life, where I felt that I had no reason to excuse myself anymore. They say I should have public relations, so I was very happy to talk to an interviewer. There were some articles and they were going to do some kind of a spin to make this story be appealing to their readers. I just was saying anything that I could to express myself.

Blum: You were in the forefront. You were very outspoken. You did give interviews. You did speak about being a woman in a man's world. But you also, in 1967, gave speeches and through the drafts of these talks you gave, I could see this evolution of your thinking as you are describing it.

Kerbis: I was bitter, because I was not getting the work that I wanted to get.

Blum: By 1974, enough of your ideas had come together that you founded Chicago Women in Architecture. You got other women to support you.

Kerbis: I sent out a little note to all the women that I knew and friends of theirs. I had this little office on Michigan Avenue and I invited them all to come up.. And, gosh, they came and they were sitting on tables and the floor and it was just wonderful. We talked about how to start and how to organize this group, what was important to us, and what we would get out of it. I don't think Natalie de Blois came to the first couple of meetings, but eventually she came and then over the next year or two, more people came and participated. One of the very serious things, when women were isolated like that, we were all going though the same experiences and trying to react to situations, like sexual harassment, and how women could defend themselves, or whether

125 you just continued to accept it. All of these were young people, some of them were married, some even had young children. Some of them were doing architecture and some of them were just doing it to make a living. There were all kinds of us that had different goals. It also turns out that there were firms that had different pay scales and different relationships to the women. So if we could assist with finding the right firms and telling the women what to expect when they got to the firm from a woman who had gone through the firm earlier, then this would be a great help in transmitting this kind of information and just talking about it—how to get jobs, and where not to even bother to try to get a job.

Blum: Was this a forum to exchange ideas or did it actually take action?

Kerbis: At that time, when I was just kicking it off, it was just a forum. Eventually, they became much more effective in drawing up a Bill of Rights, a much more formal organization with dues. I just had breakfast treats and coffee when they came. Later on they received a grant and even put on a show in a gallery. That was incredible and brilliant. The next generation, the women who were ten, fifteen, or twenty years younger than me, they became much more effective. But we had to go through this informal process before we got to the formal thing.

Blum: When you organized it, were most of the women who responded to your call women who had been in architecture for a while? Or were they young women who were just starting out?

Kerbis: There was a network of people. At that time, I had almost twenty years of experience. There was a woman from Loebl, Schlossman named Po Hu Shao, she probably had fifteen years of experience. Pao-Chi Chang was one of us, although she didn't have quite as much experience as I did. She had been with Mies and SOM, maybe she still was with SOM at that time. There were a handful of people who were significantly experienced in that first little group. That first group—it had to be more than twenty women, I'm sure I

126 sent letters to twenty or so people—all of those women stayed with the group through its various phases. From time to time I did not participate much and I think when they put on that incredible exhibition, Gundoz Ast and Cindy Weese did an incredible job getting funding. They were just a major force. They were a major force in the next organizational transition and also to get this exhibition underway. I was just a regular member by then.

Blum: Now when you look back at 1974 after twenty plus years have passed, do you think things have improved for women?

Kerbis: Oh, yes. One of the things that made things vastly different was the legislation to define that a certain percentage of work in all these federal, state, and city projects be dedicated to minorities and women.

Blum: Wasn't there a problem with defining minorities and including women in that definition?

Kerbis: Yes. The minorities took the first twenty percent and then eventually it got the five percent dedicated to women later. But it still was significant that there was some attention. We found out that maybe fifty percent of students at eastern architectural schools were women. So the notion that there were only five percent of women in the field was a very unbalanced representation. There was pressure to define better percentages, but we have never gotten beyond that to this day.

Blum: In 1983 didn't you give testimony before the State of Illinois, the Gannon Proctor Commission, in favor of including women in the definition of minorities?

Kerbis: Really only ten years ago. It was definitely very slow in coming, but then it came and that did allow significant women's firms to get work and do very well. I think Carol Ross Barney is our shining example now of a woman's practice.

127 Blum: Is it smooth sailing for women today?

Kerbis: What has happened is that the problem of the reluctance of society to accept us—what I discovered after doing all that publicity and coming out and saying, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm a woman."—I found that the shakers and movers of the real world, of building the high-rises, are still not going to give these jobs to women. They will still give work to women, it's just a question of what kind of work we get. What's happening is that we've also had a transition from the large corporate offices nibbling to death the small offices while taking over a lot of the small work. We also had this phenomenon where the small office was very rare in terms of architectural practice in the 1950s. Now it's reversed and there was an explosion in the development of these smaller offices being able to do regional work in architecture. There are still these large firms, but they're now becoming global firms. There is a great number of small offices that are surviving. One could not survive easily in the old days as a small practitioner. All you ended up doing was residential work and that was not my particular interest, nor was it what I was good at. So I felt it was important to have larger projects that had something to do with what I was interested in. Then slowly we got this government work, so we were able to go forward. There still is a reluctance, I think, with the women, right now. Now we're in another transition in architectural practice into the computer age and the volume of work you can accomplish with a computer instead of a whole flock of draftspersons. A computer can do the duplicate and repetitive work.

Blum: Do you think women are comfortable working with computers?

Kerbis: I don't necessarily think women favor it, but I do believe that the younger people find, and women are among them, when they are exposed to and learning the computer . . . They start this profession not knowing one way from another. They certainly find out that the computer has become a wonderful tool.

128 [Tape 6: Side 2]

Kerbis: For instance, if you do one toilet, all you do is press a button to repeat the toilet solution, rather than drawing it and redrawing it if the drawing was in the wrong place. So I found with students, they complain about doing the repetitive stuff, asking why they have to draw a brick over and over again if they could just use a computer. So we're in transition again—the whole practice of architecture and the idea of the office location—it doesn't have to be located in a downtown area, it can be located in the middle of Colorado, up in the mountains, and everything can be electronically transferred. Everything is changing and it's very exciting. I understand, for instance, at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill that Carolina Woo, who is Chinese, is getting all these high-rise commissions from China and bringing them to SOM and she's gotten so many commissions that they're being spread to the New York and Chicago office. She came from the New York office, went to San Francisco, then relocated to Hong Kong. She is one of those getting the projects. I think she is a very heavy hitter in the New York office. I don't know the politics of her situation. I do believe that some of these foreign clients are more sexist, even farther behind than in Chicago, so I do not know how that has evolved. I do know that she was the contact person to get these projects—maybe she brought along teams and the teams sort of gave the impression that it was a male-dominated team. These little examples which interest me in how far we're pushing it are little signs of where it is. For instance there're a number of firms specializing . . . There was a woman, Joan Goody, who was married and developed a firm with her husband and then her husband died and she now has her firm with another partner. She's very effective with old-age retirement communities—larger projects now—but she started out doing the residential bit and then growing in scale. The first high- rise by a woman is the one I'm most interested in. I have my money on Carolina Woo at SOM. But maybe by this time she's not interested in design anymore.

129 Blum: It sounds like women are getting a better shake than they did twenty or forty years ago. Your efforts certainly have borne some fruit.

Kerbis: Just a little bit. It's definitely been improving. I'm sure that anyone else in my position would have done the same. It's not a great skill, I just stuck in there for a longer period of time.

Blum: Can we go back to when you began your practice? You did these urban development plans. You made several statements about renovation and rehabilitation and reusing good old buildings instead of tearing them down. When did this come to interest you? It seems like this is the other side of the coin to building new technologically innovative buildings.

Kerbis: I'm primarily interested in the new and coming up with something that's innovative. If it's a new problem, I would really like to have a new solution. However, I also, having come from a very modest background in terms of where you would reuse things in the home and save things—we were a family of cord-savers—coming from this kind of background it seemed to me that there was a great value in what was happening in the existing buildings. Then that whole recycling and keeping the old and remodeling became very important. It's nothing that I started, but one that valued the good things of the past. Remodeling is nothing that I really like to do, I do not want to do it, but I find that it has great merit. Also, what happens is that in the context of a city, it adds incredible character to the streetscape to have the heritage of what went on before in the development of the new architectural experience. I do find that's very valuable.

Blum: Do you think a more general interest among people interested in architecture has been influenced by the fact that Chicago, in the recent past, has taken down some of the really good historical buildings, buildings that probably never should have come down but that, economically, presented a problem? Do you think this interest in remodeling and restoration was a knee-jerk reaction to all of this?

130 Kerbis: I think this happened all over the country. The modern architects were so full of themselves, even Mies, they didn't even want to study history that much. It became worse as it went along—as the second generation took over, they didn't find that studying history was very valuable to them.

Blum: Even situated in the city of architecture in the United States?

Kerbis: The modern architects in the early times—I did not know about some of our great early residential builders of a hundred years ago and I'm passionately interested in architecture. We just did not find out about these things. There was a whole society out there that lived in these wonderful buildings and sort of took them for granted. We just overlooked them. Slowly there's been a whole reaction to that where it has become very, very good. Even the great architectural scholars and more profound thinkers were going into and studying the more recent history. As opposed to studying Gothic architecture, they were studying the beginnings of Modernism. Peter Eisenman was developing a vehicle to give voice to all sorts of historians who were now studying a whole variety of new information, new resources of architectural experience.

Blum: In our immediate situation, limited to Chicago, do you think the Stock Exchange had to come down before we could appreciate the value of the Reliance building?

Kerbis: That was so terrible. Yes, I think we did such terrible things and we allowed them to be done. Part of that was because of the bad mindset the group of modern architects had at that time. We allowed that to happen.

Blum: That was only one of many. Do you think that had an influence in turning the tide and influencing you on a personal level?

Kerbis: Absolutely. I think it became more apparent that these were such valuable pieces of work that came down. That elevator screen over there was

131 discarded from the Stock Exchange and my friend Quig Lewis loaded it up on his car and brought it here.

Blum: Who was he?

Kerbis: Quig Lewis was an architect who worked at C.F. Murphy. I think he worked at SOM on the architectural team that went on to C.F. Murphy. He was a close friend. He's dead now.

Blum: Has there been any residual influence on your design because of that new appreciation?

Kerbis: It sort of comes from my ideas about architecture. I'm interested in technology, but this sort of goes back to putting things together—in all of our history Chicago has such a strong tradition of innovation in construction. Some of Louis Sullivan's buildings were not that structurally innovative when he was with Dankmar Adler. Adler had a much stronger influence when he was in that part of the game. I do believe that just looking at good things helps, even when you're not conscious of it. Good things become part of you, just like listening to good music—if you just listen, even if you're not aware of who it is, it still goes into your very soul. Some of the things, like in the Auditorium that Sullivan designed, I just hated the elevations of those two walls on either side of the stage. There's so many little things you can look back on, but one forms some kind of an opinion. But then you look at the Carson Pirie Scott building and it's something to die for, it's so marvelous. When I go to California, I guess it's no wonder that they developed the way they did architecturally—they don't have much there. If we continue to tear down these incredible buildings, that'll happen to us too. Architecture doesn't have to be this colossally intense study of the good, but if the good is there, you get it subliminally, I guess.

Blum: We are now in an older building, which is your home and office. When did you decide to buy and renovate this?

132 Kerbis: This was a throw-away building. It's a hundred-year-old rowhouse. We just happen to be on the end of the row so that I can have three exposures. It is funny that I should have found this building and stayed here for as long as I have. All my life, I felt that I wanted to design a space for myself. But this is so comfortable and it works for whatever my needs are. Also, I think I have influenced this community just by being here, just like my presence in the architectural community. Just that I'm there, even if I shut my mouth and not vociferously defend women, that becomes an element of substance in this community, as well as in the profession—it makes some kind of contribution.

Blum: How long have you been here?

Kerbis: Maybe not as long as twenty years, but maybe seventeen or eighteen.

Blum: Why did you decide to buy an old building and rehabilitate it?

Kerbis: My office was on North Michigan for so many years and I just thought that I'd be there forever and I neglected to verify that my lease was coming up, or when it was coming up. The Farwells built and owned the building, they were neighbors of mine, and they were very nice people, even though they didn't manage it. All of a sudden I discovered that the managing people had given my lease to my neighbor and so I had to move. I felt that was terrible and I thought I should get my own place where I don't have to be moved by just a whim. So I found this building and it was very cheap. It's a very handsome building, the proportions of the window openings and the brick, it just had value. It was extremely cheap, only $50,000. It had been an abandoned building and it had been unoccupied for several years. All the windows were open and the water pipes were all broken and there was debris everywhere. It was just really like a slum building. Next door was a pornography shop and the next townhouse down was a house of prostitution and across the street there was a nightclub and women were performing over there. There was a shill out in front trying to get business. This was a very bad neighborhood.

133

Blum: I remember Old Town being the place to come and see, in the 1950s.

Kerbis: It was kind of a scenic spot.

Blum: So why was it so deteriorated in the 1970s?

Kerbis: That happened as the landowners were gouging the people who were renting.

Blum: On Wells Street?

Kerbis: All along Wells Street. It happened as the owners got greedy and started gouging the renters. Finally the only way to keep renting was to get these marginal renters. It was a very bad time.

Blum: So the attraction of Old Town was really sort of diminished by the time you came in.

Kerbis: I came in here when it was hitting bottom. There was a vaulted sidewalk and it was falling down out front. The street was all jammed and there was debris and everything was terrible. Dope was being sold on the street, just a typical inner-city . . .

Blum: But since you've been here, it has obviously come back.

Kerbis: Everything has tripled. The land values have increased and all the questionable shops slowly have been put of business.

Blum: You had a lot of courage to have come here when you did, considering what you're describing as your neighbors.

134 Kerbis: My friend, Bill Monahan, who was head of interiors at C.F. Murphy, he shared my space eventually at 664 N. Michigan. He refused to come with me to this place. He didn't want to have a desk in this office. Blum: Did he think the neighborhood was too dangerous?

Kerbis: It was too awful for him. So I came here alone. I set up shop and I decided that I would show those striptease people, those women across the street, that I could be an example that a woman could have a better way of making a living.

Blum: Did you think any of them would go to architecture school?

Kerbis: No, I found out that they were all men—it was a transvestite bar! I didn't even know the difference! I told this man who was working in the street— this engineer was working on the street outside my house, I said he could come in and use my phone—that I'd never seen such gorgeous 6'2" women all together. He laughed and it was the biggest joke—it turns out they were all men. I think that says a lot about our society and the prejudicial images we have about gender.

Blum: When you opened your office—you have five drafting desks? Did you have your own affirmative action program going? Did you employ women?

Kerbis: Yes, as a matter of fact, from time to time I've had women. One of my women, one of my first employees, is Jane Moos (Cohen), who became an associate partner in Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's New York office. She was one of my pride . . . Through the years, there have been women.

Blum: When you were looking for someone, did you prefer to hire a women?

Kerbis: I never went out of my way. I took whatever came. Through the years, when you work with someone long enough, you become very fond of them and there is this expectation, and their personality, and how you can work things

135 out. In general, I have very fond memories of people who I've worked with. I think that has been very nice. But let me interject that things have not been that easy in continuing a firm, for me. I have thought of taking on partners so that we could divide up—I didn't feel that I was a very good project-getter, I wasn't a very good salesperson. Then when the opportunity came, I did join the teaching area. When things were really rough, I became a teacher at the University of Illinois and then eventually I went on to be tenured at Harper College in Palatine. That sort of made my income more secure. It wasn't me so much, the bottom line was actually that I had three children to send to school and they all went to private school. When I lived in Lincoln Park they all went to Francis Parker and that was another whole thing that was very important. And I went through a divorce. Also, I did not survive as an owner of the business and my husband eventually lost all the business and he had virtually no income.

Blum: Are you talking about the tennis club?

Kerbis: Yes, both our businesses. Both the tennis club and the tennis camp were lost because the mortgage was unpaid so both businesses were taken back by the banks. I was out of the partnership by that time, that was during the divorce period. Essentially, there was no income for my husband, so there was a lot of pressure on me to support the children.

Blum: You were divorced in the early 1970s?

Kerbis: We separated in 1970, but we were actually divorced in 1980. It was one of the longest divorces in Cook County. It was kind of a mess. Most of it had to do with struggling over—I was a fifty percent owner in the tennis club, but I was a limited partner, and that became very tricky—I had nothing to say about what was happening in the business. It was beyond me.

Blum: But in the meanwhile, you were still continuing your own office as an independent architect.

136

Kerbis: Yes. I was doing development and I was continuing to teach architecture.

Blum: You also did some government work?

Kerbis: Yes, it was mostly contracts.

Blum: As a subcontractor?

Kerbis: Well, I did work as a subcontractor to other architectural and engineering firms—that was in the last ten years, after the eighties. It had to do with the five percent law. I assisted with a lot of other engineering and architectural firms. However, I also got some remodeling things to do myself during that period for the Capitol Development Board for the State of Illinois. That was remodeling—I did remodeling of mental health centers and I remodeled the jail in Joliet. It was a hundred-year-old jail and it was just horrible. Some of these experiences were working in those existing buildings. I could tell you some terrible stories. Those were terrible experiences. Working in the state mental health institution, where the kids were off their . . . The physical building wasn't that bad, but just going through and seeing these kids . . . it was not something that I could do easily—I don't want to do that work. When I was leaving the Joliet jail, I would actually get physically sick. I had to stop the car and kind of cool down. Those were terrible times.

Blum: You complained to the press about being excluded from bidding on the CTA/RTA contract, I presume in the city of Chicago, because you were not considered a minority-owned business.

Kerbis: I think that was a time before the women got . . . That was part of the public relations of the turn against—to get the women involved, if that was right, I don't remember that. Undoubtedly I was very angry. That commission was set up. I will also say that Susan Getzendanner, the judge, who was a neighbor near here, sort of ran that commission. I knew her independently

137 and that was terrific. I think I met her through that Chicago Network, the women's organization of Chicago. Then they called me because I knew her from that. They were very effective. Blum: In 1974, there was a "Women In Architecture" symposium in St. Louis. You were on the program twice. One of the presentations you gave was titled "Architecture: Male, Female, or Neuter?" By that time you had developed your ideas . . .

Kerbis: I was developing these ideas of where a woman's place was. I felt that we should glorify ourselves. That culminated in when I felt that women should be very proud of being women and that there should be women's architecture. That was a very pivotal symposium—women did come from everywhere to the symposium. Many women were where I had been twenty years before, where they were saying they could be like a man. Some of them were very hostile to what I had decided I was now preaching, which was that we should glorify our femaleness and go for the expression of female architecture. That was a transition for me, but it was also something that was not met with great delight in the audience. It was very controversial.

Blum: You raised the issue, is there sex in architecture?

Kerbis: That was when I was saying, "Well, damn Bruce Graham and all the phallic imagery . . . "

Blum: You called him the "Chicago Super Stud."

Kerbis: I was able to express some of my hostility that had been awakened many years before. But the point is that even among the women it did not sell that well. There were a lot of young people and they were thinking that maybe that was not such a bad idea. This symposium was developed by students at Washington University in St. Louis—these were young people. One of the students turned out to be a graduate of Francis Parker, who was in my son's graduating class. Francis Parker takes students from kindergarten all the way

138 though high school. I would go speak to students there, if a teacher would ask, and maybe I was over in the classroom several times in that period of about twelve years, talking to the class. I knew this young woman and she was particularly interested in Julian. Her name was Lynn Meyer and she eventually married Dana Terp—their architectural firm is named Terp Meyer and now they have two children who are graduating from Francis Parker. I just adore them. At that time she was just an undergraduate finishing a degree in architecture and she is a very dynamic personality. She was one of the organizers of the symposium and there were a number of others. They became part of this Chicago Women In Architecture group. It was very exciting. The beat goes on, that's the whole point.

Blum: You proposed at the time that a skyscraper designed by a woman should look different. Do you continue to support that idea?

Kerbis: Yes. This thing was also written up by the Christian Science Monitor, which was published in St. Louis. Maybe a year later, the Christian Science Monitor, which was pretty good, also interviewed me and they had many pictures. It was very interesting that this strange man from the middle of Iowa calls me every five years and we have this long conversation because he also believes that there is something to a woman's kind of architecture. He has certain notions of architecture and we talk about it.

Blum: In that article, it did say that someone as well respected as Lewis Mumford supports that idea also.

Kerbis: Oh, really? That's interesting. Now that I'm retired from teaching, I would just love to start working on kind of a notion of what that architecture should be. The beginnings of that architecture was this business that there would be openings in the skyscraper, it would not be a solid sword-like element piercing the sky. It would be more of a mesh-like structure allowing the winds to go through it and also, because I'm interested in the engineering aspects of architecture, I felt that I should lower the wind resistance of this

139 building. If it was designed in this way, it would have great merit from this theoretical notion of less to deal with from an engineering point of view. Wind loads on the building become the most critical design element in high- rise design. If we could somehow relieve those loads, somehow disperse them in a certain way where the building becomes more sympathetic to the wind, as opposed to resisting the wind, it would be a better design approach. At that time I developed a prototype for the building where there would be openings throughout the building and it would be shaped in a way that pierced the wind as opposed to being a sail against the wind.

Blum: Did you think that fell on deaf ears?

Kerbis: Absolutely, because I didn't have a notion of what was involved.

Blum: Do you think any women today, now, twenty years later, have pursued that idea?

Kerbis: I don't believe that women are going to go out of their way to do kooky things because, actually, women in general are pretty practical as a species. I do know that eventually that there was a building built in Miami by Arquitectonica, where the principal designer in that firm is a woman, Laurinda Spear. It was an high-rise building with a hole in it. I thought that was just superb. That was built later.

Blum: Gordon Bunshaft did the Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a large opening. There is a building here in Chicago, on North State Street, by Kenzo Tange with an cut-out, so it wasn't such a way-out idea. And these are men's designs. Gertrude, you also presented another paper at that conference. That was titled "Role Conflicts: Architect/Mother/Wife." How did you, as a woman who is an architect, mother, and wife, find a balance in your own life?

140 Kerbis: I don't know that we can find an absolute balance. If we find balances, it's always that we're taking from here and putting it there. That is one of the interesting things about women having this experience and looking for balance among all these roles, where now men are being challenged to have these differences also. They are going to be faced, if they're not now, and many are, with the same problems of these diverse demands on their time. I think it's a contemporary problem of our age.

Blum: But your children are not babies now. You did manage somehow to raise them, you continued your business, you've had several marriages . . .

Kerbis: And isn't it marvelous that I've got good kids? I have always felt that if it were not for my children's great good health—mentally and physically— what then? I look upon others who have made enormous sacrifices for whatever challenge they were faced with for having not as lucky a gene as my kids have that allowed me to do this.

Blum: What has been your priority, among those roles over the years?

Kerbis: I'm sure my kids would say, "Her priority was for architecture." Well, I don't know if they would. I always was on the defensive, saying that I would . . . In general, when I see myself now looking back on it, I definitely made certain things work for our family and they were primary. In the end, its the children; when you have a dependent that needs you to solve these problems, you just have to be there. There's just no question that I had to compromise the practice. Also, when I look back on the evolution of my practice, not focusing on the business aspect has definitely turned me into what I am. I can no longer blame it on being a woman. It had to be on other things that compromised my pursuit of an architectural practice. For instance, I went to become a teacher, and that gave me an income, but that compromised the office and so why did I go do that? I couldn't depend on an office to subsidize my family. One thing led to another thing. I really think

141 the children came first during that whole period of their development. I don't regret that decision. I couldn't have done it any other way.

Blum: Do you think most women today have a family as a priority?

Kerbis: Absolutely. I definitely think so. I can hardly think of anyone—all the women that I know that have had children, Cindy Weese, Natalie de Blois, have felt that they have to. Carol Ross Barney, I think she has three or four boys—she talks about having a phone in her car because as soon as she starts heading home, she's on the phone and she's talking to them. You have to make accommodations for all the needs of the family. Even if you do have help, for instance if you have enough income to afford steady help. There was a while when I had help, when Kimmy was very little and when our business was going very well and I was married. We had Mrs. King and her son would go out and be a tennis assistant. He was the first black kid on the courts at Northmoor County Club. He was a number one player. Now he's a physicist out in Los Alamos. They were part of our family. We look with great warmth at both of them as being part of our family. She was a great resource and she was with my kids while I was away running the office. So during the time that Mrs. King was with us, I probably had more freedom than when I went though the divorce and I didn't have anyone and I couldn't afford anyone to help—the kids were older then.

Blum: Have any of your children shown any inclination to becoming an architect or anything related?

Kerbis: No, not at all. They actually probably ran away from it.

[Tape 7: Side 1]

Blum: During the late 1960s and 1970s, you were very angry in voicing your opinion about the established order. You called the AIA "moribund." You said it failed to respond to the enormous change that was taking place in the

142 practice of architecture. Amid all of this you were proposed for a fellow in 1970. You were the tenth woman in their history to be accorded such an honor. Why did you accept that?

Kerbis: Actually, I didn't realize what an honor it really was. Now it's less of an honor, but at that time it was a very distinct honor. It's for a very pedestrian reason that I agreed to it—I just thought that I was on this campaign to get more publicity for women. This kind of thing was what would support any kind of publicity for women working in this field. As it became more apparent that there were women working in this field, and that it wasn't such a unique thing, it would slowly turn things around. What it ended up being was that because I did not have a secretary—I was doing my own typing and I had to put this package together myself for the AIA—we didn't have computers and it was a very unsophisticated process—I felt it was just an awful lot of work that I ended up doing and I said, "I wish they would never have given me this." It was such a burden to do the research and talk to the firms and get pictures. It turns out that I found out that Bill Dunlap, who was being submitted and maybe got his fellow about the same time—I understand that he had everything typeset and he was with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, he used their support group. That was even before they had public relations departments in architectural offices, where a person was assigned and became very skilled in submitting credentials. It seemed like it was such a burden to me and when I got into it, it was so horrible. I look back on it and it's just the sort of thing we now do automatically to get a job—to put together a proposal to get a commission and make ourselves look good.

Blum: Would you explain briefly the process of becoming a fellow? You were notified and then you are responsible for putting together a package of your work to support the nomination?

Kerbis: I know what happens now, and I think it was what happened in those days. At the AIA headquarters, they must set up—this is what we have done for the last fifteen to twenty years—a committee. It's called a fellowship

143 committee and they consider who should be nominated for a fellow from their particular community or their particular chapter. Some of these are statewide chapters and in our case, our Chicago chapter is significantly large, so we have a statewide organization. We have many chapters now within the state. At that time, the Chicago chapter was significant—we didn't have as many chapters within the AIA then as we do now. I think what happened—it could have been Carter Manny who might have been on that nominating committee, he was president of the AIA, I'm sure—you go through these cycles of leadership . . .

Blum: Did you need a sponsor in the committee?

Kerbis: The committee for each year becomes the nominating committee . . . I don't think they even get attention, that their names are called out in the committee structure. It's one of those functions that just seems to go on and whoever is the president of the AIA assigns a few people to nominate. Now, that committee that nominates the fellows also assigns one of the committee members to shepherd the material for that person, informing them what is required. What you do get from the AIA when you're nominated is a brochure and written instructions telling you what to do and a number of examples and so on and what the releases are for. You can be nominated in a number of categories such as for service to the profession, or so on. At that time I was a member of the AIA, but I had not served the profession at all. Later on I was to serve the profession with my time.

Blum: What was your category?

Kerbis: It was in design. Also, I had to go to these different firms that I had worked for to get pictures and have them signed off. All of my examples of submitted work had to be released by the corporations that I worked for. They had to say that I was responsible for design. For instance, I submitted the Air Force Academy Dining Hall, I did Lake Meadows Club, I did Skokie Public Library for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Bill Hartmann, who was in charge of the

144 office, who was managing partner in Chicago, had to sign that I was solely responsible for the design of those buildings. Carter did the same thing for the Seven Continents building at O'Hare. I believe that I also submitted my little tennis club and I had some pictures of that—the Kerbis Tennis Club in Highland Park.

Blum: So you submitted about five or six projects.

Kerbis: Yes. And then after a while, the national committee voted that I would become a fellow. Nowadays, if you don't make it, they resubmit because there are so many requests to be fellows. I think I supported Norman DeHaan—his name came up three times for three years. It was cumbersome and very hard to get him through. People are then asked to write letters. I don't even remember who wrote letters on my behalf, but I do remember in the case of Norman DeHaan that Stanley Tigerman had written a devastating letter, so he virtually was never able to become a fellow, even though he had given a lot of service to the AIA. He set up all these interiors . . . He was trying to ally himself to the interiors world with the AIA. He wrote all sorts of legislation for that. I'm sure that someone at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill might have been asked to write for me and I'm sure Murphy might have been asked. But unfortunately, I don't have those letters. I don't have anything. In fact, it was such a simple-minded thing, I did not even copy the letters of authorization that I finally sent in because one of the consequences was that certain of these buildings—there is the problem of Netsch saying that I was an administrator rather than a designer in terms of the design of the dining hall for the Air Force Academy. It bothers me that somehow I'm taking someone else's credit. I asked the AIA if they ever kept any of those letters, but after five years they all get thrown out.

Blum: In becoming a fellow, were you in a position to do anything substantive about the position of women in the profession? Did that improve your position?

145 Kerbis: It really didn't. At that time, also, there were not that many fellows, even among the men. There were maybe a couple of people a year from Chicago. Now, on occasion, there are eight or ten people nominated from Chicago. In those days, there were very few. Blum: You said that Bill Dunlap was submitting at the same time.

Kerbis: Yes, and his portfolio looked superb while mine had typos. I was very embarrassed when I looked back at my submittal. It may not be as bad as I said, but it wasn't that wonderful.

Blum: Do you think the AIA matters to the profession of architecture?

Kerbis: Personally, right now it doesn't matter. But I still believe that it's a fundamental component in our profession. We have to have leadership. They are sometimes very conservative. Even this year, I found out the interiors were lobbying to expand to take more and more architectural responsibility from the architects. They ended up that they want to remodel structures and they are really not qualified to provide health/safety to the public. As they take over more responsibility, they do not take over the exposure of the risk. They can be removing partitions in spaces and it might be a structural partition. There is a problem now where slowly the divisions of the building industry have taken over more and more of the architect's responsibilities. I really wanted to give the AIA as much support as I could. I was just called down to Springfield and there was a lobbying group of interior people . . .

Blum: Interiors people have their own organizations?

Kerbis: Yes. DeHaan was trying to work with that group twenty years ago. Now they're absolutely rabid and they do not know the responsibilities that they should be assuming when they take over our responsibilities. Virtually a shop clerk can be . . .

Blum: Are they licensed?

146

Kerbis: That's one of the issues. They want to be licensed, as opposed to certified. It's a very big issue. The AIA is the only vehicle we have. Also, the problems we have with builders—architects are sued on construction sites without any ability for the architect to intervene in bad construction practices, yet we get sued when anyone falls or something happens on the job. There's a lot of legislation . . . Subsequent to my fellowship I have sort of participated in some of these legislative and administrative functions.

Blum: Did you give service to the national, to the Illinois, and to Chicago chapters? You were president of the Chicago chapter in 1980.

Kerbis: I do think it's what we have to do. It's the vehicle that we have to maintain as well as let our voices be heard. We do have a lobbyist in Springfield. She's been very effective over the years. I don't want to do that work now. I do feel that I should do other things at this time. As I said, when I was busy in contact with Springfield during this interiors lobbying this fall, I found a Harper College interiors teacher was taking students and lobbying in Springfield, and was using Harper buses, very illegitimately—the school was not aware. I had to stop all that, which I did. It was OK. Every so often, I have to use muscle. I do what I can.

Blum: In about 1974, there was a task force on women in architecture. Were you part of that?

Kerbis: Yes. I was asked to testify on behalf of women. So I did a bit of research as to what was the status of women in the profession at that time.

Blum: You testified in front of . . . ?

Kerbis: It was a commission, Gannon something. Was that the woman commission?

147 Blum: Well, there was the Gannon Commission in 1983, in front of which you testified, but that was to verify the fact that women should qualify as minorities. What was the task force all about?

Kerbis: I really can't remember. Blum: In the 1970s, you were in your own business and you became your own client.

Kerbis: Yes. I was not getting work and I decided that I could use my head. I was observing and had worked for developers when they were bidding on properties in the urban renewal program. It was a city program to dispose of derelict properties that would be cleared for new buildings. When I was with C.F. Murphy, I was hired to do some of these proposals. The remarkable part of that program was that it was a political program, probably the most politically desirable personalities were the winners of the program. But the side issue was that you had to have a design architect doing a proposal of how the land would be developed in a physical way. So there were some design implications. So you had to do a zoning study and a proposal of a real building and how it would look and how it would be developed and marketed and how you would pay for it. So it was a many-pronged program. While I was with the C.F. Murphy firm, the clients that came in were usually realtors and they had their own resources and their own economic analysis on the project, that it would be able to be sold or rented at a certain rate, and so on. I was busy developing research on how these things were going together. When I was on my own for a while I did go to various developers and offer my services on various projects and I said I would do them this way if they would finance the submittal, because you had to have a certain amount of money down when you made these entries. You paid ten percent of the value of the bid price when you submitted all these other aspects. So you did all the paperwork as well as the visuals. You had to have money. So I thought if I could get a little project and I could get a very small ten percent— if it was very low-priced land, then I would only pay ten percent of it. So that's what I did. I found this very small submittal. Lincoln Park was just

148 being developed at that time. In the beginning I did offer this service to others and I think I did do something for other parcels and other developers in this urban renewal. Then came this opportunity, right within a block or so from where I lived, this bad property was now going to be redeveloped. It had been cleared and there was a lot of vacant land along Clark Street. Clark Street is a bus street and it was a commercial strip along there and it was not very desirable. But now they were going to try to put in more residential . . . So I made a bid. Since my deposit, this ten percent, was not that much, only about $15,000, that was it. I got the money, but I had no way of financing the entire project. I was lucky that they accepted my proposal. Then I had to go and find somebody who would lend me the rest of the money, or become my partner on the rest of the project.

Blum: I understand the AIA had taken a stand against the architect also acting as the developer. This was not changed until 1978, which was some years after you did the Greenhouse. Were you not the architect and the developer?

Kerbis: I took this very seriously, this ethical stand that the AIA had taken very early, a long time before I was around, about mixing ownership and practice. What happened was when I developed the tennis club, I thought that I should be ethical and I decided . . . I read over this act to see what the ethics were and how it was interpreted at that time . . . So when we were putting our tennis club together, I told my husband that I was an ethical architect, "You sign here where it says owner, and I will sign where it says architect. I will take this part as the architect/builder and you will take the part as the owner." We were a team this way. When push came to shove on our divorce, my husband was the owner, although I did all the work putting this development together, he was really the tennis pro/manager. All of my effort was totally lost. So my divorce hinged upon this mindless misunderstanding of the ethics of it, where I signed away essentially the ownership to my husband and took this very secondary role in the partnership. In fact, I was the one who did all the work, in terms of the physical building and development of that property. Then my husband ended up owning it. When I was about to

149 do the Greenhouse, I said I had already paid my dues on the ethical issue. It was very misunderstood and it was not an appropriate analysis of where our profession had come.

Blum: In 1978 that was changed, but do you think that many architects prior to 1978 simply disregarded it and served as the developer and architect? Kerbis: Definitely. There were many of them, but those that were doing this were not being accepted. I believe that the Epsteins were not in good repute during this period, even though they became very effective in the development end. But the profession did not look favorably on them. They were considered to be a second-rate firm at that time, but it didn't matter to them. They were much smarter than I was. They took their chances also. It didn't matter to me in the end, when I was finally smart about it. I had paid my dues. I always had a great deal of respect for them also, because the Epsteins had built their own shop down on Roosevelt Road, or somewhere. It looked like a pretty nice building and it looked like they were doing good work. That was twenty years before, they had been practicing for years. Abraham, the father, probably was an engineer, I don't know that he was really an architect, but I have a great respect for engineers. I need engineers to support everything of value that I have done. I have a different opinion about this profession because I hold them in high regard. I never put them down.

Blum: Do you think the AIA has become less elite in that way? Or was it just economic circumstances that have forced them to be more in tune to what's happening on the street?

Kerbis: I definitely think that this has changed. Another very successful developer is the guy who has developed all these hotels, John Portman, in Atlanta. He was doing this kind of thing and he not only developed these hotels, but he gave them a design image that only a design architect can do. There are many examples, I'm sure, where these early misunderstood ethical points of view were finally changed.

150 Blum: So you did function as the architect and the developer in the Greenhouse development. Where did you get your money?

Kerbis: I had gotten the approval and acceptance that my project would be done, that the city would accept my proposal. But I had to follow certain rules; one of them was that I had to buy the land and I was given a certain time frame to buy the land. I was given about a year. I remember spending that entire year looking for partners and investors. I had a very bad time. I couldn't find an investor that would even think about it. The problem was that these investors were in the real estate business and at that time had certain kinds of tax benefits. But there were changes in the tax codes all the time, one way or another. It was a tax shelter proposal that was what I was selling. It was not only a return on their investment, but it also had to have the additional benefit with which they could shield other profits. I had a hard time selling this. One day I had lunch with Edward H. Bennett, Jr., with whom I had attended Harvard. I was assigned to his class. He was in practice and he was a very sweet person. We were having lunch and I was telling him about my project and that I was having such a terrible time trying to get investors. Then he said that he might be interested. I was so surprised because I was thinking of it just as how you tell stories of how you're having a bad day at the office. I was not thinking anything about him being the investor. It was just one of these friendly kind of luncheons. The next thing you know, he did say that he might be interested. Then I gave him what I would give these investors. So it was so easy to get this money from him. I think it was only a $50,000 or $55,000 property, and I only put $5,000 up. I had done all the drawings and also I had gone out for bids. I had done everything. I also had the mortgage money in place. All I had to do was get the land paid for and then I would be in business. So he came in with $50,000 and we had a partnership agreement. I never even met his lawyers, it wasn't a great tug-of-war. Everything came along very easily.

Blum: So, after a year of struggling to get the money, it came unexpectedly.

151 Kerbis: It might have even been longer than that because I also had to go after . . . I felt that I couldn't even get the seed money until I had put the whole pot together, which was the mortgage money for constructing the building. That was again another effort. If you're a developer, all these little steps along the way can be very cumbersome and a package can fall apart if one step is not completely done. Blum: Your design for the Greenhouse was quite unique in a dense, urban setting. Every apartment has its own little atrium garden.

Kerbis: The point of that little atrium was that it was on a very unattractive site that was on a bus line. There was regular traffic along Clark Street, it also has traffic lights controlling it. I felt that if people were just sitting along Clark Street, it would have been a very unattractive environment to live in. I felt that if I put an intervening atmosphere or environment between an apartment and this bus line, it would sort of work. That was what the concept was of this atrium. The bedrooms did not open out onto Clark Street, you opened sliding doors directly into this atrium. Living rooms and dining rooms had sliding doors and they opened into the atrium. This atrium would filter you, so you were virtually behind this glass sliding wall and go into the atrium which itself was separated again by insulated glass from the outside. You were really within two walls of the exterior. I thought that would work. That was what generated the concept of the atrium, this kind of an insulating space.

Blum: Did it work as you had planned for the people who eventually bought the apartments?

Kerbis: I must say that having done another development where virtually everyone in the development within five years had moved out and people were relocated, for some reason, out of the eleven original families who bought a Greenhouse condo, at least three have continued to live there over the last twenty years. I can't understand what was the explanation because the profiles of each of these families are quite different. I continue to own one; a

152 single person owns one; a couple without children owns another; and the third was a family with two small children. They were psychiatrists with children, and in that amount of space I can't believe they lived there. Something must be working in that space for them.

Blum: Certainly visually, the atrium extends the space of the actual rooms, but that's a trick. Psychologically it works, but if you wanted to put another bed or couch there, the space wouldn't be there.

Kerbis: That's exactly how it works, it's very funny.

Blum: Now that you've had twenty years to reflect on such a development, being the developer and the architect, how do you assess the problems and the rewards?

Kerbis: In that case, no one wanted to buy the little duplexes. In fact, the people with two children came to me and they had a site, and I was designing a home for them. She was pregnant and something terrible happened to their rental property while they were waiting to start construction. Something intervened in their temporary home and there was an emergency, so I said, "Come live temporarily in the Greenhouse. I have all these vacant units that are not selling. Live there while you build your own house." Then they moved in and sold their property and I was very disappointed because I had had the commission, and I would have liked to build their house. I would have had a double whammy, a house as well as a rental. Subsequently, when I did 339 Webster, I really tried to do something unique there. I was down-zoned and I had a great deal of difficulty. It ended up that I did something quite conventional because the project was down-zoned into rowhouses.

Blum: What was your original intent?

Kerbis: I was trying to put together three parcels at the end of the block. I really wanted to do a multi-story, that would have a greenhouse, a public atrium,

153 as well as these private atriums where you enter a large space and would have little gallery-type corridors going to your apartment. The community group, the Lincoln Park Conservation Association, did not want a multi-story building there. So I was bidding on the adjoining property and I was putting together a more complex real estate package and then the whole thing fell apart. I was unable to execute the whole package when it was down-zoned. They did it to prevent me from building. That was sad and so then I decided simply to do much more conventional townhouses.

Blum: It looked to me, from reading the materials on each of your projects, that your 339 Webster apartments were much more elegant.

Kerbis: They were much larger townhouses. They were 2,000 square feet. From that point of view, they were elegant.

Blum: I thought the appointments were upgraded.

Kerbis: I think they were. When I had more space, I definitely put more into it. However, it did not have these interesting things. It looked out on Clark Street and it looked out to an inner courtyard which has a very bad view of the back end of an existing building. Although these appointments were better, it was not an attractive site. The site took away from it.

Blum: Have any of these apartments sold?

Kerbis: They did sell, but then I do retain a third of them for my own ownership, so I'm renting them.

Blum: Was that out of choice?

Kerbis: In the beginning, it was not out of choice. I thought I would sell them and go on to another development. However, they did not sell within the first year

154 and I decided to take them off the market and rent them. It was a very financially successful result. And I didn't expect it to be that way.

Blum: The Greenhouse was an award-winner from the AIA in 1976. It received the Distinguished Building Award. Paul Gapp said then that the award was given because you're a woman in a man's profession. Did you believe that you deserved the award?

Kerbis: Yes. Sometimes Paul tried to be a little bit controversial. I do believe that he did miss the point of the planning of the building. From the exterior of the building, that when you have a large expanse of building—the atrium was enclosed in glass on virtually all four sides and so you get an awful lot of glass from the outside. When you look at the outside and are not aware of what the inside is, if you look at the exterior pictures of the building, you think it's a conventional building. Therefore, when he saw it and he saw the big glass looking out on Clark Street, he immediately said, "Well, they're just kind of . . .

[Tape 7: Side 2]

Kerbis: I think he missed the point and we were able to correct him later. That was an unfortunate comment that he made.

Blum: When buildings receive awards, what is the value of the award, other than receiving the honor?

Kerbis: Before it was Paul Gapp and now it's Blair Kamin—I think they're just doing a terrific job, because every time they talk about architecture, it's just one more lift under the wings to our profession. In a sense, even though he misunderstood my building, Gapp was a very good critic. It's just terrific that the Tribune has a good critical view of architecture.

155 Blum: Do you think the awards serve to educate the taste of the public or the profession?

Kerbis: I have great feelings about awards in general. However, sometimes they definitely are not well deserved. Then what happens is that you get this picture view of a building without an understanding of the building. It can be so bad where the building is completely overlooked for the picture and you get a little corner of the building, just like a mindless sound-bite on television. These little pictures have the same value—they're just brainless. The AIA decided that when they give their national awards that they would have someone going to the building and going through the building and talking to the people who live or work in the building and experience the building. The architect evaluator gets his own picture about his entire experience and comes back and talks to his award committee about what his experience was.

Blum: Were you instrumental in any way in promoting this?

Kerbis: No, but I was a member of a national awards committee and it was a very interesting . . . I was on the national honor awards committee and we divvied up . . . We went through and discarded those projects which we didn't think were worthy of any award and honed in on some that we would spend some more time with. We divvied up the sites among the committee. We had a person from the committee visit each of those that we would then consider for the award. We did it from a geographic point of view, so I happened to be located in the Midwest and there were a lot of awards that were being considered for people that were from the East Coast but had built a lot in Chicago and the Midwest at that time. So I visited quite a few of these buildings. I borrowed a camera and I don't know very much about cameras. I took a terrible group of photographs and slides and I was so apologetic because Richard Meier was on the committee and all these terrific architects were on this committee—a guy from UCLA and a guy from the South—just wonderful people. I was so embarrassed when I brought my collection of projects up and also my experiences. I was so apologetic that I built them all

156 up and they all ended up winning honor awards! My assigned buildings were absolutely the best of the lot. It does point out that architects do take these awards very seriously. For instance, Michael Graves had submitted his first house design for an honor award. He had gotten this commission—it was in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana—from his best friend. His best friend was a lawyer and was building his first house which Michael had designed. The client and Michael had physically worked on this house together. I'm now a purist modern architect from Chicago but I found great value in that house. I brought it back. It really was not a well executed house from some points of view—there were limited funds and a lot of handwork, but it had this great idea and I was very moved by it. That's not to say that Michael Graves eventually wouldn't have somehow proven himself, but that was a cutting-edge design. Another architect might have just discounted it because it did not have this image of a great house. But it won an honor award. He did have some great pictures, because my pictures were horrible—the owner and his wife were in the middle of a divorce and there was a storm—I hated to interrupt them because she was preparing a dinner party where everyone had to bring gourmet foods, her kids were not cooperating, her husband was against her, and it was a horrible experience. But the building did prevail and it made a good impression on me. It was a cutting-edge kind of breakthrough for that direction in architecture, one that I was later to regret because that became Postmodernism. At that time it was a simple modern house with no pretensions of Postmodernism.

Blum: Do you think the awards are more useful for the profession or for the public?

Kerbis: Sometimes it goes this way, and sometimes it goes that way. It can be either. Blair Kamin is establishing for the public that there is a change in the wind that Modernism has come full circle. He has seen this and has described it to the public. When he describes the awards, for instance, he will give a spin on that kind of information. That's very good for the public. It's also very good for the architects who are doing that work and will get recognition, while for some time they did not.

157

Blum: Do you think the press, throughout your career, has treated your work fairly?

Kerbis: I think so.

Blum: You have given many interviews. Kerbis: There was a period where I seemed to be talking a lot, but I don't express myself very well. I'm sympathetic to what they're trying to achieve also. They have to have a point of view. I'll always have a point of view. In the last six months, I have been called by someone at the Tribune, a writer, who wanted to have my opinion on office design. Now I'm getting to the point where unless I'm seriously committed to an idea, I'm not interested in giving an opinion just off the top of my head. That's one of the ways I've gotten more mature, I guess.

Blum: In the past, you've not only been interviewed about being a woman in a man's profession, but you've been very outspoken about the way women have been treated.

Kerbis: Yes, I felt that those were important times.

Blum: From 1969, until very recently, you were teaching. You were teaching as a professor, a lecturer, a lecturer-at-large, a lecturer-in-the-field. It seems that you've had a variety of titles. You taught at a variety of institutions. Was teaching important to you?

Kerbis: I began to teach when I began doing development. Development takes a very long time for the so-called payoff. You're struggling for years, trying to build a building before you get paid for your work. Again, if clients don't come in, then you've got to have something to pay the rent. That's why my first teaching job was with the University of Illinois. "How can I pay the rent?" was the motivation. I was a part-time teacher for the design studio. I think it was third-year design. I received another offer from a community college

158 called Harper College and at an enhanced salary and I accepted that. I was there, until recently, for some twenty-six years. We developed a curriculum that was quite a bit different. It was only a two-year college and that was the beginning of this whole community college movement. It was one of these cutting-edge community colleges and the president was motivated to do something to have a very special community college. So we developed this program about what to teach these two years. It was called "Construction Technology." It focused on these very simple ways to approach buildings from their construction type. We divided it into materials technology. For instance, we teach wood construction and masonry construction the first semester and we focus on the functions of those materials—houses and one- story buildings. The next semester focuses on one-story, simple steel construction, which could be a library such as my Skokie Library. The next semester is multi-story steel construction, which could be a small office building prototype. Then the fourth semester is concrete construction, which could be a multi-story apartment. So we developed this curriculum which ended up being accepted and repeated in many places.

Blum: It sounds like this was a very practical approach.

Kerbis: Yes. It was incredibly successful because this college was located in the Northwest suburbs where all kinds of growth and virtually all these building types were being built all around us. So our students could immediately start being hired by the local—it could be sub-contractors or fabricators. We had these young people who were filling enormous needs in that area. The winners were the ones who wanted to be architects.

Blum: After a two-year program like this, even students who wanted to be engineers would have to go on.

Kerbis: They took the fundamentals of our course and could go on and finish in two or three years at a four-year college and get a degree.

159 Blum: Was that also true of the field of architecture? They'd be given credit for the classes they had taken at Harper?

Kerbis: Yes. At the time we developed the course, we did have some students who became architects. At that time you could become an architect without having a full university degree if you had sufficient experience. I think our standard experience, with a degree, is three years. At that time if you have five years of experience, you could take the exam and you could become a licensed architect. We had a whole group of people who did that. They immediately went to work, decided not to go to a university, and yet became architects. It was quite amazing. We have practicing architects now in the field who never got a degree and who were part of our program. We're very proud of them. We were also on the cutting edge of the computer world. Some of our students became very expert with computers and have firms now that service the industry with their computer facilities. They have all kinds of very advanced machines and services that their companies provide the profession. I think it's easier, though, to go on and get a degree in a conventional way. We never really focused on design. It was only what happened by exposing these people to examples of quality architecture. Because our field was construction technology, I always felt there was a big gap in my exposure to students, and that I should work with more advanced students. So I opted to work with some graduate students. I had a particularly interesting proposal about teaching design and on two occasions I worked at Washington University in St. Louis with a graduate studio and I commuted every week from Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays—it was a rigorous challenge.

Blum: So that explains why you've had all these teaching positions with all these various titles? But the mainstay of your teaching really was at Harper Community College. In educational terms, what was important for you to communicate to your students?

160 Kerbis: The particular time which I was most interested in teaching design was this period which preceded Postmodernism. It was at the tail end of the structural expression—the Miesian type of architecture. We were all kind of wondering what to do next. All designers were feeling that there was a great deal of boredom in the expression of a wall and the structure. So what would lead to the next enrichment of the prevailing architectural expression? I was very upset that Stanley Tigerman was using these ideas from New York architects, who were sort of defined as these cutting-edge designers, for guidance in the new kind of architecture. I felt that it was a superficial kind of direction. I was wondering how I would do it.

Blum: Did you fall in line?

Kerbis: No. I thought about what should be the next way to analyze a building or how to think about a building. So I analyzed a group of elements that I felt are the basis of the design problem, that is: functionalism; construction and technology; orientation; context, to do with what is happening in the neighborhood around the building; and some study of history and knowledge of the precedents of a given application. I had a whole series of these criteria. I felt that by emphasizing these various components in different ways that this is the basis of all new expression in architecture. But it's how people did it, as opposed to what was the outcome. Mies had emphasized construction and technology and I felt that there were these other directions that were being overlooked. I wanted to set up a design problem for students and not immediately prejudice their minds with, "OK, we're going to express a building this way and it's the only way to do it." I wanted to keep these elements fluid. I took the program of a library which happened to be located near Washington University in St. Louis, where I was teaching these graduate students. We also had a particular problem with the site where this library was being designed—it was a community library. It had a particular orientation, so we could study how the sun would come in and because it was a particular site, it had a context of residential and semi- institutional buildings. I then said, we're going to plan this library three times

161 in the entire semester. We're going to have three completely different solutions with the same program and the same site. But we're going to take these elements and the first time we're going to emphasize the structure, technology, and construction. Another time we're going to emphasize the functions, how they are expressed, and the circulation with the building. Another time we're going to think about the context and the orientation. It was an incredible experience. It was so hard for the students. Towards the end of the semester, I was giving out, because every student had three buildings, although we took them one at a time. At the end of the semester, we now had three models, three building solutions, all with sets of plans and so on, and then we had to make a comparison and decide which was better and if there were elements that could be consolidated from all three buildings.

Blum: Did you have three group solutions?

Kerbis: No, each student had three buildings and at the end of the semester we were going to do this comprehensive analysis. It was a great time. I felt that the students took some of the early Modernism where we were expressing functions . . . There are many people now—even Richard Meier is going back and studying ecology and how the energy-efficient buildings work. His latest projects are energy-efficient and consider the directions of breezes and sunlight and all this kind of stuff. I was very surprised to see all of that because he had completely eliminated that originally. The point is that there are all these elements that make these great buildings, and one should be aware of all of them, no matter what project you're doing. One should not be able to jump in on some great architect's particular interpretations and try to copy it as a teaching method. I felt we should go all the way down to the grass roots elements. All across the country there are architects who are more ecologically oriented, like in the Southwest there's a whole group. I loved the experience except it killed me and at the end I virtually could not talk because I was so overwhelmed with the effort I had put into it. It was very hard on me.

162

Blum: It seems that what you were doing throughout this whole process is that you were asking students not only to look at what was current, but what had passed and what could be in the future, and to think for themselves.

Kerbis: Exactly. It was a very high-level class—practicing architects could address all these problems. For instance, there was precedent with great libraries of the past. One young fellow studied Aalto's libraries and another person studied great historic French libraries like the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was very exciting because there were so many resources that we could now discuss. And there's a method of teaching how to express functionalism and circulation, how a building works from an experiential point of view as you move through the building. These kind of little breaks, doing work with graduate students on this high level, stimulated me to continue to work with my two-year students over the last twenty-some years.

Blum: I realize the student body was very different as were their needs and expectations. What was it that you hoped to communicate, other than a practical skill, to the students at Harper College?

Kerbis: It's not only the skills that we have to address, but the kids at Harper are limited in their experience. Some of them would never come to the city. The first thing I do is take them through the city on a walking tour and start opening their minds so that they can go to the city and experience great things for themselves and not be worried. This whole business of opening up their minds is very enriching. If you can get others to do the same, then there is a sort of continuity that transcends the architecture. It goes into their life. You end up being their friend.

Blum: You've described the curriculum at Harper and how it was very practical, doing bricks and concrete, and steel. Were there many women in those classes?

163 Kerbis: In the beginning, there were very few women. Over the last twenty-five years, it's amazing how the adult homemaker, whose children are grown, and who has been deprived of cultural expression and a career, how many are coming into the field. They are absolutely at the highest level—they are our pride. They know how to study, they're terrifically interested, and they're well motivated and talented. The other thing about architecture is that you have to look at resources.

Blum: Did you have older women in your classes when you were teaching? Kerbis: In the beginning there were no older women. As we progressed, even in the suburbs, the student body became more diversified and these older women did come and they're terrific. I had them in my classes and they're really the best. They are a great influence in the class. I just had an older woman in my class, she's Chinese, she was brilliant. She had two children who had graduated from college and distinguished themselves in their own fields. So she's now going to go on, she's going to the University of Washington and she's going to be an architect.

Blum: Did you find that there were many women who were studying at Washington University in St. Louis?

Kerbis: They say that in eastern colleges there are fifty percent women. We did not have fifty percent at Washington University, nor did we have that at Harper College, but we are definitely making a break. At least twenty or thirty percent are now women. One of the limitations of getting these young women from colleges now into the field is that they have a feeling that they can't do math. And then when I work with them, they really can do math. They just have this automatic, knee-jerk reaction that they can't do math. I don't know where it goes wrong. It's definitely a stupid idea, because math can be taught. In the last semester, I had a young man who was absolutely impossible, he just had this mindset. But by the end of the year, he had enough successes to go on to the next level. As soon as there's a little breakthrough, then we're home free and we can really teach then.

164

Blum: But women not being able to do math, isn't that a stereotype of our culture?

Kerbis: That's more than a stereotype. It's a heartbreaker, because we could have many more women in this field.

Blum: In light of your own experience, did you have something special to tell women who were studying architecture?

Kerbis: First of all, you have an awful lot to learn about great architecture that has been done in the past. I think you get to the really highest level when you're expressing yourself at the deepest level, we don't do that in the first two years in college. At the beginning we just get students simply to experience what other people have done.

Blum: Do you ever tell them what women will face on a construction site, for instance, dealing with the unions, things that you've experienced yourself?

Kerbis: Frankly, yes. When sometimes I get hung up and start going into that. There might be some prejudices where one kid can bring some fundamental prejudices into the classroom and somehow they attack other people or they attack me. Then we really have to get into it. Sometimes, when I'm holding forth too much, then they say, "Well, you're just giving the women A's. You're prejudiced." It's kind of this reverse prejudice. To be an effective teacher, all students must feel that the teacher is going to be fair and that they can believe in the teacher. It's almost a physical thing. They start sensing it. If they start challenging you, then you've got to have an explanation. Also, when you're talking about architectural elements, you might not be talking about social prejudices, you might be talking about simple architectural problems about why this is done this way and how you evaluate it, or the genesis of construction methods and the rationality of the method of thinking. If it evolves from a kind of consistent and fair standard, that's the way they learn. They could forget items or facts—we do a great amount of

165 research—they don't have to know specific things, but they should learn how to use them and where to find the resources. That's how they are honest with themselves that they are definitely investigating something and not faking it. All my students must do their own work. Even though these are the first two years of college, I never have my students copying, which is the old way of teaching. Other teachers, even as we speak, are teaching them how to draft something by copying something else. I think they must set up everything themselves. They're training their eyes and it makes it so all their drawings are their own, even though they're not great expressive things. They can take their sets of drawings and will be qualified employees in architectural and engineering offices later.

Blum: Do you think that architectural education today prepares a student for the world they're going to find after school?

Kerbis: Yes, if we get them on the right groove. I give them these problems that they must process in their own brains and then solve. If they are going into a problem solving mode, they can be very effective. My students are more effective working in offices than the University of Illinois student—especially in the last ten years a number of those students were ineffective and unable to solve problems like my students were.

Blum: Looking back in your own past, were you prepared for the career you had hoped for when you graduated from the last college you attended?

Kerbis: By the time I graduated from my last college, I already was a registered architect. One of the problems about the suburban student is that they need to earn money for an automobile in order to make them mobile. They all start doing this right in high school. So, therefore, they do these menial jobs in order to earn money, but they also aspire to get a drafting job. Then they want a job drafting for an architect. They progress up. Consequently, they have pretty good job skills. Maybe the inner-city kids don't have these kinds of job skills, but definitely the suburban kid is motivated to get the car and

166 that's a pretty fundamental step when you're sixteen years old. By the time I get them, two or three years later, they're definitely in a working mode and they just want to get some skills. The next challenge that I find these students must be prepared for is that because we do not teach design—they are starting to accomplish pretty much on their own.

167 [Tape 8: Side 1]

Kerbis: They have to begin to realize that they have limitations from a design point of view. They must develop sensitivity if they want to go further. They will get the background to be a very effective hands-on construction-type person, for instance, in our curriculum. However, if they think they're going to go on to university and get registered and I just know that now from personal experience, its like going back to kindergarten. They have to take the next step in their development. I have to get them to want to go on to the next step, to whet their appetite. We don't cover what is beautiful and what isn't.

Blum: You have said, as we began this topic, that you went into teaching because there was a necessity for it, to pay your bills. But you have given a lot of service to many architectural related organizations not because you had to pay your bills. Why?

Kerbis: I'm a committed professional. It all starts where you would like to change how things are being done in the profession, just like that experience of applying ethical principles of not being a builder and a constructor and an architect because that was wearing too many hats. Then I found out that that was not in my best interest and I could affect change and change those ethics, where the master builder approach is equally valuable. That was a little taste of how I was attacking an ethical position.

Blum: But you did that by becoming part of the AIA and working from within.

Kerbis: Yes, absolutely. In the beginning when I first had the experience of that challenge of an ethical position, I was not working that much within the AIA. Slowly I got more and more into the AIA. I served on the board. Also, something else happened, I was asked to be a judge in the City Beautiful program, where one goes to look at little gardens in various communities and at proposals like park improvements. In some of the poorer communities they just have vegetable gardens. The City Beautiful program started many

168 years ago and was sponsored by the city, when Charles Wacker published a book on how the city should work and look. In the last twenty-five years they started giving awards and it was sponsored by the city and all the neighborhoods would submit their entries. I was asked to be on this jury and we had a city planner and a landscape planner and I was the head of this little group. We went through these entries and decided what was what. I had to make these presentations and for some reason we were in City Hall, in the City Council chambers, and the public was there. I felt it was important to give an inspiring talk and I have a friend, Sally Kitt Chappell, who had done a little slide show which had music. Sally had done her Ph.D. on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. I made this talk and ran her little tape for this group. There must have been three hundred people there and I used this device as a hook to stimulate this group. Then I started to think, wouldn't it be wonderful to have another world's fair? Here we have all these neighborhood groups with all this stuff that they wanted to do to give beauty to the city. Why couldn't we then bring them all together? Here was this example of what was done a hundred years ago. This had to be in 1980, before I was president of the AIA. I was going to be the president of the AIA in the next year or so, and this incredible idea of having this world's fair came because of this slide show and my speech that caused everyone to get up and start clapping. People were crowding around and everyone was saying how their grandfather had given them a collection of postcards from the 1893 exposition and everything was starting to come out of the woodwork about what people knew from their grandparents about the exposition. We focused on the old exposition but then we started thinking about a new world's fair. Because of this response, I started thinking about how we could have a new world's fair. I put together a team that next year—I was going to be president of the AIA—to develop what we would have to do to have a world's fair. For a whole year the AIA had this subcommittee and we met on Saturdays. Helmut Jahn and Stanley Tigerman and everybody got all excited about this. Stanley, of course, wasn't getting enough attention, so he dropped out. But we had a great group of real design leaders in the AIA who spent a great amount of time in planning the strategy of where it would be and the various

169 sites. We had subcommittees, site studies, facility studies, and if it could it be related to the Olympics. This whole thing was kicked off with the AIA. That was when the AIA conceived and developed all these ideas. We had all these zillions of man-hours on the world's fair. All of a sudden, I was president of the AIA, this was 1980. The subcommittee of the world's fair was a very strong subcommittee. All the head people of the large firms, like Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, signed on and sent representatives.

Blum: Weren't there teams that submitted proposals for the world's fair?

Kerbis: That happened later. The next thing that happened was that we had all these divergent site locations. Some people said that it had to be on the lake. Let's make a long story short—there was a whole year that went by and a lot of wonderful people contributed. Then it turns out that someone else, I can't remember his name, he said later on, when the world's fair actually got going, that he conceived of the idea. I did not know anything about him. What happens is that when everybody's with it, they all think it's wonderful. Tom Eyerman and Bill Hartmann at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had invited me to come up to their office. They did an end-run around the AIA. We were now trying to find a kind of civic group that would promote this, because we did not have access to the powers in the city. Evidently, Hartmann was a member of the Commercial Club—Hartmann had access to some of these influential people. So they had me up in their offices at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and they now were proposing something. I had nothing to sell, I just wanted architects to be involved in this project. So they just completely eliminated all of our committees and went ahead and wanted to know how much I had done. I had written letters to the head of this civic committee—Clayton Kirkpatrick was the head of this committee and was CEO of the Chicago Tribune. I even took Kirkpatrick to lunch. But I had no real clout—I was flapping around in the breeze with this ragamuffin group of people who had all the ideas but didn't have any power. So Kirkpatrick and the Commercial Club then went with SOM and they eventually felt that they should have a competition and invited some other

170 architects later. But Bruce Graham grabbed that ball. He's the one who said it had to be on the lakefront. We were very frustrated, so Harry Weese, who was a powerhouse at that time, he set up another committee. There were years that went by. All of a sudden, the world's fair took off. SOM had the politics tied up with financing from the Commercial Club. Now Jane Byrne was the mayor and Weese had a contact with Mayor Byrne. He was a very strongly motivated civic person. He was doing wonderful things with Inland Architect. He also had another civic study committee that he started and he had Bud Goldberg and Walter Netsch and Larry Booth and me on that committee. SOM was busy with their big plans and they were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Commercial Club to do huge models of the lakefront. We had this other committee that was feeling very frustrated. But we didn't know until SOM had their formal announcements later the full extent of what they were doing. We were sort of working parallel. The AIA had sort of dropped out and Weese had taken the ball as an individual architect. I just conceived in the beginning of having this fair, I did not have an architectural solution for the fair or a site. About this time, we were meeting with Weese's group. We were thinking about fixing up Kenwood and the West Side. Weese had a different agenda of master planning and improving a whole number of things, including transportation, the expansion of airports, and improving the water system.

Blum: Were these related solely to the fair or to permanently benefit the city?

Kerbis: No. These were just master planning ideas. Weese paid for the development of a huge amount of work developed in brochures and his sketches and data and research on elements of the city that needed correction and improvements. It was supposed to go to Mayor Byrne and her planning committee and staff. It was a very exciting series of discussions and it resulted in a lot of drawings and things. I didn't do any drawings, I just went to the meetings.

Blum: This was all pro bono?

171 Kerbis: Yes, on everyone's part. But one of the things we eventually studied was the world's fair.

Blum: You began all this by saying that you were looking at these neighborhoods in the context of the City Beautiful program.

Kerbis: We were investigating how we could improve the city. Harry Weese, with his connection to Mayor Byrne, set up a different agenda. The City Beautiful program was long past. Someone else took over that program. We were now working on Harry Weese's analysis of the problems of the city of Chicago.

Blum: Going back to the city committees that you were on—you were on the Mayor's Architectural Advisory Committee, the Mayor's Committee on Historic Architectural Landmarks. Is it fact or fiction that these committees, made up of civic-minded citizens, were really Mickey Mouse committees to confirm what the mayor and the aldermen had already decided that they wanted to do?

Kerbis: Yes, you're right. There were a lot of dynamics going on in the city. My interest in serving on those committees originally came about because I wanted to know what was going on. I was using it as a resource for my own inquisitiveness and my own curiosity.

Blum: How did you get on these committees?

Kerbis: I can't really remember. It varied. Historic preservation maybe came about because I had submitted plans to the Department of Urban Renewal and my name just came up because I had been talking to lots of people. Right now I definitely have withdrawn from a lot of that. I was delighted to work with Weese on his committee. I was very insecure about the world's fair solution and I felt that what Bruce Graham was doing—by this time, the SOM proposal had been announced by SOM and the city. I was very upset. I knew that it was a loser, that the SOM solution was such a poorly conceived

172 proposal and it was so expensive. They started to get into costs and who was going to finance it. The times were not so wonderful in 1980. The resources were limited. They were going to do landfill and it was out of the question. I have the opinion that SOM would always force their clients to go beyond what was financially reasonable in terms of a development for the clients— they would always get them to spend much more money. I'm glad the Sears Tower and the Hancock were built, but now Sears is a white elephant. I feel that as soon as a corporation hires SOM to put a face on their so-called success, I would get out of that stock immediately because that meant that within the next three years the stock was going to crash. As soon as they got their image together and had SOM do their marble covered building, this was bad news because that meant that the corporation leaders did not have their eye on doing the work that they were there to produce but that they had their eye on their image and that was bad. I hated all this process. I was really very enthusiastic that we came up with something for the fair. We did come up with a wonderful idea that has never been adequately developed: a floating fair. We were going to put these barges that were in the Mississippi and from the St. Lawrence River—they're the size of football fields—we wanted to extend the two arms of Burnham Harbor. We wanted to have this great linkage with a bridge so that you could get into Burnham Harbor and have this incredible lakefront development. It would have been so wonderful. Bud Goldberg, Larry Booth and I were the floating people, but none of us had any time to do any visuals on it. The other thing was that Chicago had a terrible reputation for exhibition rental and construction. Out- of-towners would come to put a show up at McCormick Place and they were sure to be screwed by the costs of our workmen and unions. They always charged triple what they would anywhere else. Our idea was that there was such a huge outlay of work and materials on some of these exhibition pavilions that countries could actually build their pavilions in their own countries and float them across the oceans and up the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi rivers. We just visualized all these barges coming from everywhere in the world.

173 Blum: It sounds like such a creative idea and there were other creative ideas, but the fair didn't happen and, as I understand it, it didn't happen for political and economic reasons.

Kerbis: Yes, and it was done in by SOM. That was the final nail in the coffin.

Blum: In addition to all the civic committees that you served on, you also belonged to social clubs, for instance, the Arts Club and the Cliff Dwellers. Were these clubs vehicles for you to develop clients?

Kerbis: Just like my lifetime membership to the Art Institute, they asked me, so I just paid for a lifetime membership. It was very inexpensive to join. I could take someone there and have lunch. But I was never much of a participant at the Arts Club.

Blum: Were you one of the first women invited to join the Cliff Dwellers after they had that big flap about being a mens only club?

Kerbis: Yes. With the Cliff Dwellers I really didn't have much of an interest. It's an historian's and a man's thing and I really wasn't into that. It wasn't my thing. But then it became an issue of women and then I felt I had to do it. It's horrible. I have this compulsion to teach little lessons. Then within a couple of years, for some reason they got me on the board and I became president. I also have this mindset that as soon as society starts selecting women to be heads of clubs and mayors of cities, then you've got to know that the cities are in trouble because the men have lost interest in them.

Blum: After your presidency at the Cliff Dwellers, they went back to a male president. Did you have any trouble during your year as president?

Kerbis: The reason I was acceptable for the men was because they are very proud of their architectural members. It harkens all the way back to Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. From that point of view, I was kind of a shoe-in. As a

174 woman, I was OK, but that I was an architect was much better. They have this leadership thing for architects. I learned all about Louis Sullivan and I felt very good about the club because of how when Louis Sullivan was down and out they picked up his tab and they allowed him to do his sketches and write The Autobiography of an Idea there. They buried him and paid for his funeral. I had an immediate commitment to what their values were.

Blum: But did it serve as a place for you to find a patron with deep pockets?

Kerbis: No. As a matter of fact, one of the men with deep pockets was Henry Regnery but he was so prejudiced against women in the club that he really stood out. He decided at about the time I became president to write a history of the club, which is fascinating and a very good read. However, the history went up to the time when there was a vote for women and he dropped us all out. It was very funny but sad.

Blum: You were president in 1988.

Kerbis: We tried to save the clubhouse, and it took until now to save the club in spite of the problems with the landlord that had been transpiring since 1988.

Blum: You made statements to the press that you really wanted to design a skyscraper. Is that your dream project?

Kerbis: That's my dream project, even as we speak. Now that I'm retired from teaching, I would love to do some studies and develop some models and ideas about skyscraper design. Not that it would be built, but it would be a theoretical proposal. Not that it would be so theoretical that it would be inconceivable to ever build it. The example that I have is Frank Lloyd Wright's Mile High skyscraper project. Wasn't that impressive? The night he made that presentation to the AIA, it was the first meeting that I had attended as a member of the AIA, and he was there making his proposal to the AIA. That was very impressive and I still want to do that.

175 Blum: As you look back over your career, what has been your greatest opportunity?

Kerbis: I just keep plugging along. I don't know. I think things that have shaped me are when I visited Europe when I was thirteen years old. These little things that happen to develop one's individuality . . . I don't know that they are opportunities, but they are the things that shape you. One can find something in those experiences that have happened.

Blum: As I see your career, you became a teacher out of necessity, you became a developer out of necessity.

Kerbis: So much has been done out of necessity!

Blum: Would you go into architecture again?

Kerbis: Absolutely! There's no question about that. I probably would not have married the men I married. Those were not of necessity.

Blum: For what would you like to be remembered?

Kerbis: I think I'm looking forward to doing the project that will be memorable— nothing I've done so far.

Blum: I think women will remember you in a very special way. You opened a lot of doors for women of your generation and those who will follow.

Kerbis: But those little things are baby steps for women. Opportunities for women throughout society opened up, that was wonderful. It doesn't change as we speak. Women still have to keep plugging along because we're not there yet.

Blum: But great strides start with little baby steps. Gertrude, thank you very much.

176 SELECTED REFERENCES

Bruegmann, Robert, ed. Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the Air Force Academy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Carroll, Margaret. “Architect Redesigns Her Goals.” Chicago Tribune, 11 December 1975, p. 2. Chicago Women in Architecture: Progress and Evolution 1974-1984, An Exhibition. Chicago Historical Society 20 October 1984-17 March 1985. "Women Architects Organize," by Sabra Clark. Published in Inland Architect28 (November/December 1984). Colander, Pat. “You Needn’t Be Rich To Hire An Architect.” Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1976. “Condominiums, Houses, Out of Reach?” Los Angeles Times, 12 August 1976, p. 33. Cuscaden, Rob. “Chicago Architecture - Breaking Away From Mies?” Sun-Times, 11 July 1976. Davis, Jerry C. “Ethic of a Female Architect.” Chicago Sun-Times, 27 April 1975, p. 27. De Clue, Denise. “Six Modern Muses of Chicago.” Chicago Daily News, 4-5 August 1973. Panorama 1-4. “Developer is ‘Down’ on High-Rises.” Chicago Tribune, 5 October 1976. Dixon, John Morris. "Women's Place." Progressive Architecture 58 (March 1977): 7. Drell, Adrienne. “Designing Woman.” North Shore , August 1988, 32-35. Gapp, Paul. “1976 AIA Winners: They Seem Strangely Familiar.” Chicago Tribune, 18 September 1976. Gapp, Paul. “A Design for Honoring Unsung Women Architects.” Chicago Tribune, 8 January 1978, pp. 1, 4. Hacker, David C. “Is There Sexism in Buildings?” The National Observer ,14 June 1975. Kerbis Gertrude Lempp. “Architecture: Male, Female or Neuter.” Speech given - Women in Architecture Symposium, Washington University School of Architecture, St. Louis, Mo. (29 March 1974). Kerbis, Gertrude Lempp. “President’s Report.” AIA Chicago Focus (January-December 1980).

177 Kerbis, Gertrude Lempp. “Testimony given to Gannon/Proctor Commission for State of Illinois Women; Status on Program Implementation in Illinois.” Chicago, Illinois (24 May 1983). "Kerbis Solos 'The Greenhouse'." Inland Architect 19 (August 1975): 5. Kogan, Rick. “Gertrude Kerbis: Building a Life in a Man’s World.” Chicago Sun-Times, 1 October 1978, pp. 6-7, 9. Lyon, Jeff. “Women Have Big Designs on World of Architecture.” Chicago Tribune,2 3 June 1983. Moore, Patricia. “Female Architect in Tiniest Minority.” Chicago Daily News, 10 November 1972. “Name Winners of $25,000 in Rooms Contest.” Chicago Tribune, ca. 1949/50. "New Way to Raise the Roof." Architectural Forum 108 (March 1958): 126-128. Newman, Donna Joy. “High-rise-ing Women - Making a Mark on the Skyline.” Chicago Tribune, 8 August 1976. Norsworthy, Joan. “Architecturally Speaking, Female Viewpoint Offers New Look.” Suburban Tribune ,27 July 1979, pp. 22-28. North, Katherine Ringling. "Gertrude Lempp Kerbis: Chicago Architect." Senior thesis, Lake Forest College, 1988. Patterson, Anne. “Women Architects: Why So Few of Them?” Inland Architect 15 (December 1971): 14-19. Petersen Clarence. “Ten Real Catches - and We Don’t Mean Cohos.” Chicago Tribune, 30 December 1979, pp. 1, 4. Root, Susan. “Lady Architects Have Own Views on Design.” Chicago Daily News, 26 June 1969. "The Woman Behind the T Square." Progressive Architecture 58 (March 1977): 37-57. Tiritilli, Barbara. “Dreams of Building Skyscrapers.” Chicago’s American, 22 July 1962. "U.S. Air Force Academy." Architectural Record 125 (June 1959): 151-162. Wachsmann, Konrad. The Turning Point of Building Structure and Design. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1961. “Woman Architect Assails Outmoded Building Methods.” Chicago Tribune, 16 June 1968.

178 GERTRUDE LEMPP KERBIS

Born: 23 August 1926, Chicago, Illinois

Education: University of Illinois, B.S. in Architectural Engineering, 1948 Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1949-1950 Illinois Institute of Technology, M.A. in Architecture, 1954

Selected Carl Koch, 1948-1949 Experience: Bertrand Goldberg 1949-1950 Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett, 1950-1951 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1954-1959 Naess & Murphy (later C. F. Murphy Associates), 1959-1962, 1965-1967 Lempp Kerbis, 1967-present

Selected Teaching University of Illinois at Chicago, 1968-1969 Experience: William Rainey Harper College, Palatine, Illinois, 1970-1996 Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, 1977-1982 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 1989-1991

Honors and Awards: Lydia Parker Bates Scholar, University of Illinois, 1947-1948 Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1970 Outstanding Achievement Award in Professions, Metropolitan Chicago WYCA, 1984

Professional Chicago Women in Architecture, Founder, 1974 Service: American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter, President, 1980 Cliff Dwellers Club, President, 1988-1989 Chicago Network, Founding Member, 1979 International Women's Forum, 1982

179 Selected Buildings Mitchell Hall, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado and Honors: Springs, Colorado, 1957 Skokie Public Library, Skokie Illinois, 1959 Honor Award, AIA Chicago Chapter, 1962, National Building Award, American Library Association, 1962, and Outstanding Building Award, Chicago Fine Arts Council, 1963 Meadows Club, Lake Meadows, Chicago, Illinois, 1959 Citation of Merit, AIA Chicago Chapter, 1960 Seven Continents Building, O'Hare International Airport, 1963 Honor Award, AIA Chicago Chapter, 1965 Greenhouse Condominium, Chicago, Illinois, 1976 Distinguished Building Award, AIA Chicago Chapter, 1976

Exhibitions: "Chicago Women Architects: Contemporary Directions,” Artemisia Gallery, 1978 "Women in American Architecture: Historic and Contemporary Perspectives," Archicenter, 1978 "Chicago Architects Design," The Art Institute of Chicago, 1982 "150 Years of Chicago Architecture," Paris Art Center, Paris, France, 1983, and Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois, 1985 "Chicago Women in Architecture: Progress and Evolution," Chicago Historical Society, 1984 "The Chicago Booth Festival—Architects Build Shelters for Sukkot," Spertus Museum, 1984

180 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

American Institute of Architects (AIA) 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 141-148, 166-167 40, 52, 91 Arquitectonica 138 Eisenman, Peter 129 Ast, Gundoz 125 Epstein, A. & Sons 148 Atwood, Leland 35, 36 Epstein, Abraham 148

Barney, Carol Ross 19, 125, 140 Foster, Norman 81 Bauhaus, Germany 44, 45 Fuller, R. Buchminster 84-85 Belluschi, Pietro 60 Bennett, Edward H. Jr. (Ted) 31, 149 Gapp, Paul 152-153 Bennett, Richard Marsh 38, 39, 40-41 Genther Charles B. (Skip) 52, 54-55 Berlin National Gallery, Berlin, Getzendanner, Susan 135 Germany 80 Giedion, Sigfried 17, 18 Bernardini, Ralph 35, 36 Gladych, Stanislav Z. (Stan) 93-94, 97, Booth, Laurence (Larry) 168, 170 99-100 Brenner, Daniel (Dan) 47-48 Goldberg, Bertrand (Bud) 34-36, 55, 112, Bruegmann, Robert 78 168, 170, Bunshaft, Gordon 60, 61, 63-68, 71, 78, Goody, Joan 127 94, 95, 138 Graham, Bruce 57, 58, 86-88, 90, 102, Burchard, John 67 118, 136, 168, 169 Byrne, Jane 168 Graves, Michael 154-155 Gray, Richard 116-117 Caldwell, Alfred 42, 51, 53-54 Greenhouse Apartments, Chicago, Chang, Pao-Chi 46, 72, 124 Illinois 147, 148-152 Chang, T.C. 105 Greenwald Herbert (Herb) 86-88, 89 Chappell, Sally Kitt 166 Gropius, Walter 20, 24, 28-30, 32, 33, 39, Chermayeff, Serge 83 40 Chicago Network 135 Gygax, Ulrich 112 Chicago Park District 52-54 Chicago Stock Exchange, Chicago, Hammond, James W. 86, 88 Illinois 130 Hartmann, William (Bill) 86, 89, 92-93, Chicago Women in Architecture 37, 142, 167 123-125, 137 Henderson, Caroline 59, 94 Cliff Dwellers Club 171-172 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 44, 45-46, 47, 49, Convention Hall (project) 46, 70-72, 74, 51 80, 84 Holabird & Root 78-79 Hoops, John 66 Daley, Richard J. 102 Hudnut, Joseph 40 de Blois, Natalie 78, 94-96, 123, 140 DeHaan, Norman 143, 144 Illinois Institute of Technology, (IIT), Diamant, Robert 58 Chicago, Illinois 41-42, 83 Dunlap, William (Bill) 86, 91-93, 141, Inland Steel Building, Chicago, Illinois 144 118 Institute of Design 83 Eames, Charles 18, 21, 22, 23 Jahn, Helmut 166

181 Murphy, Robert 117 Kaiser, H.S., Company 109 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New Kallman, McKinnell & Knowles 106 York City, New York 23 Kamin, Blair 153, 155 Myhrum, Maglet 31 Kanazawa, Henry (Hank) 46 Keck, George Fred 36, 37 Naess, Sigurd E. 118 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 102 Netsch, Walter 57-60, 63, 64, 65-67, 71, Kerbis Tennis Club, Highland Park, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83, 86, 92, 96, 102, 119, Illinois 107-117, 143 143, 168 Kerbis, Donald 107, 108-111, 114 Kerbis, Kim 107 O'Hare International Airport 93, 101 Kerbis, Lisa 107 O'Hare International Airport, Seven Koch, Carl 18, 20-24, 27, 28, 33, 34 Continents Restaurant 97-101, 103, Kohler, Carl 65-66, 67 142 Obato, Gyo 37 Lake Meadows Club, Chicago, Illinois Owings, Nathaniel 64, 65 82, 89-90, 142 Lake Meadows, Chicago, Illinois 89 PACE Associates 54-55 Larson, George 119 Peterhans, Julian 55-57, 92, 107, 137 Layer, Robert 14 Peterhans, Walter 31, 42, 43-46, 47, 49, Lempp, Eugene (father of Gertrude) 2, 51, 55, 56-57 5-7, 25, 115-116 Portman, John 148 Lewis, Quig 130 Prudential Building, Chicago, Illinois Loebl, Jerrold 39 118 Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett 34, 37, 38, 40 Rapson, Ralph 30, 33 Lustron House 27-28 Regnery, Henry 172 Richardson, Ambrose 89 Macsai, John 54, 58 Roche, John 112 Man Ray 44 Rouzie, Bill 68, 77, 78 Manny, Carter Hugh Jr. 93, 97, 102, 117- Rudoff, Myer 31, 58 118, 142 Ryder, Donald 78 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 170 Meier, Richard 154, 160 Saarinen, Eero 60, 62 Merrill, John 64, 65 Scheeler, James (Jim) 70, 89, 90 Meyer, Lynn 137 Schlossman, Norman 39 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 17, 18, 34, Schultz, Franz 80 42-43, 44, 45, 46, 47-49, 50-52, 69-73, Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 170 74, 80, 83, 91, 106-107 Shao, Po Hu 124 Miller, William 121 Sit, Sam 105 Miwa, Yujiro 46 Six Moon Hill, Lexington, Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 44 Massachusetts 20 Moos, Janet (later Cohen) 133 Skidmore, Louis 64 Murphy, C.F. Associates (formerly Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 167-168, Naess & Murphy) 93, 96, 101, 105- 169, 170, 171 106 Skokie Public Library, Skokie, Illinois Murphy, Charles F. (son of Charles 82, 88-89, 142 Francis) 117, 119 Speyer, A. James (Jim) 48 Murphy, Charles Francis 112, 117-118 Stark, Otto 105

182 Steiner, Ludwig 112 Sullivan, Louis 130, 171-172 Summers, Gene 80-81, 120 Sun-Times Building, Chicago, Illinois 118

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin 7 Tange, Kenzo 138 The Architects Collaborative (TAC) 20 339 Webster Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 151-152 1350 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 41 Tigerman, Stanley 32, 143, 158, 166

United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado 57, 58 United States Air Force Academy, Mitchell Hall, Colorado Springs, Colorado 63, 67-81, 82, 84, 142, 143 United States Steel Corporation 69, 76

Wachsmann, Konrad 83-85, 86 Ward, Robertson 31, 58, 59, 83 Weese, Cynthia (Cindy) 125, 140 Weese, Harry 96, 168-169 Wiersema, Jean 13, 14, 16, 37 Wong, Y.C. 105 Woo, Carolina 127 Wright, Frank Lloyd 7-9, 18, 171-172 Wurster, William 27

Youngren, Ralph 31, 58, 67, 77

Zerbe, Carl 18, 20 Zintl, Karl 104

183