INTERVIEW with HERMAN H. LACKNER Interviewed by Betty J
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INTERVIEW WITH HERMAN H. LACKNER 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 © 1995 Revised Edition Copyright © 2005 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public 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 this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface iv Preface to Revised Edition vi Outline of Topics vii Oral History 1 Curriculum Vitae 36 Index of Names and Buildings 37 iii PREFACE Since its inception in 1981, the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago has engaged in presenting to the public and the profession diverse aspects of the history and process of architecture, with a special concentration on Chicago. The department has produced bold, innovative exhibitions, generated important scholarly publications, and sponsored public programming of major importance, while concurrently increasing its collection of holdings of architectural drawings and documentation. From the beginning, its purpose has been to raise the level of awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the built environment to an ever-widening audience. In the same spirit of breaking new ground, an idea emerged from the department’s advisory committee in 1983 to conduct an oral history project on Chicago architects. Until that time, oral testimony had not been used frequently as a method of documentation in the field of architecture. Innumerable questions were raised: was the method of gathering information about the architect from the architect himself a reliable one? Although a vast amount of unrecorded information was known to older architects, would they be willing to share it? Would their stories have lasting research value to future scholars, or would they be trivial? Was video-recording a viable option? How much would such a project cost? With a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we began a feasibility study to answer these questions. Our study focused on older personalities who had first-hand knowledge of the people and events of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—decades that have had little attention in the literature of Chicago’s architectural history. For nine months in 1983, I contacted more than one hundred architects in Chicago and suburbs and visited most of them. I learned not only that they were ready, willing, and more than able to tell their stories, they were also impatient to do so. Many thought such a program was long overdue. For each visit, I was armed with a brief biographical sketch of the architect and a tape- recorder with which I recorded our brief exchange. At that time, we considered these visits to be only a prelude to a more comprehensive, in-depth interview. Regretfully, this vision did not materialize because some narrators later became incapacitated or died before full iv funding was secured. Slowly, however, we did begin an oral history project and now, more than twelve years later, our oral history collection has grown into a rich source of research data that is unique among oral history programs worldwide. With the completion of these interviews our collection of memoirists now numbers more than fifty and the collection continues to grow each year. This oral history text is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago. This interview is one of several dozen short interviews that were recorded in 1983 during the feasibility study. Surely each one of these narrators could have spoken in greater depth and at greater length; each one deserves a full-scale oral history. Unfortunately, thirteen of these twenty architects have already died, which makes these short interviews especially valuable. These interviews were selected for transcription, despite their brevity, because each narrator brings to light significant and diverse aspects of the practice of architecture in Chicago. We were fortunate to receive an additional grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to process this group of interviews. Thanks go to each interviewee and those families that provided releases for the recordings to be made public documents. Thanks also go to Joan Cameron of TapeWriter for her usual diligence and care in transcribing; to Robert V. Sharp of the Publications Department and Maureen A. Lasko of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago for the helpful suggestions that shaped the final form of this document; and, once again, to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for its continuing support, with special thanks to Carter Manny, its former director. Personally, I would like to thank John Zukowsky, Curator of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, for his courage in taking a chance on me as an interviewer in 1983, when I was a complete novice in the craft of interviewing. Since then, I have learned the art and the craft and, more importantly, I have learned that each architect’s story has its own very interesting and unique configuration, often filled with wonderful surprises. Each one reveals another essential strand in the dense and interlocking web of Chicago’s architectural history. Betty J. Blum 1995 v PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION Since 1995, when the previous preface was written, advances in electronic transmission of data have moved at breakneck speed. With the ubiquity of the Internet, awareness and demand for copies of oral histories in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project collection have vastly increased. These factors, as well as the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries' commitment to scholarly research, have compelled us to make these documents readily accessible on the World Wide Web. A complete electronic version of each oral history is now available on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute of Chicago website, http://www.artic.edu/aic, and, as before, a bound version is available for study at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago. In preparing an electronic version of this document, we have reformatted it for publication, reviewed and updated with minor copy-editing, and, where applicable, we have expanded the biographical profile and added pertinent bibliographic references. Lastly, the text has been reindexed and the CAOHP Master Index updated accordingly. All of the electronic conversion and reformatting is the handiwork of my valued colleague, Annemarie van Roessel, whose technical skills, intelligence, and discerning judgment have shaped the breadth and depth of the CAOHP's presence on the Internet. This endeavor would be greatly diminished without her seamless leadership in these matters. Publication of this oral history in web-accessible form was made possible by the generous support of The Vernon and Marcia Wagner Access Fund at The Art Institute of Chicago; The James & Catherine Haveman Foundation; The Reva and David Logan Family Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; and Daniel Logan and The Reva and David Logan Foundation. Finally, to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and its generous and supportive director, Jack P. Brown, we extend our deepest gratitude for facilitating this endeavor. Betty J. Blum February 2005 vi OUTLINE OF TOPICS Intention To Be an Architect 1 Howard Fisher and General Houses 2 Study at Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago 5 Obtaining a License 7 Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus and a Job at Holabird and Root 10 More About Licensing 19 Several Colleagues 23 Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933-1934 25, 33 More About Howard Fisher and General Houses 25, 28 vii Herman Lackner Blum: Today is July 30, 1983, and I am with Mr. Herman Lackner in his home in Winnetka. Mr. Lackner, why did you become an architect? Lackner: Because I never thought of being anything else, really. Blum: How did you come to choose this as your profession? Lackner: When we were in fifth grade, I think it was, at school, Carl Koch, who is now a very successful architect in Boston, he and I had our architectural firm in school. Blum: In fifth grade? Lackner: In fifth grade. You can imagine how kids think. Blum: Are you a native Chicagoan? Lackner: No, I'm a native Winnetkan. The school was here. Carl is now in Boston. I don't know, I just knew I was going to be an architect. Blum: Did you have any architectural predecessors in your family—your father or grandfather? Lackner: No. My father was in the bond business, and occasionally, when he thought I was interested, he would bring home blueprints of other buildings. He never pretended that they were works of art, but he just thought I'd be interested in the blueprints, and I was. Blum: Did you indicate your interest? 1 Lackner: Oh, sure. I had fun with mechanical drawing, naturally. I graduated from the North Shore Country Day School in 1930, and the father of a classmate offered me a job in his office for the summer. Chester Walcott was an architect with absolutely no business, and for a draftsman that he had to keep on, if he possibly could, he said he'd give me carfare, which he did. I'd never really had a T-square in my hand before, and being left-handed it really threw that whole office because they felt I should get started properly.