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ORAL HISTORY of L. MORGAN YOST Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

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ORAL HISTORY of L. MORGAN YOST Interviewed by Betty J. Blum ORAL HISTORY OF L. MORGAN YOST 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 © 1986 Revised Edition Copyright © 2000 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. CONTENTS Preface to Revised Edition iv Outline of Topics vi Oral History 1 Biographical Profile 117 Selected References 118 Index of Names and Buildings 119 iii PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION It has been more than fifteen years since I met with L. Morgan Yost (1908-1992) in his home in Cherokee Village, Arkansas where we recorded his memoirs. His recollections have been transcribed and the bound text is available for study locally in Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago, and records of the collection are available through the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) archives and manuscripts file. Further, a description of the interview is readily accessible worldwide via the Art Institute’s web page and the text may be downloaded. Today, with the ease of communication with computers and through Internet, we are receiving frequent requests from American as well as international sources for information and excerpts from Yost’s oral history. To better serve the increased research needs of today, we have revisited our original presentation and reformatted the text, corrected typographical errors, re-indexed the text and added a brief biographical profile. Nothing in the text has been changed. We trust that users will find the narrative more accessible because of these changes. On May 13, 14, and 15, 1985 I met with L. Morgan Yost (1908-1992) at his home in Cherokee Village, Arkansas. Yost and I recorded a six-hour oral history on four 90-minute cassettes that have been transcribed and minimally edited by Morgan and me to maintain the spirit and flow of his original intention. Yost’s recollections of his architectural career, one almost solely devoted to suburban residential housing, is important testimony that documents the change in design of the single-family house and development of suburban housing patterns in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s. In his position during the war years as editor and writer for popular home magazines such as Small Homes Guide, Household and Parents, Yost help whet the appetite and shape the taste of potential home buyers for the postwar American dream house. This oral history has provided data for interpretive material in a brochure, Architecture in Context: The Postwar American Dream, that accompanied an exhibition by the same name, of Yost’s drawings at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in 1985. Sources that I found helpful in preparation for this interview are listed in the selected references. For the researcher who wishes to consult more material about Yost, drawings are in the collection of architectural drawings at the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute, and papers are at the Chicago Historical Society and Kenilworth Historical Society. iv The Department of Architecture is grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Walter Netsch who generously funded the oral history of Lloyd Morgan Yost in recognition and appreciation of Netsch’s first employment in Yost’s architectural office. Yost deserves our gratitude for his cooperation during all phases of creating this document, as does his wife, Winogene, who aided our knowledge of details of commissions and events with her on-the-spot research during out recording sessions. Unfortunately, both Morgan and Winogene have died in the interim. To Kai Enenbach, our transcriber, we are appreciative for the diligent and careful attention she gave to this project. We are grateful to the Illinois Humanities Council for a grant awarded to the Department of Architecture in 2000 to scan, reformat, and make this entire text available on The Art Institute of Chicago's website. To Annemarie van Roessel, my colleague in The Department of Architecture, who has coordinated all phases of shaping the final form of this revision: scanning, reformatting, providing access on The Art Institute of Chicago’s web page with exceptional skill, perception and judgment, go my sincere thanks. Betty J. Blum September 2000 v OUTLINE OF TOPICS How and Why Yost Became an Architect 1 Education at Northwestern University and Ohio State 2 The Tribune Competition, 1922 6 Designing for Furniture Companies 13 Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture 14 Summer Job in Office of Philip Danielson 20 Employment in Office of Pierre Blouke 21 Century of Progress International Exposition 22 Yost Opens His Own Office and First Jobs 27 The Influence of Frank Lloyd Wright 36 Commissions 40 Teaching Industrial Design at the School of the Art Institute 41 Association of North Shore Architects 42 Employment as a Editor and Writer 46 Design Features of the Postwar House and the Zoned House 50 Mail-Order House Plans 62 Financing the Postwar House 66 Building After World War II 71 The Deno House Commission 71 More About Features of the Postwar House 75 Utility Core and Prefabrication 79 How Yost’s Office Worked 80 Suburban Growth and the Western Homes Project 83 Colpaert Realty Subdivision 85 Frank Lloyd Wright and His Work 89 Studying the Work of Greene and Greene 91 Chicago Architectural Sketch Club 95 Membership in the American Institute of Architects 97 The Chicago Architectural Foundation 105 Partnership with D. Coder Taylor 106 The Home Building Industry 106 Volume Built Houses 108 Employees in Yost’s Office 111 vi Influences on Yost’s Architecture 114 Yost Research Materials 115 vii L. MORGAN YOST Blum: Today is May 13, 1985, and I’m with L. Morgan Yost in his home in Cherokee Village, Arkansas. Mr. Yost, can you tell us how you decided on architecture for your career? Yost: That’s a story that hasn’t ever been in print. We’d gone to high school together, my wife now and I, and we talked about someday being married, but of course there was no such thing as a job available and no possibility of the wherewithal to get married. So, when I was sitting on her front porch—that is, her father’s front porch in Wilmette—we would talk about days to come, when things got better, the depression waned, and so on. We were looking at The Chicago Tribune and Louise Bargelt [Home Building Department Editor, Chicago Tribune], would have a weekly house design. We saw a very attractive little English job which we thought was a real nice house. I knew nothing about architecture, I didn’t know what an architect was, but we took a pencil and began to make some changes on that house design that Louise Bargelt had published. That led me to other factors in designing a plan and so on, and I began to realize what an architect was. That’s how I decided to be an architect, I think. Up until that time I had thought that I would be a mechanical engineer, as my father was, a very well-known one. I was in the School of Liberal Arts at Northwestern, but was taking courses in mathematics, physics, engineering, drawing and so on to go along toward that end, toward mechanical engineering. I guess that’s the way I got into architecture, it was Winogene’s doing, there she was encouraging me to be an architect. Blum: Had you given thought to it prior to that time? Yost: No thought of it at all. What I wanted to do was to be an automobile body designer. I was nuts about automobiles and after my senior year in high school I designed and built a speedster body for a Model T Ford. Winogene at that time did the upholstery for it. Little did she know what she was getting into by doing upholstery for my automobile. But the only body design work—custom bodies 1 for automobiles, which is what I was interested in—was being done in New York. Later it moved to Detroit, but at that time it was all in New York. The custom body designers like Raymond Dietrich and others were based in New York and I had no intention or funds to go to New York to get a job there. In fact I was still in school. My father had advised me to take a general liberal arts course at Northwestern, which I did. I was attending Northwestern and living at home. After I was graduated from Northwestern, or rather finished, I didn’t actually graduate there, I cut it short a semester so I could get into the proper notch to take up architecture at Ohio State. The reason for Ohio State was that it was my father’s school so I went there. It was a good basic course in architecture, it didn’t have the reputation that Harvard or Yale or MIT did, or even that the University of Illinois did at that time. Of course, at that time the University of Illinois was all down in Champaign-Urbana. Blum: Was the program at Ohio State based on the Beaux-Arts system? Yost: We sent in problems to the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and they were judged there in New York. First they were judged in our own halls at Ohio State, good old Brown Hall, that was the architecture building.
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