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. We had a very good grounding in classic architecture, historic architecture, excellent courses in architectural history which I’m sure today is lacking in many places and with many people.

Blum: When did you attend Northwestern University?

Yost: 1925 to 1929.

Blum: In 1931 you graduated from Ohio State.

Yost: Yes.

Blum: By that time, in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the work of the Bauhaus was known through architectural journals in the United States.

Yost: Yes, that’s right. We were aware of it but we didn’t have much to go on. In other words, the magazines that we saw weren’t very favorable toward the Bauhaus in

2 general, or to others in Europe. But, we were all interested in what we called modern architecture. Today that wouldn’t look modern, it might look even more like the…what do they call this stuff today they’re doing with the so-called classic motifs that aren’t?

Blum: Postmodern?

Yost: Yes. Of course, we didn’t have any modern to be post to then. It’s true that we did have the background. A good grounding in classical architecture is a good grounding in design, in proportion and the use of materials, which isn’t generally recognized to be so.

Blum: What was it that you called modern if it wasn’t the Bauhaus or the International Style?

Yost: I guess I’d have to show you some pictures. It was not Mies, I don’t think we’d heard of Mies at that time, but Corbu, yes. We had heard of him, I don’t know that we understood what he was trying to do but we’d heard of him and seen his work published.

Blum: Was his 1927 Towards a New Architecture, which had been translated into English at time, available to you?

Yost: I think it was available, yes. We saw it and read it. I’m afraid it didn’t have the impact that it should have had at that time, although it must have had some because I began to think that way somewhat. The architects here were not doing that except Howe and Lescaze. We admired them a lot.

Blum: While you were a student at Ohio State?

Yost: Yes. Their work was being shown. They were mainly residential at that time. So much of the stuff that is now being called postmodern we called modernistic in those days, a derogatory term. It was published in the advertising, but not very much in the editorial parts of magazines. The modern, as we thought of it at that time, would be exemplified by Holabird and Root and their 333 North Michigan. It is still a fine building, in my opinion.

3 Blum: Are you referring to Art Deco style?

Yost: Yes. But we never called it that. Art Deco was a term that hadn’t even been thought of at that time. We had decorative arts and there were publications on the decorative arts. We had them. I still have them over there on my shelf, mainly furniture and interiors. The term Art Deco is a newcomer, that’s something that crept in under the fence later. So, we don’t think of that now.

Blum: When you compare the traditional, your traditional training, with what was considered to be modern, you thought of the kind of work that Holabird and Root was doing. Is that what you’re saying?

Yost: Yes, that’s true. To some extent, not exclusively. That was what we thought of as modern. Lots of people didn’t like it; they still wanted the Corinthian columns.

Blum: Do you remember either at Northwestern or at Ohio State, any diversity of thought among the students in that year 1930-31? Were people interested in the International Style or modern?

Yost: We didn’t call it the International Style then, as I recall.

Blum: It was out of the German Bauhaus

Yost: It was. We liked the Dutch things, especially the brickwork of Willem M. Dudok. He was very much influenced by Wright and did the brick architecture, schools and so on. That was what was called modern; modern then was not entirely the Corbu type of simplicity. And, as I say we hadn’t heard of Mies then, I don’t think, I don’t remember having heard of him then.

Blum: Which texts did you use at Ohio State?

Yost: We didn’t have an actual text in design although we had classes in composition and so on. The text there was by Nathaniel Courtland Curtis, which is a typical Beaux-Arts design with the grand axis and all that sort of thing. Beaux-Arts influenced the skyscrapers of New York, even the skyscrapers of New York were

4 influenced by the Beaux-Arts. That was what we studied, all with the poché plans which we thought were pretty fancy. Things like that, with the columns shown as points of support and the points of circulation. In order to make a plan complete we had to put a whole bunch of mosaic on the floors to delineate which were the important rooms and spaces and which were secondary. It was all very interesting because the buildings were built, I don’t mean in Columbus, Ohio, I mean in the world, and we knew what they looked like. We didn’t know much about what the other ones looked like. We didn’t quite see what Corbu’s buildings would look like. I couldn’t feel that that was really the way that I wanted to do architecture. It didn’t seem to have the personal quality that that little English house did that Winogene and I looked at when we were at Northwestern.

Blum: You mentioned another book that was influential.

Yost: Tom Tallmadge’s The Story of Architecture in America was very influential for me. That was the first introduction I had had to the course of architecture in America. This is before I went to architecture school, I was still at Northwestern. I was very much influenced by Tallmadge’s references to Sullivan and to Frank Lloyd Wright, although some of the other references were more emphasized than those of Wright because that was done sometime ago when Wright was in the disrepute that his personal life had led him. That was extremely interesting because the buildings of the Chicago School… By the Chicago School I mean Sullivan—there weren’t many others right there who did the big buildings in that vein—and Root, of course. Those buildings are there in Chicago still. They haven’t been torn down to make way for something worse. Winogene and I would go and look and take pictures. One of my problems at Ohio State was a frontispiece for an architectural book. I chose Chicago, since I knew Chicago. By that time I’d been around and was able to see the buildings that all these people had done. I got a lot of books on the early architecture of Chicago, which has always intrigued me too, because it was so wrapped up with the story of the history of architecture.

Blum: Was this your thesis topic?

Yost: I didn’t have a thesis as such. Yes, that was one of my major interests and

5 concerns in the development of architecture.

Blum: Did you have a project that you had to produce to graduate?

Yost: No, not as such. I wasn’t taking a master’s although I went first to Northwestern in liberal arts and then Ohio State. It was not a master’s degree, it was just a bachelor’s in architecture. So, I didn’t have the thesis as such, I sometimes wish I had gone on and done a little bit more and then maybe I would have been a great teacher.

Blum: Among the professors that you had at Northwestern and at Ohio State, were any of them what you might consider modernists?

Yost: No. Those were early days. That was when Paul Schweikher was doing classic things with David Adler. It just wasn’t in our knowledge at the time. We were aware of it and that was all. There was no feeling that it was a course we wanted to take or pursue—I don’t mean a school course, I mean a path. We did have a feeling that we wanted to do something fresh. Maybe I can show you some of my problems and you can see them. At the same time, I think one of the nicest things I did in school was a Romanesque chapel. It was so simple, I got a hundred points for it and that I thought was pretty good.

Blum: While you were in architecture school, did you at any time look back at the 1922 Tribune competition?

Yost: Very much, I have a copy of the Tribune book of competition entries.

Blum: What were your thoughts about it then, as a student studying architecture?

Yost: Of course I was intrigued with Saarinen’s design and also with Bertram Goodhue’s. Bertram Goodhue’s design was very much on the same plane you might say because it was very planalinear as Holabird and Root. Much of Holabird and Root design was by Gilbert Hall, of course. Those I admired so much, their simplicity, their directness, and the disposition of ornament in the places where I thought ornament should be. Not all over the thing, the way it was in so many of the so-called classical buildings and some of Sullivan’s.

6 Blum: How did you feel about the winning design being Gothic?

Yost: Being Gothic didn’t bother me then. I thought that it was a tremendous design, and it is. It would hang together. Comparing that to the other designs published in the book, you could see that here was a building, Gothic or not, whereas the others were piles, they would have a base, a shaft, and a capital or closure or whatever at the top. That meant that it wasn’t a building. The Tribune tower of Raymond Hood did the same thing pretty much but it belonged together. It wasn’t just one thing piled on the top. That was the attribute of Gothic and that’s why we thought, then, or were sort of led to believe that Gothic was the natural style to use with steel frame construction. The Woolworth building exemplified that to a great extent. It really looked like a tall building and looked like it was supposed to be the way it is and not piled up out of classic columns forty stories high.

Blum: Do I understand what you’re saying—that the Gothic style lent itself to the steel technology, they sort of worked together?

Yost: We thought it did. Not to the technology, just to the expression. The simplest technology is just to fasten something to a steel grid and that is what the slab covering that Holabird and Root, for instance, did to the steel. You didn’t see the steel at all. That was probably unfortunate. If you go back a little bit to Charles B. Atwood’s Reliance building, the Burnham Company, you could see a better expression of the steel frame, Sullivan too, for that matter. I think the Fisher building designed by Peter J. Weber and the Reliance building of Atwood’s were much better expressions of steel frame than many of Sullivan's were, in my opinion. Of course, but Sullivan was a better writer than those guys.

Blum: When you were a student at either Northwestern or Ohio State with an interest in architecture and you looked at buildings in Chicago, which one or ones most impressed you?

Yost: I think I just touched on that. The Atwood buildings I liked for that reason, it looked like steel to me, it looked like a terracotta covering on steel, which is exactly what it was. The Fisher building had Gothic ornament on it, but it wasn’t

7 a Gothic-like structure. It didn’t pretend to have flying buttresses and all that sort of stuff.

Blum: With that as an example you looked at the Tribune competition winner.

Yost: I don’t know that I thought of it in that light. I was aware of those buildings in Chicago because I went to the city and looked at them before l went to Ohio State. I was interested in architecture at that time and consequently I didn’t do very well in my other courses at Northwestern because I was too wrapped up in architecture. Kids study the wrong thing sometimes. Current buildings that I admired most in Chicago, as I say, were designed by Holabird and Root at that time. They were quite new, very new. The Tribune competition was in 1922, before I thought of becoming an architect.

Blum: Considering the training that you had, academically, in the Beaux-Arts system and the fact that you were looking at Holabird and Root work as modern and then you went on to have a career in what was much more modern, do you now consider that your training was adequate for the career you went on to lead?

Yost: I think it was about as adequate as it could be. I was studying and reading all the other things that were available at that time to augment my training. I can’t say that I took everything my professors said as truth. It wasn’t. They gave me a good basis in studying the whys and wherefores of things. I can’t say that the professors at Ohio State were the finest leaders there were, but I’m sure they gave me as good a grounding in the basics of architecture and where architecture had been, which of course is necessary to know so you can see where it’s going. I think that part of it didn't make much difference. I don’t think that I would have ended up much different as an architect if I’d gone to Yale or wherever.

Blum: A minute ago you mentioned Burnham in connection with Atwood. Were you aware of Burnham in Chicago, his planning as well as building?

Yost: Oh yes. Daniel Burnham was an historical figure. He was one of the best known of the whole bunch and in the books that I would read then of Burnham and Root and so on, Harriet Monroe’s book, Charles Moore’s and such. Yes, I understood as much as I think a young fellow could about what was going on

8 with those men or what had gone on, because they were gone by the time I was coming along in that study.

Blum: Did you pursue that individually or was this actually brought out in your classes?

Yost: No, my training had nothing to do with it. My professors were more exposed to buildings in Chicago by my design for a frontispiece for a book, which I mentioned a while ago, than they had ever been before. I showed them that here was a young fellow who had looked at things, and what he got out of them is conjectural, but at least I put down on paper a sort of a resume of the history of architecture, at least of the tall building or commercial architecture, that they probably hadn’t looked at in just that way. They were aware of Burnham, because Burnham always worked in the classical style. Root was more original than Burnham. When Root died, Burnham’s practice took a turn except that Atwood kept things on track for a while. I was more or less aware of that, I probably didn’t understand the full import of it, but I was aware of all that because of what I had read about these men and just having seen the buildings themselves, and studied them, and photographed them.

Winogene: Was that in the period when you spent so much time at the Art Institute library? You said that you were going to the library there all the time.

Yost: No, that was later; that was after I was out of school. I taught industrial design at the Art Institute for a little while during the war. I’ll probably get to that later but anyway, I was not eligible for the draft because of a previous case of tuberculosis. So, I had to find something to do, and one of them that came along was that I taught a course in industrial design at the Art Institute.

Blum: As you were being trained for the profession, what was your view of the role of an architect in a broader context?

Yost: That is very interesting because as I told you earlier, I wasn't aware of architecture or architects when I entered Northwestern. I just got into it and one thing led to another. Then I read the books and all the books on the profession of architecture, subscribed to the magazines, and became very much aware then of

9 what architects were thinking about. How they all felt—that they weren’t getting a good deal, and such. I wasn’t much concerned about that. I thought that if ever I got into architecture why I’d be able to do what I wanted. Little did I know how difficult it is for an architect, especially a young architect, to do what he wants. It’s practically impossible. It was quite a little while before I really came to the point of being able to do things, even slightly, that were in the direction that I wanted to take in architecture. In fact, my early work was all very traditional and some of it was decent and some of it wasn’t. I used the classic as the postmoderns do today, but I had a better foundation, a fuller knowledge.

Blum: Two extremes come to mind on the heels of the last question: one was that Sullivan had a rather democratic idea about the role of an architect in that he thought he understood what people wanted and then responded to that need. At the other end of the spectrum was Daniel Burnham, who thought that he knew what people needed and produced that. I see the ideas as very different. I wondered what your idea was on that spectrum regarding the role of an architect.

Yost: I really think personally, and I’m not very scholarly about this… I don’t think that Sullivan was particularly democratic.

Blum: He thought his architecture was.

Yost: He may have thought he was but Sullivan was for Sullivan through and through. It just happened that it came along at such a point and he was able to present things in such a way that there were people who believed him. He talked about democracy and all that, but I don’t think it was democracy. I think a democratic architecture would be an architecture that people could do, could afford, could appreciate. I don’t think people appreciated or could do Sullivan’s stuff. They liked it because it had all this ornament on it, but they didn’t understand anything about the reason behind Sullivan’s expression of the steel frame, or masonry, because he did some wonderful masonry things too. I don’t think that people understood that part of it at all, in fact I know they didn’t.

Blum: How would you describe the difference between Burnham’s and Sullivan’s attitude?

10 Yost: I’m afraid I don’t get what you mean. I think that Burnham, of course, was for the big plan and he liked to do cities rather than individual buildings and so on. I don’t think that Sullivan ever had that idea really. He didn’t pursue it or profess it I think. Maybe he would say things like that and maybe he knew what Burnham was doing. Of course Burnham’s work really came after a lot of Sullivan’s, in time. Burnham was an organizer and he got people together and he could make building committees, chambers of commerce and all that come together. Sullivan obviously couldn’t, he annoyed people. Sullivan’s personality was very much against him and he had any number of disgruntled clients, especially in his later years when he was on the skids. He wasn’t able to take a group of people and bend them in his direction at all

Blum: Let me rephrase the question. Did you see your role as a professional to give people what you thought would be best for them or was it to execute their wishes?

Yost: Sure, if they know what they want. Of course I would execute their wishes, but not probably in the way they thought it would turn out. In other words, most people normally are, when they are about to undertake building a house, are in the same position I was when I was talking to Winogene about altering this little English cottage. That’s where they were. I felt that I had gone ahead, I didn’t do this consciously perhaps, I felt that I had gained more, thought more, and felt more and that those people who knew what they wanted would end up in about the same place that I did. I think that I tried to give people what they wanted even if they didn’t know it. It was a matter of convincing people of the logic without being bombastic, without being pedantic about it, of a simpler, more direct kind of architecture. You don’t compare my stuff to Mies’s, there isn’t any comparison, it’s just different, or to Corbu, or any of those boys. At least it was, I thought, a straightforward solution to a building for people in the mode that would be practical. As an example, so many architects who had a considerable reputation, Konrad Wachsmann and so on, who had a method of framing something, a system of building, didn’t always produce the thing that the people wanted. It would be a lot more expensive because you would have to do a lot of special things to get to this marvelous system of prefabrication. The prefabrication wouldn’t be the house at all, it’d be just a shell or a beginning.

11 Many systems, I was connected with some of them too, were not systems of building, they were just one piece of building, one part of the structure, or one part of the covering, or of the interior, or whatever and didn’t turn out to be a complete theory of building at all.

Blum: Did you travel at that time?

Yost: In 1931? No.

Blum: Any time up to that time, or soon afterwards—I wondered what part travel played in the formation of your ideas.

Yost: Unfortunately not very much because, as I said, it was 1931 when I finished at Ohio State and there just weren’t any funds to do that. It was hard enough to get fifty cents to take Winogene to the movies. We did find cheaper ones though.

Blum: What did you do during the depression after you graduated?

Yost: I tried to figure out what I was going to do after the depression. Actually, I had to do something of course. I was living at home, we couldn’t get married, by home I mean with my parents and so Winogene was with her parents and that was that. There was no building whatsoever. I did get my architectural license, first shot, that was in 1932. Having a license, of course, I thought would open up many avenues, which it did not. In fact the first thing that I could do to get any money was design of furniture. We had a friend who had a friend who was in the furniture business. That was S. J. Campbell. Our friend suggested that I go down and see him, maybe design some furniture. He had a job with the Bell Telephone Company; he was real secure. He could get married, $35 a week, that was considered the least income you could have to afford marriage. That would be a very simple life. That meant a lot to the kind of activity we could pursue, whether we could travel—we weren’t married yet so we didn’t travel together, naturally. I went out to Wyoming once because I was afraid she was falling in love with another guy. I had to go out there and see that things were under control.

Blum: What did you design for S. J. Campbell?

12 Yost: Chairs mainly, seating pieces, sofas.

Blum: Were they manufactured by the Campbell Company?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: What was the work you did for the Johnson Chair Company?

Yost: Johnson Chair took over Clementson. I designed for the Clementson Company who made office furniture. I did some things and of course they were just trying to keep going. They were in bad shape; everybody was then. Finally they gave up and at that time I had designed some cabinets for radios for Zenith for Clementson who was trying to get the job of manufacturing the cabinets. I think this is pretty much covered in that book Chicago Furniture by Sharon Darling. S.J. Campbell had mainly seating pieces. In fact, they left tables and things to other people. They were a very specialized business. I felt very good when a design of mine was bought in some quantity. I think they sold forty or forty-five of them for a big beauty parlor. I thought that was pretty good.

Blum: Were they manufactured?

Yost: Yes. They sold them from a sample and then they’d manufacture them and finish them and upholster them as was wished.

Blum: Would you describe that design?

Yost: Describe it? I can show you one in the flesh.

Blum: Was it a steel tube frame or wood?

Yost: It was wood, all fruit wood mainly, cherry probably, maybe apple. They were very beautifully detailed and finished. Wooden furniture with upholstery naturally. I did none of the steel tubing that some of the people thought would be coming along. For one thing there wasn’t anyone who’d pay me any money for designing that stuff. No one thought it would sell.

13 Blum: You attended the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Yost: That followed my graduation from Ohio State.

Blum: And preceded your furniture designing?

Yost: Yes. That was before I opened an office or anything.

Blum: What was that a scholarship for?

Yost: That was awarded to two top graduates of a school.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: So little is known about the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture, would you please tell us about it?

Yost: That was a foundation established by some very wealthy people most of whom lived in Lake Forest end Lake Bluff. The headquarters were the buildings of the Lake Forest College, which were not being used in the summertime. They arranged to get the dormitory and drafting rooms for us. We had the two top students in architecture and in landscape architecture from several of the Midwestern schools: Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. I’ve probably overlooked some. They had this summer session that was led by a fellow by the name of White who was a professor at the University of Illinois. What was his first name?

Blum: Was it Stanley White?

Yost: Yes, Stanley White. He was a very personable guy. That was a very interesting term, it was just a couple of months in the summertime and we had our living and our meals and the advantage of going to see all these wonderful estates around Lake Forest and Lake Bluff. We were going to go out later and do something similar. We didn’t realize that was the time of the absolute demise of the fine country estate. There just weren't anymore. There were nice houses after

14 that, but nothing like the things up here for Schweppe, McCormick, Hamill and other families.

Blum: John Holabird is listed as one of the trustees. Did you know him?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: How do you remember him?

Yost: As a tall, sort of a lantern-jawed fellow, who was very sure of himself. I never got to know him as an architect professionally, I mean to talk architecture with. Later, when I was in the activities of the Chicago AIA chapter I’d see him. He’d be at some of the meetings.

Blum: Would you speak more about the foundation program?

Yost: The estates were marvelous, they were all still very well kept and manicured. We would learn the plant materials and landscape architects would come to talk to us. The idea was to bring architecture and landscape architecture together, more than they had been. Cushing Smith, whom I had known before, was there and Vitale came and others. Architects, of course, came and criticized our design problems. They went with us out in the field to talk about the architecture, why it was done this way or that way, not their own work always. We even went out to David Adler's place.

Winogene: Tell how you were entertained in these homes.

Yost: Oh yes, we were entertained. The Brewsters’s home, we went there to dinner several times, they put on quite a spread for us.

Blum: That sounds like quite an extraordinary summer experience.

Yost: It was. Some of us having lived on the North Shore were aware of it, some of the students from small towns of Iowa had just never seen anything like that. They probably wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been there. The actual prospect of it, as far as designing beautiful country estates, was nil because there weren’t any built

15 after that. However, it was all good design experience, and especially the relationship of landscape to buildings. That was great. That was something that was not particularly stressed academically at Ohio State although we did have landscape architecture students. Two of them went with us, the two architects to Lake Forest. We didn’t have that close connection in school at Ohio State. We did take field trips together—that is, students from the landscape department and from the department of architecture would go on the same field trips. I remember one to Pittsburgh, which was very good, where we saw all these wonderful places in Pittsburgh. That was just a one-day trip. So that was a nice connection between the two.

Blum: This was while you were a student at Ohio State?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: Was city planning a part of your training at Ohio State?

Yost: No. That was not given any consideration at all. I hesitate to say this but I feel that city planning as part of architecture didn’t come in until the talk and the urge for so-called post war planning as it was called. Some people mistook the term postwar planning, which originally I think was intended as what are we going to do after the war, in anything, manufacturing or whatever. They took it to mean the postwar planning of cities, which was good. That wasn’t the way the whole thing started out.

Blum: I was thinking more about the concept of planning as Daniel Burnham, of course, was talking about it, planning a formal arrangement of a city. Planning itself could be understood on many levels.

Yost: That really wasn’t considered very much. Of course, there are a lot of places where the design of apartment blocks and so on, row houses for the working man, were considered and built, especially in New York and Boston, other places too. The Marshall Field Garden Apartments is something in Chicago which was built in the early days but it turned out to be the place where the student graduates would come and at least rent a nice place to live with other people of the same variety. It wasn’t a working place at all.

16 Blum: I was also thinking of planning as it related to the development of suburban areas. The idea of these large estates with their extensive landscaped grounds in an area that could simply be developed in a planned development.

Yost: I think zoning is what you’re talking about. There are a lot of features of that in Homewood and Riverside, one of the early examples of that. That didn’t go into having a place where the very low-income families could live at all. They didn’t plan a whole community to take care of the people in the lower income. The reason they had lower income was because people up here didn’t think they were worth as much so they didn’t get as much money and they couldn’t have as nice a place to live.

Blum: I think there’s many levels on which to understand what planning is.

Yost: There are all kinds of levels and all these things seek their own levels and find them. Their own level isn’t quite the thing that we’d like to see, maybe not quite the thing we think of as proper.

Blum: After this foundation experience, did it awaken an interest in planning?

Yost: This foundation had nothing to do with that.

Blum: It didn’t touch on any planning concept?

Yost: No. No concept of planned neighborhoods. This was all for the very fine and elitist things.

Winogene: For how many years did the foundation operate?

Yost: Ours was the last year.

Winogene: How many years had it been functioning before your year?

Yost: I think maybe six.

17 Blum: In this brochure about the foundation 1926 was the first year and this obviously was printed at the end of 1928. You say your class of 1931 would have been the last so this would have been a six-year program. Who else were students when you were there in 1931?

Yost: My compatriot from Ohio State was Gilbert Coddington. He’s an extremely good man, good architect, very meticulous.

Winogene: He’s been teaching at Ohio State. Is he still teaching?

Yost: Yes, he’s been a professor at Ohio State for years. His firm is Brooks and Coddington. Another student at the Foundation was Lauren Marshall from Quebec, he came from the University of Michigan but he was a Canadian national, he still is. I hear from him every year.

Blum: Were there any students that established practices in Chicago or in the Chicago area?

Yost: There was Chuck Goodman in Washington, he’s quite well-known. I guess he's retired now. Chicago, no, I don’t think so. I can’t think if there was anyone who settled in Chicago, as it were. From earlier years, yes, but somehow I can’t quite recall them now.

Blum: Did you know the Bnowman brothers, Monroe or Irving?

Yost: No I did not know the Bowman brothers. They were from Armour Institute of Technology.

Blum: Yes, and they had been foundation fellows in the early 1930s. There are several people whose names I recognize, theirs perhaps being the most prominent. K.C. Anderson I think went on to be a designer for Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. I notice that the Foundation brochure also lists painters and sculptors.

Yost: Yes, we had them too. We had a painter and a sculptor.

Blum: Women were in this program, there are women in each of the classes, which I

18 thought was…

Yost: Show me a woman.

Blum: Miss Willard Hunt.

Yost: I don’t know her. Of course that was several years before my time.

Blum: Were there any women in your class?

Yost: No. I say no. She would be very hurt that I don’t remember. I don’t remember any in our class.

Blum: Were there any women in your class at Ohio State?

Yost: Yes, several, not many. A couple of them were pretty good. I don’t know what they did later. I don’t know what they aspired to. Maybe they just wanted to marry an architect. Who could tell?

Blum: In 1931, when you attended the foundation you had already graduated at that time?

Yost: Yes. You might call it a reward for having graduated at the top of my class.

Blum: It sounds like a very nice experience.

Yost: It was fun. It was a very useful experience and certainly peasant.

Blum: Did you have any part-time or summer work experience while you were at Northwestern or Ohio State?

Yost: Not as such. One summer, just before I went to Northwestern, I built this Ford Speedster I was telling you about. After that I don’t think I did. I can’t remember having any jobs. There weren’t any jobs to be had. I rigged up a paint-spraying outfit and painted cars for neighbors. Sprayed lacquer was new.

19 Blum: This was from 1925 through 1929?

Yost: Yes, jobs were very scarce even then. The first job I went after, in architecture was the result of a requirement at Ohio State that one have a summer experience with an architect or on construction. The first summer in 1929 I got a job with Phil Danielson, an architect in Evanston. He was doing a real nice house that was being constructed and a thirty-six-unit apartment building in Evanston. That was a very good experience because that was the first time I’d ever been on the job in any real capacity. I’d been watching buildings but I’d never been on the job. This allowed me to take messages and tell guys what to do and everything. For instance, if I noticed the kitchen fan was too close to the door to open up I had to go and tell them that.

Blum: You were a clerk of the works?

Yost: Sort of a clerk of the works, actually just an errand boy. The reason that I was hired was that I had a car. That was a very powerful reason.

Blum: What did your car enable you to do?

Yost: To go from job to job. The architect didn’t have to buy the car. I don’t even remember whether he bought any gasoline. He must have. The fact that I had a car was a very cogent point in my being hired.

Blum: What did you learn from that work experience?

Yost: All kinds of things. One thing I learned about was unions and how unions can be such a difficulty on construction jobs. They’re not supposed to be, they’re supposed to help, but they certainly can be a hindrance on a construction job. I won’t go into it now, because I don’t remember it too well, but I remember how disgusted I was as a fellow who thought that the way to get ahead was to do a good job and work. To have union regulations come along and say that workmen couldn’t do things in order to make the whole thing proceed, that was just foreign to my upbringing.

Blum: Was there a specific incident that occurred that summer that made you aware of

20 that?

Yost: Yes. I really can’t remember the details. It had to do with plumbing, I know that. It was a long time ago.

Blum: What was your first employment with an architect after 1931?

Yost: That would be with Pierre Blouke. After I had my degree I needed a job and a year’s experience under a licensed architect in order to take the license exam. I got a job at the magnificent sum of five dollars a week for carfare with Pierre Blouke and I was mighty glad to have it. I did some drawings for him, a house with a copper skin in Rome, New York. I still have the prints for that.

Blum: Was that house built?

Yost: It was built. It was made of copper because Rome is the headquarters of Rome Copper and Brass Company. The client was a doctor and he apparently had a lot of copper clients. That’s the way that worked. I never saw it. The house was mostly designed, and I did some interiors and so on for it, and I think one of two of those things are in the Burnham library now, a powder room or something. I don’t know whether that was built that way or not, I really don’t know. That was my first job with an architect, Pierre Blouke. I did some competition renderings for him for the Appomattox Memorial I think he still had them. I was going to pick up one of those because they were very nice renderings.

Winogene: Who has them? Pierre Blouke?

Yost: Yes, he wanted me to come and get them, but I somehow never did. I wish I had. They were classic, very simple, Stuart and Revett classic. Neoclassic type, which came about after the measured drawings of Stuart and Revett became known.

Blum: What was Pierre Blouke like?

Yost: He was a very congenial fellow who wasn't a powerhouse in going out and getting work, but that was the depth of the depression. He was so pleasant, so nice to get along with; he was so amusing. Just a real nice guy, a good friend.

21 Blum: Were there other people in his office?

Yost: There was a fellow, his long-time draftsman, by the name of Phil Sax. He was there. Of course there was no work and so the jobs just dwindled.

Blum: So two things you worked on were the house in Rome, New York and the competition drawings?

Yost: I think so. That was it, mainly. We talked about a couple of other things. I made some drawings to try to get a restaurant job, which didn’t go ahead. That’s about it.

Blum: In 1932 there was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art during which the name International Style was coined, were you aware of that exhibition?

Yost: I don’t remember. I probably was because I read all the architectural magazines. I didn't have any opportunity to go there—my five dollars a week didn’t cover more than carfare, you know.

Blum: I wondered if perhaps news of it or its influence filtered back either through the journals or through your colleagues.

Yost: I’m sure it did, because I had all the magazines. I subscribed to all the architectural magazines. They didn’t tout that stuff very much, the magazines were still very classic. I don’t remember it really.

Blum: How do you remember the Century of Progress, which was held here in Chicago in 1933?

Yost: I remember being quite well acquainted with the plan and designs of the Century of Progress even before it was built. That was after I got my license. I got my license in 1932 and that was on for two years in 1933 and 1934. I did some work for the sculptor, Alfonso Iannelli. Maybe that was before the second fair, the second year of it.

22 Blum: It was held in 1933 and 1934.

Yost: I worked on a couple of buildings, one exhibit for Fairbanks Morse and Company. I just worked on the drawings, that’s all. I did that for Iannelli who had the job from Fairbanks Morse. He did considerable industrial designing and that’s how he got that work. He also did the Thermometer Tower for Havoline Oil. I did the drawings, or part of them, there were several fellows there doing it because that was a rush job to get these things out, to get them built in time for the opening of the fair. The Thermometer Tower was a tall tower that gave the temperature in a red streak going up the center of it. I don’t know if it was accurate or not.

Blum: You were employed by Iannelli?

Yost: Yes, they were his commissions from the companies that built the exhibition buildings or the advertising buildings, whatever you might call them. I think there was one other, I’ve forgotten what it was. The main one I worked on was that Havoline tower. That was a tall thing and had to be pretty well put together.

Blum: Did you attend the fair?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: How do you remember it?

Yost: A lot of people. I’m not much on sky rides or things like that.

Blum: Do you remember George Fred Keck’s House of Tomorrow?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: What did you think of that?

Yost: I was very much interested in that. I confess that I was more interested in the furniture because that was about the time I was doing some furniture design. Also, we’d begun to collect a few pieces of furniture against the indeterminate

23 time when we might be married. We were interested in furniture. I remember when the fair closed we tried to buy some of the furniture. We weren't successful in that.

Blum: Did you try to buy furniture from the Keck house?

Yost: I don’t know. Remember that dining set? I don’t remember which house that was in. I was very much interested in that stuff at Keck’s. I can’t say that I admired it a great deal though. I was interested in it but I don’t know, I guess I was still a wood and masonry guy.

Blum: Was there too much glass for you?

Yost: I guess, mainly too much steel at that time.

Blum: What about the Rebori’s house? That was a brick house?

Yost: I don’t remember it. I remember there was such, but I can’t visualize it.

Winogene: Do you remember a ceramic tile house?

Yost: Yes, the tile house and the Rostone, or something like that, panels were made and hung on a frame. After the fair, one of them was moved down to Indiana at the dunes. I guess it’s still there. What it looks like, I don’t know. I saw a picture of it some years later and it look pretty frowzy. It didn’t last very well.

Blum: Did any of these residential designs or commercial buildings excite or hold any interest for you?

Yost: Yes, I think they did. I was interested in the Travel and Transport Building but I didn’t particularly care for it. It seemed to be all spider and no web, or something like that. It was just all holding something up that really we couldn’t see was there. That was my impression of it. Yet it should have been a very interesting building. I hardly remember going into it, it’s amazing because there were automobiles in there and I should have gone.

24 Winogene: You did, you looked at the automobiles.

Blum: Considering your interest in automobiles, how did you feel about the Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car?

Yost: I could see the difficulties with it, and the faults of it, the stability and so on. I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t like it.

Blum: Do you think the fair made a difference design-wise in subsequent years?

Yost: Yes, I think it did very much, especially in commercial architecture. However, I don’t think that those model houses had much influence. I don’t think the people were impressed by them. They were too much effect and not enough hominess.

Blum: What about some of the ideas such as Keck’s solar house, incorporating that into his design and using the sun?

Yost: He did that of course. I don’t think he was the first one to do it by a long shot. He did capitalize on it quite effectively as a publicity tool.

Blum: Wasn’t that fairly new for a general, popular audience?

Yost: It was new to put so much glass on the south side of a building merely to get some heat in at a certain time when you didn’t want heat. They had a lot of trouble with them. The idea was all right but the control of it wasn’t so good. I didn’t intend to make a counter claim or say something against it but I wrote several pieces and talked a great deal about how houses should face north.

Blum: Did you do so at that time?

Yost: Yes, and later. The reason was quite obvious, first, you didn’t get all that extra heat and glare, and second, if you look at the landscape toward the north the landscape is so much nicer than looking south. Flowers face south and so if you’re looking out to the north you see the flowers. The shadows, everything’s in silhouette when you look at things to the south. If you look at them to the north they’re lit, just as things normally are lit to look at.

25 Blum: Wouldn’t your building then cast a shadow on it?

Yost: No, not that much. The sun comes from up here.

Blum: For what publications did you write these articles?

Yost: Magazines and so on.

Blum: I didn’t come across any of them. Were they published in the 1930s?

Yost: No, they were later than that. They were during the war and later. I just incorporated some of these ideas in my other articles. I didn’t write a particular article about that factor. Most of my articles I just started to write and then ended up saying something that I hadn’t planned to say particularly at all. Actually writing is a lot of just filling space. If you can fill space with good stuff, that’s all the better. Looking back on some of my descriptions of houses and talking about certain phases of houses, some of it’s still good, in other words still means something. If only more people would listen, especially the builders. They’re the biggest problem.

Blum: Later you tried your hand at working things out with the builders.

Yost: Yes, I did a lot of work with the builders and their organization and so on. That's such a thankless job.

Blum: At this early time, in the early 1930s, did you enter any competitions?

Yost: Yes, a few, but I wasn’t very successful in them.

Blum: What types of competitions were they?

Yost: The Insulux Glass Block Competition, I think I entered General Electric that Schweikher and Lamb won. I don’t remember, maybe I didn’t.

Winogene: What were some other competitions you entered?

26 Yost: There were several competitions.

Blum: Were they residential designs?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: You opened your office in 1933, is that correct?

Yost: Yes, I guess it was 1933. I got my license in 1932 and then rented an office in the so-called First National Bank building in Wilmette, which sounded good, except the bank had failed. It was a good-sounding address, though. I had a little office about a third of the size of this studio here. Another fellow was with me, Robert Arnold.

Blum: Was he an associate?

Yost: We went into a partnership but it didn’t last very long. The main problem was getting work and how to get work. That was when the furniture business came in and I was supporting the firm by designing furniture. For a time I went with the Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS, and did some measured drawings and things and drew them up.

Blum: Was Pierre Blouke working for the Historic American Building Survey?

Yost: Not that I recall. Earl Reed was of course. They were good friends, I knew them both. Earl Reed was really quite a guy. He was very much interested in preservation, not only the measurements and the drawings but the buildings themselves. That was a thankless job in those days because if you could tear something down to make a job for somebody else to build something that was great. In those days it was making jobs, very difficult to do too. We measured some very interesting buildings; the Pre-Emption House in Naperville, which was an early inn that they said Lincoln had stayed in. I don’t think so because the rooms weren’t big enough to have a bed long enough for him. Some of those buildings were very nicely proportioned. Most of it, of course, was the neoclassic, that is Greek revival. That intrigued me and I felt at that time that

27 maybe that was the natural style to follow in doing houses. It was so nicely put together, so well proportioned that it was scaled to a house, a small house. I’m not speaking of the great big windows, the big porticos and all that. Maybe I’ll show you a design or two I did in that style for clients.

Blum: A traditional style was also pretty compatible with your training.

Yost: Yes. I knew all the elements, I knew the classic motifs and the orders and so on. I could draw those in my sleep practically, but I don’t know that I ever tried.

Blum: How did you come to open a practice with Robert Arnold?

Yost: I guess he made the proposition that we do that. That was about it. He came from a family that was in somewhat the same position my family was that they could afford to let us live at home and maybe even help us over the humps of opening a practice and so we did. That didn’t work very well for some reasons, most of which I’ve forgotten, so I pulled out and opened my own office right on the same hallway.

Blum: How did you survive alone?

Yost: I guess better, but I guess he did, too.

Blum: What kind of work sustained you?

Yost: At first it was just alterations, remodeling houses. We didn’t do so many kitchens then, or things like that. We did a separate garage on the alley. The first job I ever had was from Winogene’s father. It was a two-car garage. The furniture design continued too.

Blum: That’s from your wife’s father?

Yost: Yes, in 1927. That was before I had any training at all.

Blum: He really had faith in you.

28 Yost: Of course, but you can’t go very far wrong on a two-car garage on the alley. It wasn’t out in front. It turned out very well and I’m still quite proud of it.

Blum: What was your first job after you got your license?

Yost: There were, as I say, some alteration jobs, face lifting jobs and so on to make the houses look more modern, not very many of them but some of them got published. It started to go better. From friends of ours, we got a house to do. When I say “we,” that’s me. I got two houses all at once so I convinced Winogene we should be married.

Blum: What was the year?

Yost: What year? 1936. Oh, was I nervous about that. It took a long time to get things moving. People don’t realize what times were like then.

Winogene: When did you remodel that old farmhouse, earlier wasn’t it?

Yost: For Matot? That was earlier. That was one of the remodeling jobs I was talking about.

Winogene: It was very interesting though.

Yost: Yes, it was interesting. I got some publicity on that. It began to come in.

Blum: What was that man’s name?

Yost: Ed Matot, he was the Matot Refrigeration Company. They built commercial refrigerators for meat markets and groceries, things like that.

Blum: That was a remodeling job. The two jobs that you had seem to have given you the confidence to get married, were they new design or remodeling jobs?

Yost: They were for new houses.

Blum: On the North Shore?

29 Yost: Yes. One in Kenilworth and one in Wilmette. The one in Kenilworth was a very low-budget house. It was a three-bedroom, with a bath and a half, and a single- car attached garage, which we built for $5,200.

Blum: Was this the first opportunity you had to build your own design?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: What was that design like, what was the style?

Yost: It had, of course, a very colonial feeling to it. It had the astonishing thing of a garage that stuck out in front. That was very much criticized.

Blum: Why?

Yost: Why? Because garages belong in the back, didn’t you know that? That is where the horses used to be.

Blum: Well, the car was becoming so much like a member of the household.

Yost: That’s what I told them but people didn’t like it. They’d say, “Well, when you leave your garage door open and everybody can look in.” I'd say, “Close the door.” That was true.

Blum: Who was the client?

Yost: The clients there were friends of ours by the name of Rich, Albert Rich.

Blum: Was it Mr. Rich’s idea or was it your idea to have the garage in front?

Yost: My idea. It was their idea that they wanted a house. It was my idea as to how to plan it. It was a very narrow lot so it wouldn’t have been practical to put a garage along side, it would have to take up too much of the property. You couldn’t put a garage along the side, it was just a narrow lot in Kenilworth. Strangely enough there’s a section there that had very narrow lots. I don't understand how they got

30 by with it, but they were there. Most of them were right on the street like that and some of them had drives to the rear and some of them were situated so there was an alley in back of them, but not all of them. I thought that putting a garage in front and creating a door yard garden in the L, between the house and the garage, would be pleasant. It was. That’s the way our own first house was.

Blum: What other features did this Kenilworth house have?

Yost: It had no basement, which is astounding. It had central heating plant and utility around which the house revolved. It was a shingle house, that is shingle siding. The plan was quite open, that is, there were no partitions, it just went around the fireplace. The fireplace and utility were the central core. That was the central utility core idea. It was something that I had had in mind even then.

Blum: But these features forecast some of what you did later. Why did this house have no basement?

Yost: Cost. Forced air furnaces had come in, so we could place the furnace in another place than in a basement.

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Blum: We were speaking about how your office got started in 1933 through 1936 and you had just mentioned that you had two house commissions after the remodeling work that you had done.

Yost: The remodeling work was continuing, but was hardly enough to get married on so when two house commissions came in Winogene and I decided we could run the risk of getting married and hope for the future, which worked out fine. That was in 1936.

Blum: You described the house for Albert Rich. What was the house for Oliver Morton like?

Yost: That was the other one that came in about the same time. That was a house in Wilmette, nothing out of the ordinary. It was a rectangular two-storied so-called

31 colonial that had a sun porch on one end. The detailing of the sun porch I rather enjoyed because it reminded me of the composition of flat moldings of Frank Lloyd Wright. At the time I wasn’t terribly aware of him but when I did this all of a sudden I looked at it and said, “Well, this looks like Frank Lloyd Wright.” Of course it doesn’t now, it’s so far from it. The house is still there but I was grasping not at straws but grasping at flat boards I guess to give myself a little encouragement and originality.

Blum: Were you aware of Frank Lloyd Wright?

Yost: I knew of him, I hadn’t really studied him at all. My studies, when I was in school and so on, and on the Chicago School, were mainly the work of Sullivan and the other people who did the big buildings. I knew of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and knew where they were on the North Shore. I’d been in one or two of them, not only Wright’s but Van Bergen’s and others. There are several Van Bergen houses in Wilmette where we lived.

Blum: That’s the Prairie School.

Yost: Oh yes, all Prairie School. Very good houses there, too.

Blum: How did it happen that you got these two commissions almost simultaneously?

Yost: I suppose that’s just serendipity. The Richs were good friends of ours and they’d been fairly recently married, not newlyweds. They decided they didn’t want to live in an apartment anymore and so they went on and built a house. Birdie’s mother decided to stake them to the cost of the property, the lot, in Kenilworth. I remember it cost all of $2,700 dollars, which was a fairly expensive piece of property for its size in those days. The average price for a lot, a fifty-foot lot, say, with a three-bedroom house then was $2,000. That was in Wilmette, mostly in Wilmette. You could get higher priced ones or bigger ones in Winnetka and a little farther north.

Blum: During those early days when you were working to get your office launched, did you make an effort to publicize your work in publications?

32 Yost: All the time. I spent a lot of time publicizing. Whenever I did anything that I thought was of any significance to the public or myself I'd write an article, make a drawing or whatever and submit it to the local papers, the Wilmette Life, Hollister papers and their fellow papers in Winnetka, the Winnetka Talk and Glencoe News. They usually published the same articles unless it was not apropos to feature a Wilmette article in a Glencoe paper. That was very good, it put my name around, it did a lot of good in making it possible to meet people because they knew my name.

Blum: Were you really hoping to appeal to a North Shore clientele?

Yost: Yes, it was all North Shore. I wasn’t trying to branch farther afield than that, at the time anyway. Later I did, naturally. Later I’d work from coast to coast, but not then, not by a long shot.

Blum: During those early years did people usually mortgage their homes?

Yost: Always, with a little reservation. There were people who did not. There were some whose parents, who, for instance, would stake them to it. Some of them would pay right through for the whole thing. Either they would just guarantee their mortgage, after buying their property for them, the younger people naturally, or they would actually make the payments themselves. I would write certificates for payment and Daddy would write the checks.

Blum: I have heard that during the early years in the 1930s mortgage institutions that were involved in granting mortgages often times wished to approve the house plan.

Yost: Yes, to a certain extent. It was a perfunctory approval as far as I was concerned. Yes, you’re right, I was thinking of something else too. For the mortgage, from the savings and loan or whatever, most of them were savings and loan. The banks weren’t doing so many payment mortgages. They would put a mortgage on a house that was already built, but they wouldn't put a construction mortgage where they had to make the payouts as the building was being built. That was a savings and loan function. That was a fairly new institution. There were building and loan associations that did the same thing, but the savings and loan as a

33 generalized institution for people who wanted to build houses, were coming in strong at that time, along with Federal Housing Administration. FHA had a tremendous amount to do with it. Savings and loan people could then be assured that they’d get their money, they wouldn’t lose if the owner defaulted because they were insured. FHA was a wonderful thing. Everybody thought, of course, that they were borrowing from the government. That wasn’t the case at all. It was just that the FHA arm of the government would guarantee the payment of the loan, if it was defaulted, after certain rigmarole the FHA would make good to the lending institution for their loss. They would foreclose the property in the meantime. I never had one of those. I never had one foreclose at all, or get in danger.

Blum: Did any client for whom you had prepared plans or drawings ever have any trouble having those plans approved by a lending institution?

Yost: Only because of their own financial instability. In other words, someone who didn’t have the resources or someone like a father or mother to fall back on, might have been turned down. I don’t remember any design being turned down by a lending institution. There were cases where the subdivision in which a proposed house was to be built turned it down because there was a board of the residents who wouldn't like something that looked a little risqué, or maybe it’s too modernistic for them in their own minds. What they would want is a genuine Martha Washington Colonial or something, and they weren’t getting it. They would say that the deed restrictions, which restricted the houses to be built in the subdivision to a colonial or however it was defined. Usually the definition was so loose that in any court it could have been overthrown. Still, most young couples wouldn’t or didn’t want to go through the time consuming and money consuming business of fighting it. They would sell their property, forget it, or build some place else.

Blum: Were you involved in such an incident in the 1930s?

Yost: No, not until later. It only happened to me twice that I recall. That was later when my work had changed and had deviated from the acceptable colonial, or as I called it colonialistic.

34 Blum: By later, do you mean the late 1930s?

Yost: No, there was nothing like that happening.

Blum: But in the 1930s were you still designing what you’re calling an acceptable style?

Yost: Conservative, acceptable stuff. The innovations at that time were more in the plan. For instance I mentioned a little while ago, the garage at front of the house was something very much discussed. People did or did not like it. I don’t recall anything like that ever being turned down, but I know that in some subdivisions a garage in front of the main body of the house was forbidden. I never ran into that as a problem.

Blum: This was not a problem with the Richs?

Yost: No.

Blum: What happened after these two commissions? What happened to your practice as the economy was picking up after the depression?

Yost: There was a recession in 1938, but in 1936 and 1937 things were going pretty well. We were going along very nicely. I’d have to look at my records, but I think we had a flow of work, not too steady, but at least we could jump from one to the next without financial concern.

Blum: Were the jobs North Shore residential?

Yost: Residential and almost always on the North Shore, yes. Remodeling as well as new houses.

Blum: Did you have other people in your office at that time?

Yost: Yes, I had a young man by the name of Tom Steigelman. He lived in Evanston. He was a young man and he was my draftsman. There were others too. Sometimes I’d get an extra man or two in. Tom was the one who stayed with me longest, in Wilmette. This was still in the office in the First National Bank

35 building in Wilmette.

Blum: In 1937 Moholy-Nagy came to head the Institute of Design in Chicago; and in 1938 Mies came to IIT, what was then Armour Institute. Did the influx of new ideas from schools in Germany have any effect on you personally?

Yost: I don’t think so, not particularly. I was aware of it but when Mies came I was out of circulation. I was in the sanatorium when he arrived. I read about his arrival with interest and a couple of friends who would visit me there would tell me about it. Actually, it made no impact on me as such. I could tell you what did make an impact if that’s what you want to know now. I had a very nice practice for a young architect at that time. I had several houses under construction, a couple of remodelings and I was remodeling a seven-story building in Chicago into luxury apartments.

Blum: This is in 1937?

Yost: 1937 and 1938. The work was going on in 1938. We were converting that building, which had one luxury apartment per floor, into four apartments per floor. That was a sizeable job for a young fellow in those days. It was down on Walton Place, just a block from Michigan Avenue. I got that job through Winogene’s father who was a mortgage banker. He represented an insurance company that had taken over this building, that’s where I got the connection. I did this building, and when that was under construction I contracted tuberculosis and went to the sanatorium in Naperville for a sojourn. It was not altogether unpleasant but it didn’t fit into my plans for things. I’d managed to get a hold of a young man by the name of Osterhage who took over the supervision while I was laid up. He did a very good job. Winogene ran the office while I was away. At that time I took no new commissions. There were a couple of clients who couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get up and take a look at their jobs. The doctor said no. That was the time that Mies came to Chicago, I read about that with interest but I didn’t quite see how that was going to affect me or why I should feel one way or the other about it. In the first place though I knew of Mies, I didn’t feel that his impact on American architecture was assured. The thing that really did make a large turn in my life, architecturally and otherwise, was exposure to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. At that time, I believe it was

36 the January issue of 1938 of the Architectural Forum that was devoted to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. I began to study Wright. My brother got hold of a set of the large portfolios of Wright’s work for me, from a friend who had worked for Wright as a contractor. He brought them to me in the sanitarium and I studied those and pored over them and began to realize what Wright was all about. Why he was doing what he did and the beautiful arrangement of materials and solids and voids that only Wright could do. That set me off in a different direction, I think. I never felt that I was a disciple of Wright’s, he merely opened up my thinking. I don’t think you would find many buildings that I have done which look like Wright’s work. Although I’m sure you can find evidence of Wright’s influence in almost all of it. My purpose wasn’t to be a little Frank Lloyd Wright—that was not it at all. I just wanted to be a bigger Yost.

Blum: What was it about Wright’s work that appealed to you?

Yost: The space, the circulation and the way he would fit things together, that was just a revelation. Whereas the colonial house, colonialistic, which I’d been doing, were just stud walls, there weren’t studs in colonial times but nowadays there were. Stud walls, you’d punch a hole in and put another stud wall at right angles and pretty soon you’d have a room. Wright didn’t do it that way at all. Wright had elements that were set in a very strange and peculiar position so that the space in between became something defined. That was a new thought really. He had the elements which were arranged in such a way that the wall itself was practically nonexistent, of course it was there in most cases, but you didn’t feel that the wall was merely a box enclosing things. It was the space in between elements. I got pictures of houses that I took since which illustrate that and I used it in my lectures and talks to show the dissolution of the mass. It was a composition of elements that allowed the space between to be something definable and admirable.

Blum: How did this differ from the work you had been doing?

Yost: The work I had been doing were just square rooms put together or a square house with subdivisions, which seemed to be a logical way to do it. I guess it still is to get rooms. We did it all the time later in our prefabricated houses, “manufactured houses,” as we’d call them. It just seemed to be two different

37 things.

Blum: You used a word colonialistic, how does that, in terms of how you’re using it, differ from colonial?

Yost: Well by about 200 years I guess. The colonialistic means really getting the visual characteristics of a 200-year-old style onto a house that is built today out of methods that hadn’t been thought of two hundred years ago.

Blum: How did these new ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright, which impressed you, influence your work? For how long were hospitalized in 1938?

Yost: Six months in the sanatorium and a few more months before I could become active again.

Blum: I see. So in 1939 were you practicing again?

Yost: Well 1940 and the end of 1939. I opened my office then—I moved it from the First National Bank. My friends had lugged all my goods and plan files and everything over to our house. They put it in my parents’ house. Father and mother were in California at the time and their house was vacant so we used that to store my office until I was able to get out. Then I rented a space in Spanish Court, in Wilmette, called No Mans Land and opened up my office there in the latter part of 1939.

Winogene: I recall a book you read when you were in the sanatorium that seemed to impress you a lot but I can’t tell you the name of the book, Seven Lamps of something.

Yost: Oh yes, Seven Lamps of Architecture, that’s Ruskin. I did read it because my father, when 1 showed signs of wanting architecture, got me that book, Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture. He, in his experience in reading and my grandfather's reading, had thought it was the bible of architecture. That’s what it was thought to be. Naturally he got it for me to read, and I read it. I’ve read it since, not always with approval but certainly the man was a great influence. I like to see what it is that would influence people in their thinking, in their reactions to their

38 environment. A book like that, which did influence the whole English speaking world and even Italy, was very interesting because the reader could see what it was that he was saying that had such a tremendous influence on people. Wright’s works, writings, had influence on people, but I don’t think that Wright’s writings had nearly the influence on the general people in his time as Ruskin’s did in his. Of course Ruskin was not an architect, but Wright had to wait for things to come around to his way of thinking. Some of those things that did it were not the books that he was instrumental in publishing, like the big portfolios, Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, but the published works by the magazines. The magazines didn’t publish Wright in Wright’s original twenty years of practice. Ladies Home Journal had a couple of houses that Wright had done for them and a few of them were published. There also was an article by his close friend who was with him in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago, by Robert C. Spencer, Jr. Those were the only publications of Wright’s work that the general public had available. The general public, not being able to understand what Wright was saying, was not influenced in the direction that Wright wished they would be.

Blum: But you came across his material, in the 1930s.

Yost: Yes I sought it out. The one big thing that influenced people toward Wright was Howard Myers and the Architectural Forum, January 1938. That issue of the magazine was as great an influence on Wright’s behalf as anything, including the early publications of Wright’s work in Germany.

Blum: What did you do with this newfound inspiration?

Yost: I stewed over it a great deal as to what to do about it. I definitely did not want to be a copyist, and yet I enjoyed the way he put things together. I enjoyed studying those plans and seeing how they came into the third dimension how they were articulated. I thought of doing work like Wright, just as Van Bergen did. That didn’t appeal to me, I didn’t want to be another Van Bergen. I was aware of Van Bergen then. I know him personally. I guess I groped for quite a while and may be still groping. I just did things that had the influence of Wright in a general sense but not a specific sense.

39 Blum: When your next commission for a house came after you returned to practice after your stay in the sanatorium, what did you propose to the client as a residential design?

Yost: I suppose the Zuver house is one of the next ones. I just started to work and didn’t say, “well now I’m going to do something with brick piers,” or whatever. I just started to work to design a house. I tried to forget, as much as possible, the colonialistic influence, not entirely successful always, for several reasons. First, it didn’t seem to work out that way, and second the clients were so imbued with colonial that it was hard to break away. I didn’t want to be a nasty meanie and tell people, “No I can’t do a house for you, my principles say I can’t,” when I really couldn’t at the time offer a full-blown substitute. In other words, I had to work and grope and feel toward what I wanted to do next. I guess that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Blum: Were there features of the Zuver house that you feel were influenced in some way by the new material you were processing?

Yost: Not the new physical material but the material of thought, yes. I think so. For instance, the Zuver house has an articulated stairway that projects out in front, that wasn’t colonial at all. It freed the mass of the rectangle of the plan so that the rooms could be arranged more generally without being specifically spun around a stairway. The stairway was off to the front. There again, that was something, just like the garage in front. Well, you don’t do that. What you do is put a pair of windows with shutters on the front, that’s how you do it. We were also, at that time, thinking of putting our houses to the garden and opening up the rear to the private garden. That, of course, is the influence of the automobile and the noise of the street and so on. Even in the suburbs it's nice to have your private garden so that people aren’t looking in the bay window to see what you’re doing before they knock on your door.

Blum: Where did you put the living and dining rooms?

Yost: Living, dining to the rear, yes. On the front, this particular house, the Zuver house, had the stairway projecting to the front and the powder room and naturally the entrance hall, vestibule, whatever you will and the kitchen to the

40 front where the service would be. That’s another thing, the service entrance in later years pretty much disappeared, even in larger houses, just as servants have disappeared. When you're bringing home a bag of groceries you don’t don another uniform and say, “Now I’m in the service part of the establishment,” and go around to another door.

Blum: The Zuver house dates from 1940. That was the year that you were an instructor at the School of the Art Institute.

Yost: I didn’t think so, I thought I was an instructor later than that, during the war. Maybe it was toward the end of 1940 or something. At that time the war was brewing and the freedom with which people could build, assuming they had money or credit, was being curtailed because of materials that should go into the war effort. The war was very much in peoples' minds and the government had to issue priority to do something, to build or even put an addition on, even before the general clamp down of the war. During the war, and even before the war, private home building was absolutely cut off. There wasn't any unless you'd already started your house. A lot of builders and other people wishing to build would suddenly put a foundation in the ground. Even though they didn’t know what was going to be on top of the foundation, they were permitted to finish it, and in most cases they got away with it. By and large that wasn’t as large a proportion of the jobs as you might think. Free people would have the ability or the nerve perhaps to go ahead and do something like that just on chance. Mainly it was the ones who wanted to build for sale who would do that, not the private family.

Blum: For a moment, let’s go back to the class that you taught at the Art Institute.

Yost: That had very little to do with anything. Emil Zettler, of the Art Institute, called me at the recommendation of Ernst Benkert, an architect in Winnetka, and thought that I would be good at teaching a two-day a week class in Industrial Design. I thought I could do all right because I was able to work with materials, forms, shapes, colors, and manufacturing methods. I don’t think it was formative, as far as I’m concerned. It was something I did because teachers were hard to get and I was available. Having had tuberculosis, the draft board didn’t want me so I was available to do other things, which I did.

41 Blum: What was the student body like in 1940?

Yost: I haven’t any idea. The size?

Blum: The size and their interests?

Yost: I would guess that the class that I was teaching was about, as I recall it, half men and half women, girls and boys, whatever you want to say, young people. I think mostly the young men were sort of awaiting the draft. There was nothing very solid about it. There was a tension, a nervousness about what was going to come next, what people were going to do. Not that they thought the war was coming to our country or continent, but that they just didn’t know how it was going to affect them.

Blum: In the official notice of the class you were teaching levels two and three, intermediate and advanced, I would assume. It’s listed as an architecture course but you’re saying it was industrial design? Was there a specific approach you used that could either be categorized as traditional or modern?

Yost: No, it certainly wasn’t traditional it was just design. I didn’t call it anything. I remember one problem was a set of bathroom fixtures, towel bar, soap dish and things like that. I never heard of a colonial soap dish so there wasn’t any discussion about what style it was going to be. I tried to get them to think about how a soap dish is used, what’s it for, what do you put in it and what problems are there with what is put in it. Soap doesn’t make things clean; soap naturally makes things dirty because the soap comes off on other things. You have to have the surface compatible to the material that’s going to be temporarily stored there. We just tried to get them to think of the problem and then let the solution follow the problem.

Blum: 1940 is also the year that you became chairman of the Association of North Shore Architects.

Yost: I don’t remember being designated as chairman, I think that happened because I started it. It was a group of architects who had been practicing on the North

42 Shore. I don’t think that was the first time we got together, but it was a good thing for architects to be friendly and profit from each other’s experiences and so on. We had luncheon meetings, they were always fun because architects have a peculiar affinity for joviality and we would talk about lots of things other than architecture, no doubt about that. We’d talk about problems of clients, how to talk to clients, how to influence clients properly, how to get work and all that sort of thing. How we would do our working drawings so that they wouldn’t be misunderstood. We would also exchange what should be privileged information about the performance of certain contractors and products. It was just a meeting of guys trying to help each other, I say guys because there were no women that I know of at that time in the profession that I recall on the North Shore.

Blum: How large was your membership?

Yost: It was ten or a dozen, it varied. Of course, when the war really came it practically disappeared although at that time we thought about efforts toward conservation of materials, fuel and so on. We announced and carried through a program of inspecting peoples’ premises toward that end. Not only for heat loss, but performance of boiler insulation, weatherstripping, and things like that with the end that for the war effort and for the good of the country fuel would be saved. I think we charged ten dollars for such a survey with a report.

Blum: Was this group limited to North Shore architects?

Yost: We didn’t think of it that way but those were the ones who came. Van Bergen was one and a fellow that did the real good colonial houses, Robert Seyfarth. He was an excellent designer. His houses were not really colonial or colonialistic, they used colonial elements. They were beautifully put together. He died some time ago.

Blum: Who else?

Yost: Robert Arnold and Ernst Benkert of Winnetka, James Gathercoal, who since went to the West Coast. There were a few others who from time to time would come in and then they’d move on. It was quite an informal organization, just for the purposes of getting together and talking about things.

43 Blum: The fact that it even was organized I suppose speaks to the fact that obviously there was a need for it.

Yost: Sure there was a need. There is always a need for exchange of information. I think the thing that I felt in talking with a couple of the others was that people didn’t know what an architect was. We felt that by doing this and getting a little publicity, and even putting some so-called institutional advertising in the local press, that we could help in telling people what an architect was and what one did. That was what you might say was a prime purpose. The exchange of information for the good of all of us was just as important.

Blum: An announcement in the Wilmette Life said that the organization was to raise standards. The body of the text spoke about people doing the work of architects when in fact they were not really licensed architects. Was there a problem with contractors?

Yost: Yes. Some people would call them unlicensed architects. Actually, if they weren’t licensed, they weren’t architects. The problem was stronger in other parts of the country than on the North Shore. The North Shore building departments pretty much adhered to the idea that a set of plans had to have an architect’s seal on it. Of course that led to a bad practice of a builder who wanted to build a house for somebody or build it for sale, getting a set of plans, buying them or having them and having a friendly architect stamp them.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Blum: Did that happen fairly often?

Yost: Yes it happened. I think everyone who was at our little luncheon meetings professed that, of course, he would never do such a thing. We don’t know whether they did or not. Anyway, we brought it out. We tried to make the general public aware of what an architect was and why he was licensed and how he became licensed. The general public was not, and I’m sure still is not, aware of what an architect is and why he is licensed. That was one purpose and we did some advertising about that problem.

44 Blum: How long did this group stay together?

Yost: It was off and on. During the war, because of the complete break down in construction, there wasn’t any more construction locally, that is on the North Shore, of the type we were doing. Some of the men went elsewhere and did work for the government perhaps and others worked for larger firms on war work, factory buildings and things like that. The group didn’t really remain active through the war. The few of us, Benkert, Arnold and myself would have an occasional lunch meeting just to talk things over. I don’t think we did much more until the end of the war than that. After the war we got together again and did some more work.

Blum: About how long did that group continue, or does it still continue?

Yost: It doesn’t continue any longer. After that I became interested more in the American Institute of Architects Chicago chapter and I did a little work with them and became occupied there. It wasn’t very long before I got tapped for a job on the board and that led to other things.

Blum: Were you a member of the American Institute of Architects at the time the North Shore Association was organized? Were you a member of both at the same time?

Yost: Yes. I’ve forgotten just when I first joined. When I was a young fellow I joined as an Associate Member or whatever it was called. I took a regular membership as soon as it seemed practical. I would attend the chapter meetings quite faithfully. When I started to do some editorial work downtown during the war, there was no architectural work actually. That disappeared. I suppose I could go into that if you want, what I did during the war.

Blum: What did you do to survive during the war with no architectural work and not being eligible for the service?

Yost: I knew I had to do something. I had a family to support and we had built a new house in Kenilworth, 1940-1941. That required money of course. We sold our original honeymoon cottage with a garage in front and graduated to a house

45 with a garage on the side. I’m trying to think of the years when that was. We had moved into our house so it must have been 1941 or later, 1942 maybe, that I was wondering what to do and trying to figure out just what I could do to make some money and be useful. I know I didn’t have any income at all and we were just living on savings. After the long session in the sanatorium with no work during that period, I was a little disturbed. I saw an ad in the paper, a blind ad, wanting an editor for a magazine concerned with the building trades. Certainly I was concerned with the building trades and at Northwestern I’d majored in English composition and felt that I was somewhat conversant with the English language. So, I wrote them a letter. They, needed an editor rather badly because help was hard to get, they were all being drafted, they needed a good guy like me who wasn’t going to be drafted. I went down and saw them. They asked me questions, which I couldn’t answer, like how many words can I write a day? That’s a dumb fool question, but that’s what they would do. They were anxious to fill their pages. How do I know how much I can write a day? I didn’t at all. I knew that I was able to put words together, but I didn’t ever measure them quantitatively. I started with them and did a whole series of articles, and I guess fairly successfully.

Blum: For what publication was this?

Yost: That was the American Lumberman, which is a magazine that was slanted to the retail lumber dealer, buildings materials dealer. That was certainly a wonderful editorial experience. I had always been interested in the printed word and the process of printing itself. That was a particularly good experience because that magazine had retained the old-fashioned idea of setting its own type. They would send out the text, that is the columns, for linotyping and the linotyped slugs would come back and then the heads and all the illustrations would be set right in the composing room, right next to the office. You’d walk out there and see the whole thing. I had always been interested in the composition of pages, the process of printing. I never had a printing press as such, but I was always interested in page layout. It’s very architectural.

Blum: What was the nature of the articles that you wrote for them?

Yost: I’d write anything they felt was suitable. I did a series on the postwar house,

46 which of course we didn’t know anything about, we didn’t know what postwar was going to be like. Anything pertaining to that, I would put together an article in order to produce a series. The publishers all know that the way to get readership is to have one thing lead from one issue to the next. You stop on the note that, well for the next issue wait, read the next issue to see what’s going to happen. That’s the old continued story, even Charles Dickens did that. The series was quite successful and we got quite a lot of reader response, that is, letters to the editor and arguments. One thing that did not particularly appeal to me was the fact that the magazine had a policy of giving no credit to its own staff, no by- lines. I think that was because they had the feeling that the magazine itself was the prime authority and that you shouldn’t delegate that to a mere employee editor. My name was on the masthead, though. Even Time magazine has changed policy and now credits authors and researchers.

Blum: Do you mean that you do not appear as author in any of those articles, but in fact you were?

Yost: Many of them, I wrote them and had no by-line in that magazine. Of course I know which ones they are. I have in my scrapbooks those series laid out with a lot of stuff in there that I did write that didn’t give me any credit at all. In fact I did quite an interesting, I thought, article in their seventy-fifth anniversary edition on the history of the American house. That was very well read. For years afterward the article was mentioned to me. That was in 1948 and by that time I was getting a by-line—it has been often quoted by other authors and historians. It took the American house from the early days of the sod huts through to what was then the modern house, including Frank Lloyd Wright, and, I must admit, a couple of Yost houses. That way I could give the architect credit for the illustration, especially if he’d taken the photograph. But, I couldn’t get a by-line for several years until my name had become well-known and an asset to them.

Blum: During that time you also wrote for other publications, such as Household magazine and Small Homes Guide.

Yost: As we’ve said before, one thing leads to another, and the only way to get anywhere is to start with something. Many people will just sit and wait for the whole thing. The whole thing doesn’t come, you do one thing and then it leads to

47 another. That’s what happened here with American Lumberman. American Lumberman was not going to do me a great deal of good in itself. The magazine went to lumber dealers and it wasn’t going to do me much good as an architect even when architectural practice came back after the war, It didn’t go to the general public and that’s what I was interested in. Telling the general public about architecture and about architects. It happened that there was a fellow by the name of W. Wadsworth Wood who was quite a promoter. He had a magazine that he put out on the newsstand once a year. He would go around, get a lot of articles from various people and he needed someone to put his magazine together, write part of it, and relieve him so he could go out and sell more ad space. The people at American Lumberman recommended me. I did a few articles for him and one thing led to another until finally I was called the architectural editor of the Small Homes Guide. I enjoyed that very much because I could get ideas together. I could contact other people, other architects for instance, to do articles or to give me illustrations of features and houses to publish. That made me a full-fledged architectural editor. That lead to something else. I really don’t remember how Nelson Crawford, who was the editor in chief of Household magazine which is a Capper publication out of Topeka, Kansas, got my name. He made an appointment when I was with American Lumberman to take me to lunch and talked to me about various things. The next time he asked me to lunch, he asked me if I’d be a consulting editor of Household magazine. That was a pretty good magazine in those days, it's gone now, as so many magazines are. It had a circulation of two million. It wasn’t a rural magazine—they also had Capper’s Farmer published by the same people, Senator Capper of Kansas.

Blum: I know that in Household magazine you made various drawings that you proposed for houses.

Yost: One of the things that Antrim Crawford wanted for his magazine, which as I said had a two million circulation, was house designs that could excite peoples’ interest in building something, looking forward to building something after the war. That was what Small Homes Guide was doing too. The two worked together; there was a meeting of minds. In other words, these people in the publishing business worked together and it was understood that I would use material from one magazine to put in another, just giving credit for each one. Any article that could be used in both magazines or all three would gain by getting the article

48 and that they could all get the stuff that I would write without paying me three times. That was about the size of it. It was just good experience and was a great public relations gimmick, as far as I was concerned. By that time I was getting full credit by-lines and becoming very well-known.

Blum: To whom were these articles addressed?

Yost: People, just the people.

Blum: For instance a young married couple, the man was away in service.

Yost: We did a lot to encourage them to dream about when the war was over and they would come home. That was the one great theme, getting the men back home, women too for that matter. And, what they were going to do then. In other words give them a goal to think about when they’re away. They would take these magazines, the girl, either wife, sweetheart or whatever, would tear out a page and send to the guy in Europe or wherever he was. They would talk about it and write back and write me letters. I’d forgotten about all that, I have a whole file drawer full of fan mail on the stuff. I haven’t looked at that in a long time.

Winogene: Where do you keep that?

Yost: It’s in one of the file cabinets out in the garage. I got some of the strangest letters too. Crackpot letters as well as sentimental letters and all that. It was quite an experience being sort of a male Ann Landers in a way. It was interesting and I felt that it was for a good purpose. I felt these people were in need of someone to talk to. A person in his own hometown sort of finds it hard to talk about what they’re going to do afterwards. “Forget that ‘til the war’s over,” was usually the sort of comment they were very likely to get. I answered all those letters.

Blum: In one article in Small Homes Guide, drawings for the “Post-War House” that we have at the Art Institute, was published and titled “Homes for our Children.”

Yost: Is there a date on that?

Blum: Yes, Spring 1944.

49 Yost: That was before the war was over.

Blum: This design also appeared in American Lumberman in 1943. You obviously reused the same material to attract different audiences.

Yost: Oh yes. It was understood. Absolutely. As I mentioned before, there was an understanding when I took these jobs or posts, whatever you will, that we would work these things back and forth. So they would get more expert opinion, architectural advice, and so on than each one of them could have gotten singly.

Blum: About the drawings of the “Post-War House” that The Art Institute of Chicago has—you have said they were the first version of what became the house that you published in both of these publications.

Yost: I wouldn’t say the first version of the house I published.

Blum: How would you describe the relationship?

Yost: There are some similarities. In other words, Waddy Wood, who was a fellow with a great imagination, would think of an idea. The one we had in this case was a folding roof; the roof was going to fold up like a horizontal door. The whole outside would become inside, including all the bugs and rain I guess. It was an idea he wanted to talk about. He told some of his advertisers, “We have a wonderful new idea in a house that has a folding roof.” So, we had to produce a house with a folding roof. We didn’t talk much about how impractical it was because it wasn’t going to be built anyway. We didn’t produce any working drawings for it, it was just an idea. We did that a great deal, not necessarily in things like folding roofs, but we were trying to get people to think imaginatively. We would talk about such things as prefabricated bathrooms which still has not come into being although there have been many attempts. Later restrictions and so on have made it impractical to have a so-called mechanical core. Ingersoll Steel did it a little later, but never got into the market because of the union problems. Plumbers didn’t want to give up being able to connect each of these fixtures separately. The unit would have it all plumbed, all put together in the factory, and they’d just take it with a crane and truck and put it in the house. A

50 very practical idea, but not from the standpoint of labor. That’s unfortunate. Of course we know that a lot of people are talking to labor about being a little more sympathetic to ideas which would make things less expensive and thereby give them more work in the end. But, you have to prove those things.

Blum: The prefabricated unit that you spoke about in these articles was just an idea?

Yost: Sure. There were no such things at all in that time. They were just ideas. A prefabricated bathroom, or a prefabricated mechanical core. Go back to the Rich house, my first house that I did for a client—that had a mechanical core. We put it together right on the job. We had the plumbing, the water heater, the furnace, and the chimney with a fireplace on the other side all in the mechanical core, right in the center of the house. It included, laundry, the piping to the bathrooms and so on, and it was all manufactured right on the site. In other words, we took standard articles and put them together in the same way that a mechanical core could have been assembled in the factory and just shipped it in and placed.

Blum: In articles the Small Homes Guide of Fall, 1944 and the American Lumberman of August 7, 1943 you talk about a mechanical core needing only to have the pipes connected as it’s installed in that house.

Yost: There were other ideas that would simplify things. For instance, a house, even today, has water pipes to every faucet in the house. Usually they’re separate, although sometimes they’ll branch off from one and go to two different bathrooms or two different fixtures. That means that there’s a lot of hot water sitting out there in the open, as it were, cooling off. Wouldn’t it be much better to run a single pipe to each bathroom, branch it to the various faucets in the bathroom and at each one, or in the bathroom, have a small unit electric water heater? So the water would be heated just as it was used, perfectly practical. It can be done, it has been done but no one knows it. They haven’t been able to sell those units because the plumbers don’t like them.

Blum: Was this an idea that you had at the time when you did editorial work?

Yost: Yes. I wrote about that. I don’t mean that I originated it. It was an idea that could have been picked right up. Maybe I thought about it originally for myself, but

51 then I discovered that there was such a unit on the market, or had been then. But, it was not used. For one thing you have to run a fairly heavy wire to the heating unit, but we run bathroom heaters on heavier wires so why not? It would be much better to save all that water, save heating the water. No water is heated until it is used. Such a simple thing which even today, forty years after the war ended, has just been discarded and not used.

Blum: At the time when you were publishing this hypothetical postwar house there were ideas that appear innovative even today, such as the folding roof. Also, there was the idea of a swinging screen that would separate spaces.

Yost: It would separate spaces so you could make the dining room cut off or move it around so you’d have a smaller space next to the fireplace for coziness and all that sort of thing. That is an idea which persisted because people were so used to having all rooms separated by walls, the dining room had to have a wall around it, and of course the living room had to have a wall around it, the study had to have a wall. The kitchen had to have walls around it; you couldn’t have a kitchen open onto another room. Those ideas have fallen. The idea of a folding partition or a partition that would swing in an arc or whatever to close off a certain portion, has fallen out of favor, out of peoples thoughts really, as now we’re quite used to having space open right through the house.

Blum: At that time what was the motivation for wanting flexibility between these spaces?

Yost: They didn’t like the idea of the cloistered feeling of the whole partition. Partitions as such were a throw back to colonial again when you had to have small rooms in order to heat them, with a fireplace usually. There they huddled around the fire. This huddling around the fire, or huddling with each other is just something that persisted. They thought it had to be. Now, with the way we can heat a house either with heated air or the sun or whatever, it’s not necessary, sometimes not even desirable, to have the rooms closed off. A closed off wall can keep the heat out of a room as well as keep it in, depending on what you’re trying to do. Frank Lloyd Wright did the open plan and that was one big influence that he had that most people don’t realize.

52 Blum: How did it influence you?

Yost: Sure, it did but I’d already thought about it. I did it in the Rich house, the first house I ever did. That may have had some influence from Wright, but I don’t think to the extent it did after I had studied Wright’s works, after 1938, after that issue of the Architectural Forum. I acquired a whole library on Wright’s work and the work of other people in the same vein.

Blum: Was this a more appropriate, suitable room arrangement for people, say for a serviceman coming back, wanting to be with his family, wanting his family to be together. Did that enter your thinking at all?

Yost: Whether it was more suitable for the serviceman to come to a house with fewer partitions wouldn’t be for a serviceman only, it would be for anybody. The idea was to simplify the house, why build walls and boxes if walls and boxes weren’t necessary, and if in fact the spaciousness gained by eliminating them would be much more attractive than making a bunch of cubicles, or cylinders, any shape. It’s just a more attractive, the change in kitchens. In wartime the old-fashioned kitchen was walled in. Houses now, the dining room, the dining space they call it, or the kitchen, are all put together. Another thing has happened to make that was still very much the norm. In other words, you had a separate range, often the black coal range or the black gas range still in use at wartime. If someone had a what’s that Dutch name kitchen cabinet that all the women wanted, Hoover kitchen cabinet, where you have your flour sifter right there—well, people don’t sift much flour now—and all the canisters for the stuff all labeled neatly and so on. What did they call that? It was a kitchen cabinet but there was a certain manufacturer who made it very popular and advertised it and that was sort of the beginning of the built-in kitchen cabinets. The idea of a kitchen counter was just never thought of. They used the kitchen table. You had a table in the center of the kitchen, and all the work was done there. If you ate in the kitchen, which you didn’t do very often, but if you did, in certain families, it was right in the middle of the kitchen. The sink was over against a wall and it might have one or two drain boards, but they were sloping and weren’t very good to put things on. It wasn’t what we’d call a counter and they didn’t attach to a counter, it was just there. Too, they were placed so low that it was back breaking. The stove, of course, was just by itself. You might have a little place to put a pan down when

53 you took it off the burner but not much. It was just a matter of redesigning, pulling together the whole kitchen. The idea of the continuous kitchen counter came in just before the war. My first houses, I remember, had separate units. You’d have a separate stove, of course, with its bottom compartments where you’d put the pans and all that. The refrigerator still is separate, mostly. It doesn’t have to be. The idea of having a room that was composed of such a heterogeneous appearing bunch of stuff, even if you think only of appearance, connected openly to the living-dining room wasn’t to be considered. You just didn’t do it. The two didn’t look nice together so the acceptable plan was to partition it off.

Blum: How common was eating in the kitchen?

Yost: People did, of course. We had more help in those days and the help would eat in the kitchen, the maid, sometimes a couple would eat in the kitchen. Then the idea of a breakfast nook took over. That’s surprisingly late. That didn’t come in until the 1920s-1930s and then it wasn’t very much used. A breakfast nook, where you could have breakfast, and of course people then found they could have dinner there too. That helped the kitchen a great deal because it took away the need for space for the kitchen table in the middle of room. You see all the work was done on the kitchen table. You’d go over there to do this and then go over here and do that and then go over here and do that.

Blum: Was this in the 1920s?

Yost: Yes it was, still is in lots of places. That was the idea of a kitchen, you do the work on the kitchen table.

Blum: In the war period, when the kitchen was being redesigned, counters came in? Did the table go over in the corner to become a kitchen or breakfast nook?

Yost: There wasn’t any table. A breakfast nook if they had it. In other words there was a great deal more freedom and people gave attention to the planning of kitchens. The kitchen was practically out in the barnyards sometimes in peoples’ thoughts. It just wasn’t part of the house, it was there to be sure. That’s where the food was prepared but often the husbands would never go into the kitchen. Those were

54 times that you can't imagine nowadays.

Blum: After the war the kitchen was used by the family as a social center.

Yost: I wouldn’t say after the war made the difference, it was just the change of use as time went along. It just happened to coincide with the war. The war did a lot of good in that direction because it got people thinking about all this publicity that we and other people were giving to the house and how the design of the house could be changed to make things better for the family and for the housewife and the kids and so on. That was a continuing process, it wasn’t just the war that did it.

Blum: One of the other features in the house you’ve titled the “Post-War House” with the collapsible roof and the swing screen was also the idea, you expressed in American Lumberman, of the indoor/outdoor connection. Apparently, on one side of the house there was an indoor/outdoor relationship.

Yost: It was always desirable to get more view to the outside, especially if you liked a nice garden or had an attractive view to look at. The window as such was a factor of the house that had been neglected terribly. The casement brought over from England, and the double-hung window that was used in colonial America, were complicated businesses that were hard to keep weather tight. Weatherstripping was brought in, spring, bronze and felt and all that sort of contrivances to keep it tight. Those things were improved but it seemed so much more simple to fill an opening with just a big piece of glass and put it into a plastic or putty surround so that it didn’t open at all. The idea of opening the windows was a habit that was hard to break, very hard to break. People thought, you got to be able to open the windows. I suppose you do if you want to. I wouldn’t want people to have windows that wouldn’t open if they wanted windows that open. But why? We can get ventilation, we can get heat, we can get fresh air circulation, cool. That’s another thing, air-conditioning, or so-called cooling, didn’t come in until way after the war. That made quite a big change in the design of houses, coupled with what I’m telling you about, about the design of windows. The large windows, of course, were nice because they were good to see out of. Of course at other times it would allow people to look in when we didn’t want it.

55 Blum: When could you get large enough pieces of glass?

Yost: Large pieces of glass were something that came along early, then float glass made it much cheaper than the old plate glass had been. That came later. The float glass came after the war.

Blum: I was thinking about opening up the wall with sliding glass doors.

Yost: Opening up the whole side of the room to the garden or to the terrace or something like that. With sliding doors, yes. Those things were a product of the same factor—that is, when large pieces of glass were available. Especially when they learned how to make it with double glass and have it practical. It isn’t always practical now. At least the idea of a double glass, insulating glass, while it may not have saved as much heat as people imagined, it did cut down on the steaming, the condensation on the inside on a cold day.

Blum: What was the purpose of the folding roof?

Yost: Nothing. There was no purpose for it forever. It was just an advertising gimmick. Waddy Wood had apparently told some of his advertisers, “Oh we’re going to have a wonderful new idea in this house, it’s going to be a folding roof.” I don’t think anybody ever questioned why you’d have a folding roof, but Waddy had to have that on his house. In his editorial, in his magazine, we did it. None was ever built, thank heaven. The idea’s ridiculous.

Blum: You have never built a sliding roof?

Yost: No. You can have a skylight now. Skylights will fold up, we’ve got a lot of those nowadays, but we didn’t back then. That came with the advent of plastics.

Blum: In this particular article with your “Post-War House” the flexible screen is used.

Yost: I wish that never was there. It’s a silly idea and we don’t need it. I’m explaining that what we want is openness in the house. We don’t need to close off all the parts of the house. There are some rooms we want to close off. My studio here, we like to close off occasionally but we don’t very much, merely because this

56 room is such a mess. We do so much on-going work in it and can’t clean it up.

Blum: But I think at the time you expressed the idea that it was useful for teenagers in the house.

Yost: Nothing holds a teenager back. I knew it then, but this is Waddy Wood again. It wasn’t my thought. I thought that if you would have a separate space, that’s why I did split-level houses, to give a room below which was really less costly because it was half way in the ground. It was less costly to build than a deep basement and certainly more pleasant because you could have windows at conventional sill height and let the kids be down there so that they wouldn’t be tramping on your ceiling and making noise. That was one big reason why I’ve recommended the split-level house. It made a family playroom, whether it was for kids, a workshop, a recreation room for families to play dartboard or anything, it was space that was separated from what I call the polite living part of the house.

Winogene: You called it quiet living.

Yost: It’s the same thing.

Blum: There was another house that was attributed to Perkins, Wheeler and Will but, in fact, you actually drew the house that was published.

Yost: No, I didn’t design the house, I just made the rendering. I just drew the perspective.

Blum: The article in Small Homes Guide, Fall 1943, talks about how children can be observed at play by the mother in the kitchen. Was that a new idea?

Yost: No. It was an idea that, of course, was very practical and I think led to the idea of separating the quiet and the noisy functions, the active functions, of the house, which led to the zoned houses that seemed to influence people and seemed to be accepted quite readily by magazines and so on. I did one for Parents magazine and others for these magazines we’re talking about.

57 Blum: You did one for Household magazine.

Yost: I dare say I did them for all the magazines.

Blum: That was published again in Small Homes Guide. This was called the Zoned House.

Yost: Really there’s nothing to that. In fact there’s nothing to all this design except just common sense and how people and families function. If you recognize how people and families function, then the house design is so simple. But, people are so imbued with habit that they think that the kitchen has to be separate, as I said a little while ago. For instance, one thing that I did in quite a few houses is to put the laundry on the second floor, or the second level, which ever it was, instead of in the basement.

Blum: Why?

Yost: That’s where most laundry originates. It’s so simple and yet no one thought of it. They didn’t think of doing that. The place for a laundry is where laundry originates. You just take it and toss it in the machine and it makes it sound so simple that way. It is simple—you don’t have to carry it around.

Blum: Were patterns of family living changing?

Yost: Of course they’re going to change if you change the houses.

Blum: Did the house design reflect the family changes or was change in the family caused by the changes in the house design?

Yost: We changed peoples’ habits of living by designing better houses. That’s what we were trying to do all along. We didn’t do it all at once, and didn’t convince lots of people. Lots of people preferred to have the laundry down in the basement because that’s where their grandmother had her laundry. Maybe grandmother would rather have had it on the same floor as the bedrooms. I did quite a few houses and am still doing them really with the laundries adjacent to the bedrooms, off the bedroom halls. I can think of a number of them right now in

58 my mind. Of course, the automatic washing machine and dryer have influenced that very much.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Yost: I recall with what stony silence a couple would react to my suggestion that the laundry be placed on the bedroom level that is the same level as the bedrooms right there. They wouldn’t say anything; they’d just look at me. They hadn’t ever thought of it. And yet, it wasn’t very long before, a few minutes maybe, they’d say, “Yes, that’s a good idea, let’s do it.” So often these ideas which are still customary are merely the creatures of habit. It’s something that is done merely because it has been done that way, and for no other reason.

Blum: Are you talking about the resistance of people to new ideas?

Yost: I don’t like to call it resistance to new ideas, although there certainly is that. I would call it ignorance of new ideas. If they don’t know about it they aren’t going to want it, are they? That was one purpose of writing these magazine articles. I’d design a little house, put it in a magazine, merely to put across a certain idea, to get people to thinking about it. I’m sure that these houses that I’ve published, hundreds of them really, have had a great influence on people’s knowledge, what they can think about because now it’s known to them. Of course this was a long time ago.

Blum: At that time you published another house for which the Art Institute has drawings and it is titled the Zoned House.

Yost: We were talking about the Zoned House a little while ago. The idea there is that if we open up all the rooms of a house, as we were talking about so as to get freedom of space and to be able to use the space for various purposes, we also lose one thing. That is the ability to sit quietly in a secluded place to enjoy music perhaps or to read or converse. That naturally led to the separating of those spaces. We would have the active areas and the quiet areas. A quiet room might be one, depending on the family, where primarily reading or listening to music could be enjoyed. As soon as we get music and television into the quiet room it’s no longer quiet, so then we’ve got to put the television in the active room as well.

59 To keep those two things from interfering it’s necessary to close off the spaces. One thing that we would do is put the heavy wall, that is the fireplace wall or the masonry walls which makes a wonderful sound block as a barrier between the quiet section of the house and the activity or noisy section of the house.

Blum: This is where the fireplace was?

Yost: Yes, those are fireplaces there. There's a fireplace there and one there, and then we just continued the wall right straight through to form a sound barrier wall. And then off of the quiet room would be a garden. There wouldn’t have to be a garden with a lot of formal planting or anything, just greenery and a little shade. A little dappled sunlight just to make it pleasant in the room. Of course that meant glass walls to open it up. It’s best to have some of the glass walls sliding, although that brings up problems of keeping it air tight. Those things have been improved so much in the last few years. When we first tried to do those things, sliding glass doors, it was quite a chore because they hadn’t developed the weather stripping, tracks, rollers and locks. Now they’re pretty good, I wouldn’t say perfect but they’re pretty good.

Blum: But the uniqueness about this plan was to separate the centers in the house, the activity from the quiet area.

Yost: Of course you’d have to define what was to be in the quiet center or the activity center. Usually the kitchen became part of the activity because that’s where the kids came home and wanted something to eat and where you could have a breakfast bar set up for the unfortunate habit of bolting breakfasts on the way to the train. That wasn’t part of the quiet section of the house at all. That would then run off to the bedrooms perhaps. If you want to sleep you want quiet. However, sometimes depending on the family and the way they live, I would have the children’s bedrooms opening off the activity room or the playroom. Then the play could be taken into the children’s room and out of the general circulation.

Blum: But in this design they’re all lined up in a row, the master bedroom and then two children’s bedrooms?

60 Yost: Yes. They are off of the quiet room area. Also that was the entrance to the house, if you’ll notice, because you don’t want to bring people right into the activity room where the electric trains are spread all over the floor and so on. You want to at least present a nice reception area.

Blum: Another thing this article said, in American Lumberman, July 22, 1944, about the Zoned House, is that the closets were units that defined the space. Was this again the flexible idea?

Yost: Well it isn’t exactly flexible, it’s space saving. It makes it easier to remodel if you want to. We don’t put them on rollers so you can roll it two feet out and get a bigger room or anything like that. The closet itself is a piece of cabinetwork, made of plywood probably, which would be set in after the space was built. In other words it’s not structural, it doesn’t hold anything up. Often we would leave the top of that open for an open shelf for displaying things. Sometimes we’d put a piece of glass up there to show through to the next room if that was appropriate so that the space would seem larger.

Winogene: That’s a terrible idea, a dust catcher.

Yost: A very bad idea for catching dust, but if you want dust it’s a good idea.

Blum: Before we leave the Zoned House, this design has a distinct Wrightian look...

Yost: That does? Yes it probably does.

Blum: I think so.

Yost: He certainly never did anything like that though.

Blum: It has a low-slung kind of look, with wings coming out in various directions.

Yost: Horizontology. What I enjoyed about doing these was connecting the single story part to the split level, the story and a half part, in such a way that it was a continuous mass, it didn’t just jump up abruptly. It was tied in nicely. See, these parts tie in with both of the wings and this comes over here and ties in with that.

61 Blum: This recalls Wright’s ribbon windows, how they wrap around and continue the line.

Yost: Yes, very much.

Blum: Was this a conscious change on your part?

Yost: Sure it was conscious, it had to be conscious.

Blum: Let me say deliberate.

Yost: Deliberate of course. Here, if you’ll see these strip windows there and there, this strip of windows is located just at the kitchen counter level. The wall cabinets are above that. The space between, which you’re familiar with, a piece of wall between the counter and the wall cabinets, becomes glass. That’s window. It lights the counter, and it gives that nice continuous line. It opens up the kitchen very much. I did that in one of the first houses I did after the war, the Deno house.

Blum: Another magazine in which your work was published is Household Magazine. Numbered plans that you designed could be purchased for twenty-five or fifty cents. Were they available from the magazine or from a lumberyard?

Yost: You’d send in your fifty cents or whatever it was and the magazine would send the plan to you. It was a single sheet of elevations and plan so that you could measure how much space there was and so on. It was not a structural plan. It was not an architect’s plan.

Blum: How were these plans intended to be used?

Yost: They were intended to be used like people use so many things, and that is for fun. They just enjoyed looking at them, working them out, changing them if they wished, talking about them, saying, “Oh we could put the sofa over here or maybe we could put the sofa over there.” They would just play with them, enjoying them. They would cut out furniture and put on these scaled plans. You

62 see the plans in the magazine were not to scale, they were much smaller. These were not working drawings, they were not intended to be built, that doesn’t mean that some guy who’s a good carpenter couldn’t have built from them, but it wouldn’t have had the structural part at all. Some readers sent in for many different plans—a whole collection.

Blum: Did anyone ever come to you and say, “Oh, magazine plan number 205 is really wonderful, I want to build that house.” Did you ever do a house like that?

Yost: Sure. People came to me and employed me as an architect to do houses but actually the houses never turned out the same as shown in the magazine. The ones in the magazine were designed around an idea of possible family use, for a typical family. When they’d come to me I knew the family, I knew how much money they wanted to spend, at least what they’d say, and where it was to be built, where the views were and which direction it would face. Maybe the house that they admired wouldn’t be for them at all. So, we’d start all over and do a new one. In any case, as far as I can remember, none was ever built that followed the proportions and the appearance of a published house.

Blum: In presenting these elevations and plans in every issue of Household Magazine, each one had a distinctiveness to it. What was the idea behind Plan 205, for example?

Yost: We haven’t found the plan for that so I can’t say. As I recall that house, it was a split-level house. The stairway was behind the chimney, as you see there. You’d go up half a flight. That’s not a very good example of the split-level house. The split-level house is much better shown on another one. There are plenty of them; I did a lot of them. The idea was that you would go down half a flight to the lower level which was about two and a half to three feet below grade, usually two and a half, and that would allow windows above grade, above the foundation, to light the room. It would be lit just as nicely as any other room in the house. Of course there were no sliding doors down to the floor, unless you’d have a terrace out front, then you’d kill some of the advantage of the split-level idea. The thought was to get that space which would be cheaper than building a full two-story house. In most climates, and the audience of these magazines was usually the Midwest or toward the north part of the country, you’d have to go

63 three and a half to four feet below grade anyway for the foundations. You’ve got that wall that you have to have to get below the frost line, to keep the frost from heaving the foundation. That meant that you could use those walls, which are already there, as walls of the house. Then you only have to build a wall half a room high above the foundation wall to get a complete room enclosure. That saves a lot of money. It was cheaper to build a split-level house with the same accommodations than it was to build a two-story house or even a one-story spread out house completely above grade.

Blum: Was economy one of the reasons behind the design of this house?

Yost: Sure. That was a split-level house where you’d get the lower level for activity and such.

Blum: Another thing you mentioned when we were discussing this earlier was a family dining room.

Yost: That was what I’ve been talking about before. This other house that we looked at had an activity room which was really the dining room and playroom and the kitchen was at one end of it. In other words, activity in that particular house included dining.

Blum: Is this design the one you said recalled references to your grandfather’s large family dining room?

Yost: That was just an example of using the dining room as a family center. That’s not a new idea because gathering around the dining table after meals to do homework and so on is an age-old custom. There you have to think of why. The reason was that you had a lamp, an oil lamp in the middle of the table so everyone sat around the table to read or study. You’ve got to look at the reasons for things. You can’t just say, “Oh that’s the new thing.” How do you know it’s the new thing? You don’t know why it was done. The idea there was, I mentioned my grandfather’s house in Ohio because it was a place where the family did that very thing. My grandfather had a rocking chair next to the fireplace for a reason that I cannot condone. He liked that fireplace with no screen in front because he liked to chew his tobacco, which I positively despise.

64 He was, nevertheless, a very well educated man. He was a lawyer. That’s where he would read, rocking before the fire. He would discuss books. His family would, I don’t remember when the family was young of course because that was my father’s generation. The other relatives who lived in town would always stop in on their way to the post office in town and converse a little bit or give the neighborhood gossip and then they’d go on. It was really a family center and very pleasant as I remember it. My grandmother would prepare dinner in the kitchen, the kitchen was separate, but actually it was a lean-to type kitchen. It was an old-fashioned thing in a big old house. It had a lean-to kitchen that for one reason or another was one step below the dining room. I can’t recommend that at all. It didn’t seem to bother her much. She would prepare meals in the kitchen, naturally, and bring it in and set it around the table. People would then gather.

Blum: Did you use that as an idea in this particular house?

Yost: I did not use that as an idea per se for this house but of course that’s the idea I’m talking about it. It’s an idea that eating, dining, reading, all those things around the table is something that can be enjoyed in a family if the family is so disposed. In some families who prefer the very formal type of service, even though they have to serve the table themselves, would prefer a more formal and separated space. All these things are a matter of family preference. You can’t say this is the way to do it at all, you just can’t. People should be treated differently. I look forward with a great deal of disgust to the time when people will perform all their daily living functions in exactly the same way. We can’t do that; we’ve got to encourage individuality.

Blum: Small Homes Guide, Fall 1943, compiled the results of a survey that they took to find out what features people wanted in their homecoming house. Those results apparently guided you to design a house reflecting those preferences.

Yost: At that time it was not the wealthy segment or the poor segment, it was just the good average American people. Their likes were naturally influenced by what they were aware of, what they had. I mentioned that before. If people don’t know about something they certainly can’t like it.

65 Blum: There was an overwhelming percentage of people who wanted extreme opposites—traditional on one end and the very modern on the other end. This article does go on to say that the trend towards modern design is strong and steady, tempered with, “we want it to look like a home,” that combination.

Yost: “Looking like a home” does not preclude modern design. This was not influenced particularly by the all glass houses that have been introduced by such people as Mies van der Rohe because the people at that time were not greatly aware of them. His work had been published in some of the magazines, but not to the extent where it would become a preponderant factor in influencing public opinion. I don’t know that we can say much more about that here. There’s always been a segment that prefers the traditional, and now, right this moment, this very modern moment that we’re sitting here, there’s a whole bunch of people who think nothing is better than a room full of antique furniture.

Blum: This questionnaire was an interesting gauge of what readers of the magazine were thinking at the time about a postwar house. One of the things that it points out was that they absolutely wanted openness in the house. They wanted the merging, as you have already talked about, of the kitchen, the dining and the living space. Also they wanted an extra room for activity or hobbies. Obviously these homes were being planned with children in mind so they wanted spaces for children. Another thing they asked for was for more closet and storage space and it seems that they were aware of the idea of using their war bonds as the down payments and also backing that up with mortgage insurance. That was fairly sophisticated.

Yost: That was FHA. That was almost mandatory.

Blum: Mortgage insurance?

Yost: Sure. That was the only way that the savings and loans, the banks, would loan money.

Blum: The article mentions a life insurance plan, was that mortgage insurance?

Yost: No.

66 Blum: How were they different?

Yost: I think what they refer to in the life insurance plan is a plan of monthly payments so you build up equity with the life insurance company. That compounds because the interest is paid on what you’ve paid in. Building and loan associations do the same thing. It depends on who gets in there and sells it, that’s all, the idea. What they’re after, naturally, is to get the money in their till so they can loan it out at higher percentage. Nevertheless it’s a good idea, that’s banking, that’s what it is. Life insurance could be had to pay off the mortgage in case the breadwinner died.

Blum: Do you think the audience that read Small Homes Guide was aware of that?

Yost: Sure, they wanted to save money. They would like a way to save money where it was safe, insured, and a life insurance plan would normally be pretty safe. That was what they wanted.

Blum: In some of the articles prior to this one, you wrote about how one could buy war bonds today and use them after the war as a down payment on a house. Were you educating the public in a way? What was your intention?

Yost: The intent there was to get people thinking about saving. Of course the primary thing was to put money with the government so that it could be used for the war effort. That was the main purpose of that whole thing. Because the interest was so low, it would have been much better for people to put the money at a higher interest rate and let it compound. They’d have more at the end of the war. But, that wouldn’t be putting it with the government for the war effort. So, people did that deliberately if they knew what that was all about, deliberately just so the government would have that money. It was rather hard to contribute to the government for the war effort in any other way than buying bonds of one type or another.

Blum: At the end of the war effort how was this going to benefit the home building industry and the architects?

67 Yost: Then they could spend that money for hiring architects and contractors to build houses. That was fine with the business effort. People were very concerned then about the changes that the end of the war would bring. There were so many men and women in the service who had left jobs at home and were going to come back, all at once, they thought, and the economy would be disrupted because there wouldn’t be jobs for all these people. They were trying to conduct a concerted effort to channel these savings into houses, which of course would produce work for people when they came back. Not only directly, but ancillary. If there’s money in a community from building, there’s going to be money for other things too. In other words it’s just priming the old pump and keeping it going rather than having them all come back to no jobs and no money and living on the dole or whatever. It was just foreseeing the difficulties that could be encountered when so much new labor would be thrown onto the labor market. Some of them would be coming back to jobs, maybe, but maybe their jobs weren’t there because the company had gone out of business because all their people had gone into the war effort and so on. It was very uncertain.

Blum: Another one of your literary efforts was a question and answer column for the plumbing and heating business. People could send in problems or an example of their store, either front or interior and you would then propose a modern solution for them.

Yost: That started with the Crane Company during the war. Plumbers were in business—usually plumbing and heating were all in the same business so workmen would do both. They wanted to improve the merchandising and the places of business of the typical plumbing and heating dealer of the Crane Company. They commissioned me to do a study of modernizing existing plumbing and heating stores, or places of business, to attract the public. They were aware that most plumbers hadn’t thought much about an attractive place of business and yet they were selling things that the public was very much interested in. They should have an attractive place of business to entice people in so they could tell them the advantages of these new plumbing and heating appliances and fixtures, and installations of course. After that had been finished, and I think quite successfully, and some brochures published and advertising and so on as a result of it, the magazine Plumbing and Heating Business—which is an industry magazine and it has nothing to do with Crane Company directly but,

68 of course, they have their advertising—asked me to continue those studies for individual plumbing and heating dealers. I was to make suggestions for improving their places of business, to do the same thing that the Crane Company was after. It all worked together because they were all after the same end. The plumbing and heating dealer would send in a measured plan and photograph or two, or whatever he could, and a description of his town and circumstances, location of the business and so on. I would try to analyze what they would send and give them ideas on improving their stores. A lot of plumbers were in most unlikely locations—they weren’t in places where people would be going past and be enticed in at all. They were in back alleys, a lot of them. They were more interested in installing the plumbing than they were in getting the customers in. That was just an effort toward making the plumbing and heating dealer more of a public benefactor.

Blum: Much of your time during the war was spent educating the public and working up a potential clientele for when the war was over.

Yost: Well potential clientele was rather non-existent, I suppose it was an ephemeral clientele because I didn’t know who they were. When it came toward the end of the war, and we could feel that hopefully we were looking toward it, some people came in and wanted to start planning, looking toward the end of the war. That, of course, was encouraging. It gave me something actual to do that might really be built.

Blum: It seems like many of your articles were geared to an upsurge in building after the war because of the returning servicemen. So many of the homes were filled with optimism and a hope for the future. Some of them were called the Dream House, the Post-War House, the Homecoming House. Some of the articles were geared to the fulfillment of that dream.

Yost: That’s right, but we mustn’t forget that there are really two types of clients, two types of people that I was addressing. The ones in the magazines were small house people, newlyweds, families with young children, and so on. And yet, I lived in a community where people wanted larger houses, you could call them pretentious to a certain extent. They saw none of this publicity in the magazines—they didn’t take those magazines.

69 Blum: Was it your feeling that this was limited to your publications and your reading audience?

Yost: No, that was general. That was part of the propaganda office, the government, they were trying to keep people happy and enthusiastic, buoyant, and looking forward to the end of the war.

Blum: Were you ever asked to write articles geared in that way or was this just your understanding of what the times needed?

Yost: No, no one ever told me. They talked about postwar houses because they knew that there was an interest in being able to do something when the war came to a close. That would naturally be something that people would buy magazines to read about. The advertisers would advertise their products in such a magazine in order to keep the name of their products, no matter what they might be, in front of the public. It was just a general feeling that people were looking forward to the end of the war, you can’t look back to the end of the war so you had to look forward to it, you see? The people on the North Shore where I practiced, where I had my office that is, were not subscribers to these magazines, they just weren’t. I did write the same type of material pretty much for the local papers, the Wilmette Life, Winnetka Talk, Glencoe News, and other papers and magazines that would reach the locals. I was interested in those for my local clientele.

Blum: I notice that the Wilmette Life had an account of the Homecoming House survey.

Yost: Oh yes. Any of those things would be good. Even though the original magazine didn’t reach a certain type of people, nevertheless they might be interested in the same thing. That’s why I repeated these various articles or parts of them, the essences of them, in the local North Shore papers for the people to read. Also, if the people would read in a news magazine, local news magazine, that I had written an article about such and such for a magazine of national circulation, that would certainly do no harm to my good name. I did that all the time. Even if someone had never seen a copy of Household for instance, they would know that I had written for the national magazines.

70 Blum: The Homecoming House survey got very broad coverage. In your scrapbook are articles from the Washington Post, the Michigan Society of Architects journal, and various other publications.

Yost: I dare say there were others too. The public relations departments of these magazines would send these articles as releases to various other sources, various other media. The radio had a lot of it too. I don’t have any of that in my scrapbook you see. I found it difficult to clip a radio talk.

Blum: After the war was indeed over and the postwar period was not something you were looking forward to but actually living, what was the first house after the war that you built?

Yost: I had several houses on the boards. Norman Deno—Mr. and Mrs. Deno—called me and we talked about a house, I don’t know just how long before the war ended but it was months anyway. Mr. Deno was a friend of Stan Hansen's. Then Stan Hansen came to me too. I designed a house for them to be built in Kenilworth. The Deno house was in Highland Park. They were the first houses that I actually could put into working drawing form and let contracts for on behalf of the owners after the war. Fortunately they were both good clients. I was able to do a nice piece of work for each of them then others followed along.

Blum: In the Deno house, what features did you use in designing that may have been formulated during the war period when you were writing about homes for the future?

Yost: The Denos were not young newlyweds, they were approaching middle age. They had a beautiful piece of property in Highland Park on the ridge overlooking the Skokie Valley. It was a large piece of property, comparatively, for a suburban piece. It had this beautiful view out over the valley. We capitalized on that. It was really a view house. Strangely enough our first studies for that house were for a split-level house because he wanted more of a workshop space in the lower level. However, I guess because of the fear of rising costs, and costs did go up, we couldn’t keep track of costs very much during the war because we couldn’t be taking any prices on anything because there was nothing to build. We realized that prices had gone up and he decided he really didn’t need that workshop

71 space and so we collapsed it to a single-story house. It worked out very well too. It was the same plan pretty much except we didn’t have the lower level underneath the bedrooms. I think the thing about that house that was quite interesting was the kitchen, which was close to the entrance and yet not discernable with the strip windows above the kitchen counters and clearstory windows above the kitchen cabinets on the wall. All that worked very well because we didn’t have any need for a view in that direction. I should put it this way: the view was downhill so the low windows right at the kitchen counter tops level, while they were below your standing eye level, nevertheless were in line with the view down the hill. You could move a little bit, to another room or wherever, and you could see the rest of it. That’s one thing I usually tried to do if I could, that is to have the view change. I wouldn’t just open up a whole side of a wall completely just for the sake of getting the view. I’d like to get a different view in one direction. The end of the living room in the Deno house has a real nice window that is in line of the length of the room. There you had quite a different view into the woods—the vista at the end of the living room was different from the view out toward the valley. The valley was open and then you’d just turn a little bit and you’d have a view into a nice sort of secluded woodsy area.

Blum: Was this arrangement influenced in any way by your intention to design something for zoned areas?

Yost: No. I don’t think that had a particular meaning here because they were just a family of two people and they had extra bedrooms because they had sons who would visit. They didn’t live there, they were grown. That wasn’t a zoned house in the sense of a quiet area and a noisy area or active area.

Blum: The living and dining room is one large room.

Yost: It’s all one large room with the entrance and the freestanding movable coat closet separating the dining area from the entrance area.

Blum: Is this one of the houses that you did during the time when Walter Netsch was working in your office.

72 Yost: I’d begun this before hiring Walter.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Yost: As I think I said but probably didn’t finish, Walter Netsch did not participate in the original working drawings of this building because the working drawing process took something like two years. He did make the drawings for some built- in cabinetwork though, which was included subsequently.

Blum: He pointed out to me that many of the cabinets or chests of drawers had no hardware, just a little ridge where you could fit your fingers.

Yost: That was something that wasn’t necessarily new. It was a feature that did away with the interruption of hardware on the surface. It was sort of like a louver front. In other words the fronts of the drawers sloped out toward the bottom leaving the bottom edge exposed over the surface of the drawer below. That was grooved so you could put your fingers in there and pull the drawer open. I’ve used that quite a bit. I know it’s done by other people, there’s nothing particularly original about it, but I enjoyed doing that.

Blum: Was the use of built-ins greater after the war? Was that a new feature in houses?

Yost: Yes. I think built-in furniture was something that certainly had been used before the war, I’d done it too, but it was used more after the war for a couple of reasons. First, furniture in the stores had become terrifically expensive so it didn’t seem like such an extravagance to have your own built in. The real reason, for many people, was that it could then be included in the mortgage. Being part of the house, you could include the value of the built-in cabinetwork, furniture, whatever it was, as value of the house to make your equity bigger and get a bigger mortgage. So, you’re actually able to get a lower mortgage rate, time payment rate, on built-in furniture than you could by getting it from a store. You’d pay quite a carrying charge on a store purchase and for not as long a time. Here you could pay it out over the length of the mortgage. If you had a twenty- year mortgage, you could pay for your bedroom chest of drawers over twenty years, which is quite an incentive.

73 Blum: Were many people aware of that?

Yost: That was a good point. I don’t know how many it really affected.

Blum: Did you make a point of telling the Denos or did they simply want these built- ins?

Yost: Well I think they wanted them at first, but I really don’t remember about that. I think I must have told him because he was conscious of those things.

Blum: In working out the arrangement for the house, did you propose the plan to him or did you work it out with him?

Yost: As with almost all my clients, it begins with just conversation. I prefer that they not even put pencil to paper to show what they want. I want it in words and why: why certain things should be a certain way, why they wish it that way. How they live. Then I would interpret those wishes into something that I thought would please them. Generally, it wasn’t very difficult to work out a plan almost at the first visit with the clients, that would satisfy them quite generally. Of course we’d work out details then, even such things as room sizes, window, furniture placement, equipment, that sort of thing. That would work out as we’d go along. I had very little difficulty in coming up, I think almost immediately, with a plan that was quite suitable to them, which they liked.

Blum: Were there any special things about the Deno house that you remember?

Yost: After the split-level plan with its half-sunk basement was abandoned in favor of a single story, I designed the footings as just trench footings. Footings were dug by hand spade. I had a little difficulty convincing the Highland Park Building Department that that would be substantial enough. I tried to point out to them that it was just like putting it right into a socket because the concrete would actually fill the excavated trench so it couldn’t go anyplace. It was solid. They finally agreed, well maybe I’m right. They let us go ahead with that kind of a footing. They had been trying to make people who wanted a slab on the ground, as if it were to dig a wide trench, maybe almost two feet wide, maybe wider, and pour a footing at the bottom of it. Then, let that set up to put forms for a short

74 piece of wall up to grade level and let that solidify and harden. Then, form up for a slab across the top. Well, we eliminated all that you see, by the simplicity of construction. Also the fact that there wasn’t a lot of loose, disturbed earth around it. The more you disturb the earth the less solid it is, obviously. We would do this trench work, by hand, no machine stuff, and that would allow the concrete to fill the trenches like a solid socket, just as if it was into a socket that had been machined to fit. It did fit, it poured right into it.

Blum: How was this house heated? There was so much talk about radiant heat during the war, in the magazines. Was this a radiant heated house?

Yost: Yes, in a way it was. It was not radiant in the way that many people thought of radiant. Many people think of an entire floor that’s heated, either with a grid of pipes in the slab and then heated with hot water, or electricity, electric cables. We didn’t do that. What I did was to run a duct around the entire perimeter, I called it perimeter heating. At first we’d make ducts out of sheet metal and later composition board, called a sonatube, and run that around the perimeter of the house with some intermediate supply pipes running from the furnace. The furnace was placed most any place. When you have a complete loop the pressure, theoretically, is the same in all the loop, in the whole loop. It doesn’t make any difference where you put the fan or the furnace because it’s going to be the same all around. It will equalize against the other end of it. We would do that and then take supplies, that is the grills, registers if you will, underneath the windows, some of them, or in strategic places coming up through the floor. They would be right in the floor, you could shut them off if you want to, or not. Some of the air would come in but all the time the whole loop was pressurized. That was a system that was quite new at the time. I can’t claim to have invented it, I may have improved it but I didn’t actually invent it. However, I’d never seen it done before.

Blum: Another feature that was talked about in these articles as an appropriate element for the post-war house, was air-conditioning. Was this house air-conditioned?

Yost: What do you mean by air-conditioning?

Blum: What was meant by it when I read it in Small Homes Guide?

75 Yost: That’s something that is confusing because air-cooling was hardly done at that time. Manufacturers didn’t have equipment for it and it just was a considerable extravagance and wasn’t considered necessary. Air-conditioning then was just a warm air furnace with a means of humidifying and filtering. That was where the conditioning came in. That was called air-conditioning. “Air-conditioning engineers” went on their trucks but they knew nothing about cooling.

Blum: Do you mean this was a humidifying process?

Yost: Humidifying is just getting humidity into the air somehow.

Blum: Is that what was meant in articles in Small Homes Guide?

Yost: It’s very likely. If it were cooling it would say so.

Blum: It did say cooling.

Yost: If it said cooling then it meant cooling. If it just said air-conditioning they didn’t mean that. Houses after the war hardly ever had air-cooling. That was another business. I’m not sure just when we got air-cooling into houses, about 1950 and later. Our own house was the first air-cooled house in Kenilworth.

Blum: In an article in Small Homes Guide in Fall 1943 titled “New View Points for Post War Living," there’s a list of about sixteen items: number seven says, “The new home will be sound proof, air-conditioned, as well as highly resistant to fire, water and bugs.” What does “air-conditioning” mean?

Yost: I’m sure that was humidifying and filtering which were things that had not generally been done earlier, before the war.

Blum: In 1944, the year of the Deno house, the Morse house was also designed. The Art Institute has your drawings for that.

Yost: Yes, that was a house to be built in Winnetka. Ms. Morse was a pianist of considerable ability so one thing was to provide a space for the piano. This was a

76 nice thing to do. I always like to provide a space for a piano.

Blum: Mr. Morse also had a hobby and this house was planned to accommodate it?

Yost: I don’t quite remember.

Blum: In an article, in House and Garden of December 1946 the Morse house is featured and it says, "planned around a music room and workshop.”

Yost: Yes, woodworking. Almost everybody who builds a house has a hobby of woodworking, they want to be able to fix things as least. They will say that and say that their hobby is woodworking, I don’t think that we had any specific workshop in there at all. However, people do various things in various rooms. I’ve seen a complete woodworking shop installed in a bedroom. That isn’t ordinarily planned ahead of time, it just happens as people use the house.

Blum: Is the Morse house a one-floor arrangement?

Yost: Yes.

Blum: Whose idea was the stone?

Yost: I have nothing against stone on a house. I don’t remember, I guess they wanted it.

Blum: Was this house built?

Yost: That was unfortunately not built. Mr. Morse died on January 6, 1945. It’s too bad because he was very much interested in getting the house built.

Blum: What kind of statement were you hoping to make, first, in the hypothetical houses that you wrote about in publications during the war, and next, in houses you designed for clients after the war?

Yost: A statement? What sort of a reputation was I trying get?

77 Blum: If you wish.

Yost: I wanted to do a house which I felt was in each case a good expression of the needs, requirement, site always, and the materials that were selected or that were logical for the house. It’s pretty hard, for instance, to design a house to be built in wood and then have it built in brick. It just isn’t right, it has to be completely redesigned to do that. That’s something that people cannot understand it seems. I recall one house which was to be built in Wisconsin, just north of Racine, in which they changed their minds and wanted a brick house after the house had been completely designed and working drawings made for a wood house, a wood frame house. That meant not only slapping a layer of masonry on the outside of it but also changing the intersections because that made the corners come out differently. When you'd run one corner into another the corner wasn’t any longer in the same place, it would be four inches one way and four inches the other way which would mean it would be diagonally about 5 inches out from the same place that the corner had previously been. Other things run into trouble that way too, it’s very necessary to know what materials you’re working with before you get too far with it. That was one thing that we were trying to do, to express the materials as well as the needs of the family.

Blum: What audience were you trying to attract as clients?

Yost: I was hoping to attract anyone, as far as clientele, who’d like to build a house, certainly who would be able to do so. The houses which were featured, and which I designed specifically for the magazines such as Household and Small Homes Guide were necessarily small houses. That was what those particular publications were slanted for, what their advertising was slanting for, and that’s why they turned out that way. I like to design small houses, very much, but I had to do some bigger ones in order to support the small ones. In other words, it usually takes just as much work and effort to design a small house as it does a comparatively large house. I’m not comparing a mansion to a cottage. A smaller house is usually just as much work to prepare the drawings for, let contracts for, make decisions on, as the other one. It isn’t easy to make a living out of small houses.

Blum: Another idea that was rather prevalent in the articles you wrote, was that a

78 house could be designed around a prefabricated utility core. In Interiors of July 1946 there was an article stating that you were one of eight architects who were each asked to design a demonstration house to use a utility core that had been produced by Ingersoll.

Yost: Ingersoll Steel and Disk. That’s right, we did. I think there were six or seven architects involved. Each of us did a house separately. We didn’t work together on houses. The subdivision had been laid out and we were each given a particular lot that was all plotted to put our own particular house on. That was quite interesting because the mechanical core, which included the furnace, water heater, plumbing for a bathroom, the kitchen, kitchen sink and so on all in one unit, was developed by Ingersoll Steel to be placed ready-made into a house under construction or possibly even into a house to be altered. The idea was to show that primarily such a uniform requirement of a standard mechanical core would not bring sameness in the various houses. It certainly demonstrated that. These houses were just as different as houses could be. The only thing that they had in common at all was the Ingersoll mechanical core. You couldn’t tell that from the outside. Mine was the only one that expressed the core on the exterior.

Blum: Did using the same item in each house give rise to a fear of monotony?

Yost: There was, naturally, a fear that using something like that would produce sameness in the various houses.

Blum: Was that a fear that was generally held about prefabrication?

Yost: Of course, after all that’s what prefabrication is, mass production of the same thing by machinery. If you mass produce one part of if, it has to be thought about, guarded against or feared, that it might bring sameness in other things such as the adaptation of that unit to the structure itself.

Blum: Prefabrication seems like such a logical solution for the early postwar period.

Yost: It was.

Blum: And yet to my knowledge, it never really took hold to any extent.

79 Yost: I wouldn’t say that.

Blum: Did it?

Yost: There were lots of prefabricated houses in different degrees of prefabrication and different methods of construction. Hundreds of them have been built from my designs so I know that they were done, and they have been done, they’re still being done. Unfortunately, the mechanical core, which was developed by Ingersoll Steel, did not continue because of difficulties with labor. They could not see that it was going to do labor any good to have the mechanical core the same in every house. They thought that that would put plumbers out of a lot of work.

Blum: Did you use the utility core in any of your houses?

Yost: Unfortunately the core was never manufactured for sale because Ingersoll Steel ran into this difficulty and couldn’t apparently solve it, with the labor contingent. However, we did do designs for a small subdivision, west of Highland Park, Illinois which was to use those, but of course they were never built. They weren’t built at all. If they had been built, we could not have used that core. We’d have had to change the design because they weren’t being manufactured.

Blum: Were other utility cores available?

Yost: No, not to any extent. There were prefabricated furnaces, naturally, but the plumbing had to be put together. There was no such thing as a prefabricated plumbing wall with the plumbing in it. However, some builders later would set up such jigs to assemble pipes in, someplace on the field. Usually that had to be done on the site, that’s what the unions insisted on. This may have changed in different areas and so on. That was the sort of thing that militated against the use of a mechanical core.

Blum: In 1946, which is when you planned this group of small houses that you just spoke about, in the Western Homes project, Walter Netsch was in your employ at that time. How large was your office?

80 Yost: Yes he was. I think we had four men, besides myself and the secretary at that time, a small office.

Blum: Would you describe the office arrangement or the process of getting work done in your office among you and your employees?

Yost: I suppose there’s a lot of people that want to know that. Once I’d interviewed a client and gotten the basic requirements down, I would produce a sketch. What we call a sketch, actually was a very carefully worked out drawing at small scale and some elevations. Sometimes I would take that over at night and lay it on Don Reinking’s desk with a note to prepare this at one-eighth inch scale for me to see when I come in. That would probably be at 10:00 or 10:30 the next morning. I had to get some sleep. When that was done then we would consider any improvements or things that could likely produce difficulty in working drawings and so on, revise them right then and there. Then the client would come in to look at those preliminary drawings, mostly plans. I hardly went to elevations except just for my own edification until later. Usually I would try to get approval of plan before we would show them what the house would look like. I didn’t want them to get imbued with the idea of a romantic feeling of the outside until they could see and become used to the workings of the plan and how they could live in it. Then, if they liked that, why chances are there wasn’t much difficulty in showing them the elevations, perspective, that would grow naturally from the plan. They would, by that time, be used to the idea that’s the way the house is going to be, it has to be that way because that’s the logical way for it. When the client had approved the preliminary plans for proceeding to working drawings, we’d do just that. By that time we had the scale drawings pretty well laid out at one-eighth inch. Usually Don Reinking would do the preliminary plan layout. He was very rapid on those things and very accurate. Special details of things that are a little out of the ordinary or interior furniture, built-ins or whatever, I would work out or possibly Walter Netsch would work out. It depended on how we had our schedule, our time, what else we had in its way. We were not all working on the same job at the same time, at least very seldom, until we got into some of the very larger housing groups for the air force, the navy and for the larger subdivision work. Then the whole office might be working on the same job at the same time.

81 Blum: Walter said that somehow there was an expectation in the office that working drawings would be produced in one week. Was that so?

Yost: I never heard that, but maybe so.

Blum: He felt compelled to do it and said, just recently, that if he could do it for you in one week he was going to do it for himself in one week, which he tried to do for his own house.

Yost: I don’t remember that particularly. Of course I do know that I wanted those drawings out a lot sooner than they usually were out. That was bread and butter. The salaries went on no matter what. Until I could get a house to the point where I could bill for the work done, for the completion of working drawings for instance, then I wouldn’t get any money and I’d have to carry the whole thing. The end result would be too much money for working drawings and not enough money left for them. That’s just business, nothing extraordinary about that I guess.

Blum: Another project that he said he worked on was the Western Homes project and there were seven or nine variations of the same basic plan.

Yost: I remember how many we produced. That was never built. A group of employees from Booz, Allen and Hamilton, management consultants, wanted to build, collectively, a subdivision, houses for various men of the firm, not members of the firm but employees probably, most of them, on a piece of land on which they held an option as I recall, west of Highland Park. I went out to look at the property and consulted me as to what they wanted, and what kind of families these were, and what the requirements in general were. They were not designed as I recall specifically for individual families participating in the group. We tried to produce some different types that would make an interesting subdivision and avoid the sameness that so many subdivisions had. It worked out that way. One thing that we had to consider was that Booz, Allen and Hamilton, being consultants to Ingersoll Steel, wanted to use the Ingersoll mechanical core, which I’ve talked about before. Our designs included that mechanical core, in the beginning at least. I don’t remember whether we ever got to advance to the point of changing to a more conventional type of mechanical

82 system or not. The job was cancelled because of organizational difficulties. It didn’t seem feasible to go ahead on the organizational basis that they had. It was a corporation of a number of these people who were with Booz, Allen and Hamilton.

Blum: It seems that in looking over the drawings for Western Homes project there were variations of two- and three-bedroom houses, two-bedroom houses with a possibility for future expansion.

Yost: That was more or less usual, then later as we went along in subdivision work, it seemed that two-bedroom houses were not particularly saleable. On subdivisions for sale we often omitted the two-bedroom houses entirely, we didn’t even have them available. The difference in price wasn’t that much comparatively because you had the same number of bathrooms usually and the same number of kitchens and the same number of heating plants. The extra bedroom wasn’t enough more to make it worthwhile.

Blum: It seems that every house, however, has a garage, and almost all seem to be attached by a little porch or covered area.

Yost: Yes. That was something that was very much desired. Of course the garage itself was desired. It was detached there for several reasons, one is that the same house could be used in different locations, for instance with an irregular shaped lot. If the garage had to be put on a skew, the skew could be reconciled by just adapting the passageway. It could be connected with no difficulty. That’s one reason. Another reason is that a garage right next to the building, contiguous, obliterates that much wall space where you can’t have windows or doors. The service door would then go into the garage. It just makes more difficulty. This way we had much more flexibility in planning and the basic house itself could be repeated exactly without any harm to it.

Blum: I mentioned the garage, and of course you picked up on that because everyone needed a garage for their car. The idea of developing suburbs was that people drove to and from their work from their bedroom communities that ringed the city. In retrospect, there were critics at the time—Serge Chermayeff being one of the most prominent—who were saying late in the 1940s that decentralization was

83 not a healthy development for cities. Suburbs were developing at the cost of city deterioration. All the resources and all the talent was being siphoned off to the suburbs. How do you respond to that?

Yost: I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.

Blum: Chermayeff was critical of the fact that the urban core deteriorated because the talent, money and substantial people left the city for the suburbs.

Yost: That’s true but not entirely. People are talking about that still. They forget that the big house in Lake View or some other place, which is now part of Chicago, was vacated by the original family and is where a big building is now which pays a lot of taxes and will house many families. I don’t understand fully what his argument was at the moment. I know he did talk about cities. The thing that I was very aware of, back in those times of suburban expansion, is that given the fact of suburban life people liked the suburbs if they could afford it. If they could go to town, usually by the steam road as we called the Northwestern or whatever it was, those lines went out, star-shaped, from the center of the city. In between those several arms of the roads was farmland. The development was along the lines of the railroad, from one suburb to the next. They’d stop every mile or two to let passengers off or take them on. Occasionally a long one from a little farther away, like Lake Forest, would come shooting through. Those would be the rich guys. It meant that the land in between remained farmland, a lot of it was just sort of given away, until the automobile became more available, more useful and more prevalent, then the land in between could be used. That meant that the star pattern of the city development was obliterated, glossed over and the land in between was developed. That was what the automobile made possible. It didn’t make it possible to live farther out, except for those few. The land was more fully developed closer to the city. This filling in between the points of the star was most interesting to Richard Neutra when I took him on a tour and pointed it out to him. That has another bad effect; that is it wasn’t as easy for many city dwellers, or suburban dwellers, to get to the greenwood.

Blum: What is that?

Yost: Greenwood is where you have trees.

84 Blum: Is this similar to greenbelt communities?

Yost: That was done for the same reason. Those were developments, some of them were developed by insurance companies and so on, to provide places to invest their money, which they’d taken in on insurance policies naturally. Those were usually placed where the automobile would make it more accessible and where they could depend on enough people who would drive to work and home of course, you have to go both ways. The railroads then were becoming less and less important. That means that the railroads lost suburban traffic, because in the meantime the population was increasing even more proportionately. In the meantime, too, factories and jobs were established in the suburbs and the country so people could work where they lived.

Blum: Despite criticism suburbs developed south, west and north of the city. Historians have said that architecture in residential communities express the values of a society. What do you think some of the newly developed postwar suburbs say about American society?

Yost: That we are satisfied with a terrible mediocrity and sameness. That you can say with no fear of contradiction. I think that does not say, however, that you can’t build prefabricated houses or communities of houses which are pretty much the same, if attention is paid to variety of placement, of planting, of color, materials and other things. The trouble is, most of those houses that were built by the thousands, were after all, more economical. People could afford them who couldn’t afford a new house anywhere else. But, there was that sameness. The idea of sameness was not generally liked. In fact, those that were built that way have come to look very different. The houses next door to each other now have different colors, different accoutrements, whatever people could do to personalize, including planting, to make their house their own, not just the same as the one next door. It would be much easier and better for business, I think, if that was done more beforehand. I think they’d get more people in there quicker if they’d have that difference right along. In subdivisions, which I did for our clients, I tried very strongly to do that. I think we were pretty much successful. In the Colpaert subdivision in South Bend, for instance, we laid out the whole subdivision. No house was in the same frontage plane as any other two, we

85 always varied the front edges, set back from the street so that we’d have open spaces and then come in so that you’d see past the houses, or not be able to see past the houses, you’d have a little mystery as to what was beyond the next couple of houses.

Blum: What was the date of this subdivision?

Yost: The subdivision was extended from 1952 to 1955. It was a continuing process that developed quite a few houses, maybe as many as one hundred or two hundred at once and extended the subdivision. We would design them in such a way that the houses varied. As we went along houses as well as the planting and the carports were different. Things about the houses, even though the basic house might be stock, or quite a few of them, we had several of those too, we would have a different porch, different carport, different treatment of the windows, and, of course, color. We studied color quite carefully and I think it was quite successful, for its time anyway, to get the variation in color in those houses.

Blum: Approximately how many different models would you use in a group of one or two hundred houses?

Yost: I don’t know. I suppose we’d have eight different models in a group of a couple hundred. That was changed all the time. We’d see it and then we’d get the reaction, the public reaction, then if one of them didn’t sell fast enough we’d find out why.

Blum: Were these put up for speculative purposes?

Yost: Yes, if you can call good business speculation, yes.

Blum: Would you modify your design in accordance with public taste?

Yost: We modified the designs as we went along, yes.

Blum: I have not seen photographs or drawings of these houses, were they modern houses, one-floor ranch-type houses?

86 Yost: One-floor, one-story, prefabricated houses. They were factory-built. In fact, they built the factory right on the site. In those days we didn’t have such things as stock windows that could be bought, of any sort. I designed, and helped develop them in their shops, sliding windows made of wood. I took a double hung window and turned it on its side and made alterations to it and developed it. I’ve often wondered how those windows really worked out..0 I haven’t been back there in quite a few years now to see. I think they were probably a lot better than the metal sliding windows that were used at that time.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Blum: What was the name of this development?

Yost: This was a development by Colpaert Realty Corporation. He was a Belgian, he was really quite a guy. His name was Achille Colpaert. He, of course, had a good staff of people working for him who just idolized him. His imagination and his thinking were so different from the ordinary American builder I might say. That was on the fringes, of South Bend, Indiana, at that time, though I dare say it’s been built up considerably around it since.

Blum: Was that connected in any way to the Revere Copper and Brass Company?

Yost: No, it had no connection with Revere. Oh, you’re referring to the house I did for Revere Copper and Brass in South Bend? No, that was a separate job and done by a different builder. That was a program instigated by the Revere Copper and Brass to further the use of copper in building homes. They picked out some architects around the country and from each community they would pick a builder to build it. Then the builder would own it and of course sell it. It was advertised by Revere Copper and Brass. We did one in South Bend.

Blum: It was just a single home, a demonstration home?

Yost: One model home. It was all furnished, painted up and landscaped and so on, just to get people interested in new houses and the use of copper.

Blum: Am I correct to assume that most of your commissions for single-family houses

87 came by recommendation of friends and family, and by reputation after a while?

Yost: You’ve sort of covered the waterfront, how else would they come? Reputation of course, and I think reputation is going to spread from past clients, it’s also going to come about just by prospective home buyers seeing them on the street as they drive around on Sunday afternoon looking at houses. Everyone seems to do this at one time or another. These clients would come sometimes as a result of my work being published in the magazines or in some of the publications of the manufacturers or whatever. I got quite a few of them like that across the country, a nice house in Missoula, Montana, one in—what’s that island off the East Coast? My memory goes back on me—the sea-going island where you have to go by ferry. That was not received by way of a magazine article—that was received because the people who lived in Winnetka knew me and they wanted me to do their house in Nantucket. That’s it, it just slipped off my tongue before had a chance to think about it. We knew these people socially.

Blum: In your building activities there was a project that included George Fred Keck and Harwell Hamilton Harris.

Yost: The Ingersoll Steel mechanical core, yes.

Blum: George Fred Keck was often a contributor to many of the articles that you edited.

Yost: Yes. When I was doing work for the various magazines it was very useful to me to know all these architects all over the country, and to ask them to make contributions to the magazine which they were happy to do. There was a little fee involved but not enough to make people wild with joy. However, I think architects were beginning to feel that the public should know more about architecture and architects and they were glad to help along that cause, which was one of my primary aims in my editorial work.

Blum: Was there a reason why Keck was frequently selected over someone else?

Yost: I don’t think he’d be selected over anyone, he was just there and I knew him. I liked his work and thought he could do a good job, which he always did.

88 Blum: Was Harwell Hamilton Harris a friend of yours?

Yost: Yes. I got to know Harwell very well, Harwell and his wife, Jean. We visited in each other’s homes. When we were in Los Angeles and when they came here, we showed them around. We showed them all the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that we could take in on a weekend. That pleased him because he, of course, is a Wrightophile, just as I am. He was glad to do an article and send me photographs. In fact, he contributed one small house design for Household.

Blum: He’s a Californian, you’re a Chicagoan. How did you happen to meet him?

Yost: Architects sort of see each others names around, maybe in the architectural press, we’re aware of them. In the matter of AIA, Harwell at that time was not a member of the American Institute of Architects, but we knew him by reputation. I certainly knew his work by publication. I just wrote him a note and the next time he came through Chicago for some reason, I’ve forgotten what it was, we met and got acquainted. We made these trips to Wright houses and “bearded the lion in his den.” I remember one house that we went to see, a Wright house which was in pretty bad shape, and the woman just couldn’t get over the idea that he really wanted to see the inside of that house. She let us in.

Blum: Did this precede your trip, or trips, to California when you were studying Greene and Greene, and Bernard Maybeck?

Yost: Our meeting in this way was before I went to California. I had not visited California until after the war. My first work with the Household magazine and also with Small Homes Guide and American Lumberman and so on came about during the war, and it continued later too. That’s when it started and that’s when I began to collect some of the works and articles from other architects, such as Neutra. I never asked Frank Lloyd Wright to give me one, I don’t think he would have, but he might.

Blum: Did you know him?

Yost: At that time no, I’d only met him. After that I did become acquainted with him quite well, and visited him, my wife and I, in both east and west Taliesin.

89 Blum: How do you remember him?

Yost: As a very congenial, pleasant man. Some people don’t have that remembrance. Of course he sometimes would make bombastic statements but if he hadn’t I’d have been disappointed. We met him in various places, at the architects’ convention, for instance. He was in Houston when he got his Gold Medal, and I was there too for the convention of the AIA. Karl Kamrath and I took him on a little tour of Houston and got a lot of his wisdom or sayings and so on during that trip, and then we got to know each other better a little later. We were in New York, for instance, in Phoenix and Scottsdale, as well as in Spring Green.

Blum: Did you ever tell him that his work had influenced you so significantly at one time in your life?

Yost: I think I was a little afraid to because I thought gosh, if his work inspired mine why he wouldn’t want any part of it.

Blum: So he never knew the influence he had been?

Yost: He certainly knew that I had a great regard for him. Once when our family was in California, I just happened to stumble onto a house in Montecito which I was just sure was a Frank Lloyd Wright house, an early one. My father and I, my father lived in California at the time, took some photographs of this house which I admired greatly. The way that he had handled the disposition of the elements to form an enclosure when none of it was really a wall. I don’t know whether I can just talk about that without describing it or showing the picture. Anyway, he didn't have a wall, as such, in that house that was noticeable—but he had them, of course. You’d look at one place and it would be a trellis and another place it would be a flower box and another place it would be a garden wall and you’d look and, by golly, that’s the house. You don’t realize it until you begin to look at it in that way. I had some enlargements of that photograph when my wife and I were in Spring Green visiting there, I pulled those photographs out and asked him if he recognized them. He said, “Where did you find this?” I told him and that is a house that had been more or less forgotten. The design was shown in small form in the Wasmuth portfolio but under a different name and location. I

90 recognized that similarity and of course that was all clarified at the time. This was a long time ago, this was back in the early 195Os that we looked at that and that we first visited Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green.

Blum: When you went to California did you go to study Greene and Greene work or did this just happen?

Yost: When I was doing some teaching at the Art Institute in Chicago I would take a moment or two and go into the Burnham Library and look through the old periodicals. I was interested in Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact I don’t know whether I’ve gone into this before, when I was in the sanatorium with tuberculosis I was able to study the portfolio which my brother had borrowed from a contractor who worked for Wright. I was able to study that portfolio and really, I think, see what Frank Lloyd Wright was doing, what he had done and what he intended. This was the time of the 1938 issue of Architectural Forum put together by Howard Myers. It had a tremendous influence on lots of people, including me. That really awakened my interest in Wright. When I was at the Art Institute I looked in the magazines which were of that era, let’s call it the 1900-1910 era and I came across some houses, which I greatly admired, by Greene and Greene. I looked them up and found some special issues, one in the Architectural Record, the old Record, and elsewhere found their work published. I had to see those houses. My parents lived in San Gabriel, California so when we had the first opportunity after the war we went with our first-born daughter and made a trip there to visit my parents and to find out about Greene and Greene. I did that and my interest led me to write an article that was published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and also the AIA Journal.

Blum: In the September 1950 issue.

Yost: That about coincides doesn’t it? That was awakening another interest, that is the study of the work of Greene and Greene and others along in that era, Maybeck too, whom we visited, Schweinfurth and many others. In becoming familiar with Greene and Greene and seeing if they had any similarities to Frank Lloyd Wright and what was in the air at the time. The more we look at architecture, the more we see, looking back, that something is just in the air. You can’t say that somebody actually did it. There was a combination of factors, it might be

91 materials available, it might be climate as it was in California, largely, or just social habits—whether people drank outdoors or indoors, just anything that comes to be a pattern or can form a pattern of human behavior will influence the architecture. That then, becomes the architecture of that era. Sometimes you don’t see it, but it’s there anyway.

Blum: What was the message in Greene and Greene’s work for you?

Yost: The message of perfection of course, which is unattainable. They did. If anybody ever attained perfection, they did. They had tremendous ability in form, materials and putting things together. It’s an architecture that has to be seen and felt, including their furniture. They were able at that time to do a house for a wealthy family that would be complete right down to the last table cover and throw, all the furnishings. It was amazing to see such complete perfection.

Blum: Was this the Gamble house in Pasadena?

Yost: They’re all of them. The Blacker house and the Gamble house are the two outstanding ones. There are many smaller ones too. I was just enthralled with the whole situation, and of course I was interested in the connection with Wright. I located the Greene brothers whom people told me had died but I finally found them.

Blum: How were you able to find them?

Yost: Somebody said that there was a woman in Carmel who she thought had been a relative and she had a riding stable. We went north to Carmel and I found a stable run by a woman named Greene, which seemed to be closing in on the quarry. She said, “Oh yes, he’s here, he’s home now. Would you like to meet him?” I, of course, jumped at the opportunity and went over there and spent an afternoon with Charles Greene talking about it. I wish I would have had more time—all these things were cut short from what they should have been. It was most interesting to see him in his studio there. He had retired many years before and eked out a living, I don’t know how, doing woodcarvings, pieces of furniture and so on. I don’t know. Those things interested me too because I know how hard it is to get along on very little money. As I wrote in the AIA Journal and

92 the SAH Journal, Charles Greene directed me to his brother Henry in Altadena, which was but a few miles from my parents’ home where we were staying. Winogene and I called him when we returned he took us on a personally arranged and escorted tour past many of their homes with interesting comments. We went into the Blacker house, as I wrote, as well as the Culbertson house. This experience can never be repeated as the Culbertson house was gutted, decapitated, and remodeled a few years later and the Blacker house has been recently denuded of its lighting fixtures, stained glass windows and other accessories. The Blacker out-buildings and the gardens, and pond were altered and sold off a few years after our tour with Henry Greene. Fortunately I had taken photos and slides—but not enough. I did what I could to further belated recognition of the Greenes by the AIA but at that time the Gold Medal seemed remote though both Maybeck and Wright have received that honor. The Greenes were most pleased, almost overcome, by the certificates of honor which the AIA did bestow, which I regard as one of my signal accomplishments, reinforced by the California AIA group. Also in California I found William Purcell and we became close friends and correspondents. He wrote George Elmslie in Chicago, whom I had neglected to call on before and we also became friends. I proposed him for fellowship in the AIA and the Chicago chapter nominated him and he was duly elevated to fellowship. Mr. Elmslie, in appreciation, left me a photograph of Louis Sullivan, which Sullivan had autographed to G.G.E. in 1904.

Blum: Did that experience influence you subsequently in your work?

Yost: I’m sure it did, especially the way that he and Wright allowed the house to dissolve on the edges—in other words, it was about the dissolution of the box, letting the house grow into the garden, encompass part of the garden, extend partly into it. The entrance wasn’t just a stark door in the middle of a flat wall. Those things were all very carefully put together so that, as I said earlier about that house in Montecito, you couldn’t really tell where the garden ended and the house began. It was a breakdown of the rigidity of the box. Of course Wright did it in somewhat different ways. There were a lot of similarities. I took a bunch of slides, I always did, and gave many talks on these influences on American architecture at various clubs and universities and architectural gatherings and so on. I would contrast the methods by which Greene and Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others were after the same thing. The same thing was doing away

93 with the rigidity of the box. That, strangely enough, seems to be at variance in many cases. I say seems to be. With the architecture of Corbusier and Mies even they were doing that in little different ways. It wasn’t the same way that Greene and Greene did certainly. It’s interesting to observe the ways that various people were thinking and producing livable houses, speaking of houses only. I suppose it goes into commercial buildings too. I was interested then in the history, development and execution of houses.

Blum: Do you think that what Greene and Greene did was specific to the California area, was it regional?

Yost: Was it regional? Yes, I think it was. The first thing that they seemed to take pride in was the house built around a courtyard or patio. They did that, but not always. They did it in such a way that the climate was really part of the architecture which no longer holds out there because the climate has changed so. Whereas it used to be an outdoors climate, you didn’t have to worry about rain, or anything. Plants would grow with no problem. That’s no longer the case, human beings have come along and the environment adapts itself to human beings by dying I guess.

Blum: Did you ever use the specific characteristic that you mentioned in any of your work here in the Midwest?

Yost: I think so. I was aware of it. I believe so, although certainly it was completely different from Greene and Greene and was completely different from Frank Lloyd Wright. Nevertheless, the influence was certainly there. What I was looking for was something that would make the house more human. You get a lot of these traditional houses that have been built, brought over from Europe and so on that had very pleasant attributes. Yet, they didn’t seem to have the living quality that the work of Frank Lloyd Wright did. I know that just because of habit and observation, and because people are used to the so-called European, let’s say the Georgian or the Tudor. They’re used to it so they are not strange to it, except in the amount of money it takes to build a Tudor house. They don’t see that the things that we want to do in making a habitable house must make it look different from those houses imported from Europe. I think I’ve said all this before in much better terms.

94 Blum: We’ve looked at some of your drawings, and one of the drawings was a competition entry for the 1932 Chicago Architectural Sketch Club competition. How did you happen to enter that?

Yost: I suppose the main reason is there wasn’t anything else to do. I’d finished school, gotten my diploma, and I think probably had my license or was about to get it when this competition was announced. If I recall correctly, the first prize was a trip to Europe or $1,000 towards it. Of course, $1,000 now wouldn’t get you halfway across the ocean, but it did then, and gave you a good trip. The idea of entering a competition was just part of the fun of being a young architect and getting going. I had to do something. There was no building being done.

Blum: Did you know architects who were members of the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club?

Yost: Oh yes.

Blum: Who were some of them?

Yost: You’ve got me. It’s so hard to remember. I can see them right in front of me but I can’t recall their names right now. I certainly would recognize them if I saw them, if I saw the names or the people. I can’t think of their names—I’ll have to pass on that.

Blum: Where did the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club have their office or their meeting rooms?

Yost: The Chicago Architects Club at that time owned the… Who was the piano maker?

Blum: Kimball?

Yost: The Kimball house, yes, on Prairie Avenue and 18th. They had taken that house in consideration of John Glessner’s promise to will them his house if they would preserve the other house and keep the neighborhood from deteriorating. The

95 Pullman house, right across the street, kitty-corner from the Glessner house, was still there then, and occupied. The neighborhood had not completely gone commercial or to the dogs. I recall the first time I went down there to a party given by the Architectural Sketch Club if I remember right. I hadn’t realized that this was a future disposition of the Glessner house and so my friends and I rang the doorbell at Glessner house as if we expected to go into the party. The butler looked at us and said, “Well that’s across the street.” I was embarrassed, of course, because I should have known better. We then went across the street and had a party. I can’t remember the party one bit. Yes I can too. There were some fellows from Ohio State, which was my school, who went with me. They had a most peculiar way of dancing that they called the Ohio hop. It was quite foreign to the method of dancing of the Chicago architects, young people. That’s where the sketch club held its sessions and that is where the competition for the drawings for this competition that we’re talking about were made. We all went to the sketch club and this was on the second floor of the stables building of the Kimball house.

Blum: Do you recall who the judges were for this competition?

Yost: I don’t remember.

Blum: Speaking of parties, were you a jazz buff?

Yost: Jazz buff? Yes. I played in dance orchestras at that time or before then, when I was in high school partly, and when I was in Northwestern.

Blum: Which instrument did you play?

Yost: I played the saxophone and the oboe of all things. The oboe is, of course, the one that got me into the classic symphony orchestra. The saxophone made it possible for me to afford the oboe.

Blum: Did you enjoy jazz?

Yost: Oh yes, very much, especially the jazz of that time. I despise the so-called jazz today, but then I have to remember that I’m of another generation.

96 Blum: What did you do in your leisure time at that time in your life?

Yost: I called on my girl I guess. That’s about the main thing. That’s the thing I wanted to do most.

Blum: Were movies a leisure-time enjoyment?

Yost: Movies, yes, movies were the thing. If I could scrape together fifty cents why I’d take my girl, who is now my wife and has been all these years. To go to a movie cost twenty-five cents apiece. I appreciated the movie sets, especially the interiors. Robert Arnold and I wrote the producers for photographs and received some. We thought to put together a book of movie interiors, to publish. But that fell by the wayside.

Blum: What was the movie you best remember?

Yost: Oh me. I don’t think I remember the movies, I just remember my girl.

Blum: Ok, fair enough. Were you a member of the American Institute of Architects?

Yost: As soon as I could, yes, but there were certain requirements. I was a member of the AIA, the Chicago chapter, and have been ever since.

Blum: Did you say you were nominated for fellowship by C. Herrick Hammond?

Yost: I wasn’t nominated by Herrick Hammond, because the nomination came from the board of the chapter in that case, or a committee of the board of the chapter, or the approval of the board. They asked Herrick to guide me through the intricacies of putting the exhibit together for my consideration as a fellow.

Blum: Did you have an opportunity to get to know him at the time?

Yost: Herrick? Yes. I’d known him before then. He lived not far from us. I was nominated in design, which pleased me, since my exhibit for AIA consideration was largely small houses. Other architects, I guess, didn’t have their exhibits

97 composed exclusively of small houses.

Blum: That was unusual?

Yost: Sure it was unusual. Most architects might do small houses when they’re fresh out of school as potboilers, as something to do. Most of them thought that they wanted to go ahead and do commercial work, churches, whatever they went into depended largely on what kind of a firm they were able to get a job with to gain their experience.

Blum: How did it happen that you remained with residential work almost throughout your career?

Yost That’s true. I guess it’s because I like it. The reason most people do things, or should do things. No point in trying to make a livelihood in something that you don’t like.

Blum: In 1941 and 1942 you were on the Executive Committee of the AIA.

Yost: I was for quite a few years, yes.

Blum: I read in your scrapbook the AIA letterhead that listed you on the Executive Committee along with Al Shaw, Paul Schweikher and John Merrill. Were there any people on either the Executive Committee or in the AIA with whom you were especially friendly?

Yost: Always. We were all friends, that was the wonderful thing about it. We had a group of real friends. Paul Gerhardt, who was city architect, Norm Schlossman I wish names weren’t so hard for me to recall.

Blum: Here’s the sheet with names of the architects listed on that letterhead.

Yost: Lindsey Suter, of course, lived in Winnetka and we saw each other up there. Jerry Loebl, indeed. Perkins, Larry and Phil Will naturally and many others. They were all good friends.

98 Blum: How do you remember Nat Owings? He was first vice-president.

Yost: You can’t forget him, he was a character. He was able to start talking and keep talking and say something. He was the president of the Chicago chapter at one time. He was on the Planning Commission of Chicago and he brought out ideas that were thought to be quite extraordinary and novel. I was not a Chicago man, I never lived in Chicago, didn’t practice in Chicago. My practice was suburban and elsewhere. In fact later in my career it extended from coast to coast and from Canada to the Florida Keys.

Blum: Did you find that your interest or your concerns differed from Chicago architects or those who practiced in Chicago?

Yost: No, I don’t think so. We had different interests but that didn’t make any great difference in our getting together and having a good time or having discussions.

Blum: Regarding the AIA, do you think that it is an affective organization for architects?

Yost: Yes, I do. I don’t say that I can give an opinion now. I’ve not been active since we came down here to Arkansas and retired, supposedly. Although I haven’t retired really I keep doing work, but I should retire. I think that the AIA is a most necessary and viable organization. Any architect who tries to get along without it is fooling himself. I think even Frank Lloyd Wright fooled himself. At one time I made a sort of half hearted, timid suggestion that he should join the AIA and he made his usual pointed remark about unions and so on. He did it with a smile and I knew about it. We never got him to join, I don’t know that we put any real pressure on him but I think that every once in a while someone would say something to him and he wouldn’t take the bait.

Blum: Did he say the AIA was an architects union?

Yost: Oh sure. That was in his writings. He made those remarks that we didn’t need a union in architecture or something like that.

Blum: What do you think was important about what the AIA did?

99 Yost: The AIA, of course, could act as a spokesman, a single voice for the profession. That is one of the biggest things and most obvious things, in having to do with city planning, a lot of it was city planning, with schools, school buildings, policy on the school board toward facilities and buildings and so on. That was one thing that was going on when I was president of the chapter. I wish I could remember those things in greater detail. I could look them up I guess, to refresh my memory.

Blum: Another architect said that he differs strongly with that position because he doesn’t think the AIA upholds standards within the profession.

Yost: Upholds standards?

Blum: Yes. It doesn’t do anything substantive. To paraphrase him, he said they give very good parties but do nothing substantive to uphold the profession.

Yost: Well, I wouldn’t say they didn’t do anything. I think, as with any organization, there is much more that could have been done, and could be done now. That’s true with the United States government or anything else. There’s always something else that could have been done better, I think in the main. Looking through the history of the AIA and reading of it since the early days, the 1890s, I think it’s quite amazing that so much has been accomplished in making the public aware of the necessity and execution of architecture. I’m not speaking only of big monuments such as Daniel Burnham built. Everyone was conscious of architecture when Dan Burnham was around. He talked that way. He was such an organizer that the chamber of commerce in any city in the United States would listen to him. Sometimes we feel, I think, that some of the architects don’t pursue it with that zeal, or maybe with that knowledge. I think architects sometimes, because everything has become so much more complicated, architects will sometimes speak whereof they know not enough.

Blum: Do you think the AIA…?

Yost: It isn’t the AIA. That’s a particular member in an individual case but not named. In other words, one is likely to be in that position.

100 Blum: But the AIA seems to speak for everyone.

Yost: No, I didn’t say the AIA spoke at all. I was talking about individual members who would speak in various capacities. Anyone who is an architect speaks for the profession whether he wants to or intends to or not. He just does because people look at him as a member of the profession. If he says something, they think, “Oh that’s what architects say.” That’s something that we all have to be careful of in any endeavor. We can’t just talk off the record all the time.

Blum: Were you a member of a club: the Tavern Club, the Cliff Dwellers, or the Arts Club?

Yost: The Cliff Dwellers. No, I was never in the city very much, except for meetings of the institute, board meetings of the chapter, or for some specific meeting, lecture or whatever. I was very involved, initially, in the suburbs. My work then began to spread, over the suburbs, then over the state, then neighboring states, and then as I mentioned a moment ago, from coast to coast.

Blum: Was there an architectural establishment in Chicago?

Yost: How do you mean?

Blum: I suppose in the same way that people would look at Chicago architecture today and ask if there’s an inner group that seems to guide most of what happens.

Yost: That is going to happen no matter what you’re talking about or where. There’s always a so-called inner group of people who do things. They don’t intend to be inner necessarily, some do, they sort of take pride in that.

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Yost: Actually the people who are active in organizations are going to be the inner group just because they’re active. Usually anyone can become part of that inner group. It certainly was true when I was active in the Chicago chapter, which I was for quite a few years. We had that complaint that people said, “Oh those

101 people are the inner group.” They were the ones who were willing to spend time and were willing to work.

Blum: Are you saying that the AIA was the inner group?

Yost: No, I didn’t say that at all. I said that those who claimed there was an inner group weren’t in the inner group so-called really because they didn’t work. They didn’t try to work.

Blum: Who was in the inner group? I thought you were referring to your activities with the AIA?

Yost: I was. The inner group of any organization is the group that does the work. Sure, I was part of the inner group because I was willing to work, and did.

Blum: Would you consider the AIA to be the architectural establishment at the time?

Yost: We didn’t call it an establishment because anyone could be part of it. Architects from all over, the suburbs, the city, the surrounding cities, would come in and join in the work and even become officers, even though they weren’t in the center of Chicago. I never thought of myself as a Chicagoan, particularly, and I never felt that I was on the outside because my architectural work seldom was in Chicago. That wasn’t part of it. I was an architect. I was a member of the American Institute of Architects, who were all working for the good of the profession. The profession was working for the good of architecture. A lot of the people who have complained, as you have repeated, think that they have to belong to something to get on the inside. That’s not true. I suppose to get in the inside of the AIA you have to belong to the AIA, but there it ends.

Blum: Do you think AIA is the core of the establishment, has been years ago, and is now?

Yost: I find it very difficult to know what you mean by the establishment. Do you mean the architects who were recognized because their work was better or their work was more readily received?

102 Blum: That may well be part of it. I think the people who caused things to happen in the architectural community, those with the power.

Yost: As I said before, they’re the ones who work, right? If you work, you get power, if you want it. I don’t think that very many of them, if any, thought of it as getting power. They thought of acting cohesively in the chapter as a means of furthering the profession, which of course is going to do them some good too. I don’t think many of them did it absolutely selfishly like that. They just wanted to make the profession stronger, to make it more uniform, more professional. It changes as the years go by.

Blum: It seems that during the decade of the 1940s, from 1940 until about 1952, you were on the executive committee, you were vice-president, you were president of the Chicago chapter. That was the time when you gave a lot of time to the administration of this organization. What were some of the concerns that the AIA explored in that decade?

Yost: We had a situation of the plasterers, union lathers and other unions, work restrictions. I recall stating that the architects had not become involved in union matters but now that we were, we were going to stay that way. I don’t really know what’s going on now in that regard, but I daresay there’s some of that going on still.

Blum: What was the nature of the conflict between the union and the architects?

Yost: The conflict was not primarily between the union and the architect, it was between the union and other trades or work regulations which stopped work. That, of course, was a concern of architects. That’s why the architects stood up really on behalf of the people and said, “Look this has gone far enough, we’ve got to get back to work.” We were able to be of some assistance. We didn’t do it ourselves, we weren’t the prime mover but we certainly were in on the meetings and conversations and talked to the various factors to get things moving again. That’s just one of the things. The matter of the Outer Drive improvements and the Crosstown Expressway and all that. I don’t want to go into that now because I’m not familiar with the details anymore. Those were things we were always concerned about. Nat Owings was very much part of all that. He would talk to

103 many civic organizations, including the chapter, about the city planning aspect of that, from all viewpoints, traffic, pleasantness and everything else.

Blum: How did your profession impact your family?

Yost: That’s sort of hard to say, isn’t it? I know that my wife was very close to it. She came to chapter meetings and conventions with me, quite frequently, usually I think. She was instrumental as one of the organizers of the Women’s Architectural League. She was active in putting across the idea that wives could also be a part of the activities of the men. At that time there were very few women architects. There were just a few.

Blum: What time are you talking about, about what years?

Yost: 1950s, 1960s, along in there. There are a lot more of them now, that’s good. The place of the woman in architecture has come along the same way as women in other things. It’s a shame that it has to be so difficult. I feel that the women, who were mostly the wives of chapter members, there being just a few women members of the AIA at the time, made a tremendous contribution in community endeavors. They had their own organization, that was comparatively recent. They were spoken to and with, rather than having the men just run an exclusive men’s club.

Blum: Did you have a studio in your home?

Yost: Part-time. I always had a studio there but my office was in another place.

Blum: Did you always keep an office at another location?

Yost: Not always. During the war I didn’t have a separate office, I did all my work at home. When the war was over I quickly got an office to put a few drafting tables in so we could get some work done.

Blum: Having an office at home, did that affect your family?

Yost: Sure it affected the family, it’s bound to. I don’t know just what they think of it,

104 but I know they were very much aware of it. My wife was very helpful, of course, she always has been. She knows what’s going on, what has gone on, and she can remember things that I can’t. She knows, even when things have been moved around as much as they have in our moving to Arkansas, she can still locate things that I couldn’t.

Blum: Earlier you spoke about going to the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club to do your drawings at Kimball house and Glessner house is located across the street.

Yost: That was still occupied by Mr. Glessner.

Blum: In later years you were affiliated with Glessner house as the executive director of the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Yost: They asked me to be their executive director, which I did. I don’t know just how long, a year and a half or something like that, maybe longer. That was really a difficult undertaking. In the first place the money was almost nonexistent, the house was in such deplorable condition, having been used for several things before the foundation got it. The foundation was new and hadn’t gotten into any routine of operation whatsoever. The officers were eager but all of them weren’t able to give the time or consideration that would have helped a great deal. It’s a wonder that that organization got going. I hope it’s in such a position now that it’ll continue.

Blum: It survived those years and they operate quite an extensive program today.

Yost: I’m a life member and I get their mailings.

Blum: What were the years of your directorship?

Yost: I guess it was about 1968 to 1971, along in there. I could look that up but that’s about it. It was before we came down here.

Blum: As we’ve been trying to go through your career in a chronological way, it seems that we’re up to the decade of the 1950s. At that time you spoke earlier about having work that involved larger commissions than single-family houses.

105 Yost: Single-family houses by the hundreds can be a considerable commission. That’s what we were doing. In other words, when you multiply a $15,000 house by a thousand, that’s real money. That’s what we were doing, I say we, I was doing at my office. I operated by myself, that is as an individual, with employees up until about 1952. It became obvious that I had acquired so many clients and had so much to do and so many prospects of more, either large developments like that, or designing for house prefabricators, or single families. Lots of those were getting to be quite substantial, in other words for wealthy people. I needed to get a little help. Coder Taylor was with the Holsman firm which perforce was dissolved and he was told that I needed some help and so he came to see me. I agreed with him that I needed some help. He and I went into a partnership, which was very successful, both from the standpoint of doing work and of making ourselves livelihoods and of employing other people and getting them involved. That lasted through 1960. It then became apparent that our particular interests were different and so we dissolved the partnership.

Blum: It was during those years that I start seeing you in print again, just a little bit. It seems to me that one article I read that you wrote was about the volume-built house. Also, at that time, correct me if I’m wrong, you were on the Home Building Industry Committee of the AIA.

Yost: Yes, I was chairman of that. That’s a national committee.

Blum: Was your writing connected to your activities on the Home Building Industry Committee for the AIA?

Yost: Every activity is connected to every other activity.

Blum: What was that Home Building Industry Committee all about?

Yost: I suppose as far as the organization of the national AIA was concerned, it was to bring the home building industry and the architectural profession closer together. The home building industry had an annoying habit, annoying to us, of just hiring some draftsmen to do their so-called architecture. We didn’t like that and we thought that we could do the public a lot of good and we could do the

106 homebuilder a lot of good, and the architects too, if architects could become involved in the design and, more than that, the concepts of mass home building in quantities. Quantities don’t have to be big, just half a dozen houses. That’s worth giving good design attention to. You go beyond that and you can have a cumulative effect and the result can be pretty horrible if it isn’t well considered. That was what we were after, to produce a better environment for people who needed homes and needed lots of them. The end of the war had put things way behind. The expansion of communities, cities, beyond their previous boundaries, that had a great impact on the natural environment, on nature, the ecology, all those things which so many people in the building business had not yet become aware of. I think it’s much better now. Remember that ecologists talking to a group of architects even, and home builders too, was brand new. Most people didn’t know what an ecologist was. I guess they do now, I hope.

Blum: Had builders, contractors, developers, I’m lumping them all together because I’m not quite sure of the distinctions, had they by the 1950s taken over the development of suburbs and building of houses away from the architect?

Yost: No, the architects never had it.

Blum: Never had it?

Yost: The architect never did except in unusual cases where an architect himself would become a developer. Architects did not have any connection particularly with mass producers of houses. We didn’t like the situation.

Blum: Where did the builder get his plans or his designs from?

Yost: He’d just hire a kid fresh out of school, or an architect who needed a job or someone who didn’t need a job. He’d get them to do it. That was unfortunate because those people, not all of them are architects you see, because building codes didn’t necessarily require an architect’s seal or an architect to design something. That’s come along a little more now.

Blum: What is the situation in Chicago now?

107 Yost: Any place, it’s a local proposition. In Chicago, presumably, an architect’s seal is required. But then you get into all this sort of thing that we probably shouldn’t take the time to discuss here but the builders would say, “Here I got a plan I need stamped. What do you need? How about a case of scotch?” That’s a pretty raw thing to say, but it happened. I don’t know, I haven’t been there for a few years to know if it’sstill that way. It’s something that didn’t do the architect’s self esteem very much good.

Blum: Surely that is the kind of thing that the AIA would have frowned on but would they have stepped in and said something about it?

Yost: Yes of course, that was part of the reason for the committee, which I was chairman of, a national committee. We didn’t come out and say that was it. We were trying to create an educational situation where the home builders would come around to the thought—even maybe original with them, they might think—to hire good talent. It might just make them a few extra dollars a house.

Blum: Did you succeed?

Yost: I don’t know. All I know is that we did a lot of houses, for quite a few developers, including the navy and the air force. Those were for sale. That was something that was done for the same reason—to create an environment that would encourage an enlisted man to come into the service with his family and have a nice community to live in so he’d stay in longer. It cost the military a tremendous amount of money in turnover. If a person were in for three years and left, they’d have to train somebody else, at considerable cost, to take his place. If they could keep a certain percentage or more in the military, and avoid all that training expense and have experienced people in the services, then that was a tremendous advantage to the services. That was the reason that we did these houses.

Blum: They thought the key to keeping men in the military was to create a pleasant environment for them to live?

Yost: I wouldn’t say the key.

108 Blum: One of the keys?

Yost: Yes indeed. If they’re married they would have to be provided with living quarters, often only by an allowance, and then they'd have to go out and rent their own place. It was sort of a mess. Ralph Jarrow Cordiner, president of General Electric was asked to make a report to the armed services on means of keeping the enlisted man in longer so that they wouldn’t have this huge turnover and expense of re-educating, and so they would have a continually competent force. One of his main—maybe his main suggestion—was to create communities where they would want to stay with their families. That was the so-called Capehart housing. Senator Capehart entered a bill that was passed for the government to finance houses for the military that would end up saving the military more than that amount of money.

Blum: Would you describe the houses?

Yost: The houses themselves, of course different architects did different houses for different locations. All this Capehart work came to me because I, as you pointed out, had become well known as an architect for smaller houses. Not necessarily exclusively mansions as some architects did. My name was recognized as a designer of small homes that were accepted by the people, builders, and so on. They approached me to do a group of houses at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. We did that. By that time Coder had come with me and we did that kind of work. There was quite a large addition to Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois, and then another one at Great Lakes, and then another addition at Chanute, and then one at Sawyer Air Force in Michigan. There were a few more.

Blum: Were these individual houses or row houses?

Yost: They were composed mainly of duplex houses. The officers would have single houses and there would be a certain number of officers’ houses in each group, not mingled in but on a separate cul-de-sac, or something for the officers. But, not separated, I wouldn’t say intermingled exactly, but there wasn’t too much difference shown. The materials for the buildings were the same. We didn’t make the officers houses out of stone and the others out of scantlings or whatever, they were all the same quality. It was the plan, mainly. The officers had to have more

109 entertainment space and other features.

Blum: Was prefabrication used?

Yost: To some extent. We did prefabricated houses in other places, and the contractors who bid on these jobs were perfectly at liberty to prefabricate as much or as little of the house as he wanted to. The bidding was on price and specification, that is, the plans.

Blum: This is not something that you specifically built into your design?

Yost: It was possible, yes, we did. We made it possible to use prefabricated design. In those days the prefabricators who had set-ups to make it worthwhile were not as numerous. We couldn’t actually say this should be a prefabricated house because it would be cheaper to do it that way, it probably wouldn’t be, because we wouldn’t have the competition that we would have if anybody could come in, even those who were not set up to do prefabricated houses. The government required open competition among bidders, so prefabs could not be required or forbidden.

Blum: Was this true in all of these large commissions?

Yost: Yes, that’s right. Actually, as it turned out and went on from one project to the next we, of course, learned a lot too. We learned how to set these things up for the type of builder who would bid on it. In fact some builders would bid on one and then another, and go right on. They were used to it and that of course was a cost advantage.

Blum: With all these very large commissions, what was happening to your individual, single-family house commissions?

Yost: They were getting bigger too. We got some pretty nice houses to do, and some smaller ones. We never stayed away from the small, individual house. That was always a great attraction to me, I think Coder didn’t quite feel the same as I did about it. When it came to mass-produced numbers, that was another thing, he liked that.

110 Blum: Your office seems to have grown from a small, three man office right after the war to quite a substantial office. Who were some of the people who worked for you? I know there was a man’s name who I had in mind to mention, David Barrow.

Yost: David was an associate of mine for a short time. That was not part of this sort of thing though. The large housing commissions came a little after David Barrow.

Blum: Weren’t you partners with him for a year in 1951?

Yost: I think that was about it, yes. I think he was a little unhappy about what he was doing so we parted but we’re very good friends.

Blum: Was he a draftsman in your office?

Yost: No, he was an architect. He came to me as a partner, not as an employee.

Blum: Can’t you be a draftsman even if you’re an architect?

Yost: Sure you can. I guess I’m a draftsman. What I mean is that he was not there primarily as a draftsman, of course he did drafting. He did rendering, designing, client-gathering—you’ve got to gather clients. I really can’t say why we dissolved that partnership but it seemed to be mutual. Maybe I was too irascible, I don’t know.

Blum: How large had your office grown? To how many people in the 1950?

Yost: It wasn’t large then, just a couple of people in addition to the two partners and our secretary. Later, with the military work and the large subdivision developments, it grew to twenty with the total staff.

Blum: Who were the people in your office?

Yost: One of the fellows who came to me out of the war was Don Reinking. Don was the most talented natural draftsman I’d ever seen. He had no formal education in

111 architecture or in drafting as far as I know. He could sure draft, he was a whiz. He picked up on ideas so quickly that it wasn’t very long before he could do a good part of the design. I would do my design work at home, in my studio at home, usually at night. Maybe I’d finish up my thoughts, my scheme for the building, house, whatever it was, at three or three-thirty in the morning. I'd take it over to the office, which was about three-four blocks away and put it on Don’s desk, with a note. I would sleep late the next morning, much to the consternation of my wife, and I’d get over to the office about 10:30, something like that, it varied. He would have that alI drawn to scale for me. Mine was to scale, but it was free-hand. He would have it all drawn out with sizes of fixtures, plumbing, furnace, whatever, all in there. I could see how this thing I was doing would really fit together. He’d have ideas of course. That was a very nice arrangement, I appreciated it.

Blum: Who else did your drawing?

Yost: Don Reinking was with me for many years.

Blum: Was he with you until you came to Arkansas?

Yost: No. He stayed with Coder when we dissolved that partnership in the end of 1960, beginning of 1961. Walter Netsch had been there, in my office. Walter was quite a talented guy, as we know now. He impressed me because he was willing to come to my office in Kenilworth from the South Side. He lived down near the University of Chicago. He’d come by a couple of railroads and so on and get off at the Kenilworth station, which was right across from our office. He’d do that everyday and sometimes his mother or his sister or both would come and pick him up or bring him in the morning. I don’t remember that he ever drove a car himself. I never could quite figure out why not but maybe living in an apartment sometimes limits the number of cars per family. I was impressed that he would think enough of coming to work for me to go through the hardship and time involved in traveling that distance. He was a very talented man. Of course, soon he was able to take some of the design load. I don’t remember that he actually designed a complete building. He may have in houses. Sure he did. Under my eye, naturally. He had a great natural ability and formal ability too, that is education. He later went on to do many great things with Skidmore, Owings and

112 Merrill. I tried to get Walter to stay with me but he wanted to go with a big firm. He had that in mind.

Blum: As you know, I’ve spoken with him, and he has said that he learned a great deal about what an architect should do and how they should do it, during the time he spent with you.

Yost: I’m glad he did. We certainly had some good discussions. I remember once I gave a talk down at the Museum of Science and Industry on a Sunday and he came to hear me and he laughed at all the right places.

Blum: That’s a tribute. What has been your greatest opportunity as you look back over your career of the past fifty or sixty years?

Yost: How many years? I got my architectural license in 1932.

Blum: What was your greatest opportunity?

Yost: Marrying Winogene.

Blum: What was your greatest opportunity in architecture?

Yost: My wife has been a tremendous influence on me and my work in architecture. I wouldn’t say she was my best critic but she certainly led me on proper paths.

Blum: Was there a commission that you consider to be your greatest opportunity?

Yost: I don’t know that I remember it. I may have said something like that at some time but I don’t remember it. I think that any commission at any time that gives an architect something to design, is a great opportunity. I don’t see how I can really compare one with the next or the previous one. Except in such instances where you have so few jobs. I think of Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts at the San Francisco Exposition, which of course is a tremendous thing. That started out not as Maybeck’s at all. It was turned over to him by—I’ve even forgotten the name of the architect who turned it over to him—Willis Polk maybe. He put it to good use and really made his national reputation out of it, although he’d been very

113 highly regarded before that in the San Francisco, Berkeley area.

Blum: Did anything of a similar nature happen to you?

Yost: No I don’t think so. I never did a Palace of Fine Arts, not that I wouldn’t have if it had been presented to me.

Blum: In that your primary focus has been in residential work, what do you consider to be the most influential pre-World War II residence as far as you’re concerned?

Yost: The residence that influenced me or my work perhaps it’s very difficult to answer because I’ve studied so many and looked at so many built in the last four hundred years that I can’t narrow it down particularly. If I had to name any, which is no chore really, I would say the Blacker house by Greene and Greene.

Blum: Was there a pre-war house in the Chicago area that had an influence on you?

Yost: A pre-war house in the Chicago area? I don’t think of any. I looked at many. I didn’t like them going farther back. The Robie house would be the greatest.

Blum: What about postwar?

Yost: Postwar the same thing.

Winogene: We’d go through every new house being built.

Yost: New houses yes. We’d go out for a drive on Sunday afternoon, invariably, and look at every new house under construction. There weren’t very many then, we were lucky to find one under construction, or even later. I think that the one that impressed me most at that time was Van Bergen’s house on the lake in Wilmette.

Winogene: That’s on Michigan Avenue.

Yost: On Michigan Avenue in Wilmette, I liked that very much. Even though I didn’t understand Wright, I hadn’t gotten enough from him to know what was going on there and I liked it. It intrigued me the way it was all put together. I don’t

114 know that I can say that there is another that I particularly liked. Oh yes, the Walter Burley Griffin houses in Kenilworth, the little ones. I wasn’t really aware so much of the Chicago School as such, before I studied the Chicago School and became better acquainted with them, I can’t say I really knew much about it.

Blum: Were there any contemporary commercial buildings that influenced you?

Yost: I can’t say that there were. Looking back on it and trying to disassociate my feelings then with all the influences that have come since, I don’t think that I was really much aware of modern versus traditional. I’m speaking of very early days, before my so-called education. As soon as I went to school, even Northwestern, I had a very unusual professor of art, Anna Helga Hong, who included architecture. She told about Walter Burley Griffin and his design for Canberra, which of course I’d never heard of. I became interested in it, and also his other buildings.

Blum: In your opinion what has been your contribution to Chicago architecture?

Yost: My contribution? I never did anything in Chicago to speak of.

Blum: In the Chicago area?

Yost: I can’t answer that really. I’ve done a lot of houses in the suburbs. I did the Unity Center of Christianity in Evanston, a synagogue in Skokie, I don’t know that any of them would be called influential. I hope they were good enough so they weren’t influential in a bad way.

Blum: If someone wanted to know more about you, where would one go to find material? At the Art Institute we have drawings and some manuscript material, and we will have, this oral history transcript in the library [and on the Art Institute’s web page]. There’s some material at the Chicago Historical Society too. Are there other institutions that have material?

Yost: The Historical Society of Kenilworth has some things that we placed there. The Chicago Historical Society, I think, has some papers related to my tenure as an officer of AIA but I don’t think there’s anything on buildings. They’re sort of

115 circumscribed, they only want them in Chicago and I never did much in Chicago.

Blum: What or who would one consult to learn more about you?

Yost: Me, I guess.

Blum: In your scrapbooks it is apparent that you were regularly covered by the North Shore papers, such as the Wilmette Life, so that is another source. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Yost.

116 L. MORGAN YOST

Born: 12 October 1908, St. Mary’s, Ohio Died: 6 May, 1992, Salem, Arkansas

Education: Northwestern University, 1925-1929 Ohio State University, 1930-1931, B. Architecture

Work Experience: Phil Danielson, 1929 Pierre Blouke, 1931 Alfonso Iannelli, 1933-34 L. Morgan Yost and Robert Arnold, 1933 Historic American Building Survey, 1933 Furniture Designer for S. J. Campbell Company, the Johnson Chair Company, and the Clementson Company, mid-1930s L. Morgan Yost, 1934-1950 L. Morgan Yost and David Barrow, 1951 Yost and Taylor, 1952-1960 L. Morgan Yost, 1960-1972

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1952

Professional Affiliations: 1940s, Architectural Editor, Small Homes Guide 1940s, Consulting Editor, Household Magazine 1940, Chairman, Association of North Shore Architects 1941-42, Member, Executive Committee of the American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter 1950-52, President, AIA, Chicago Chapter 1950s, Member, Home Building Industry Committee, AIA 1967-70, Executive Director, Chicago School of Architecture Foundation

Academic: 1940, Instructor of Industrial Design, School of the Art Institute

Interests: Of special interest to Yost were the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and David Adler. He was a pioneering historian of the work of Greene and Greene. Yost was an avid collector and historian on the subject of Packard automobiles. He was president of the Antique Automobile Club of America in the Illinois region and co -authored Packard: A History of the Car and the Company.

117 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Apartments: Suburban Town Houses.” Architectural Record 129 (March 1961):203. “Architect’s Home and Studio.” Pencil Points 25 (May 1944):49-51. “Attractive Roadside Garden Center.” Architectural Record 129 (May 1961):165. “House and Garden Prizewinners.” Architectural Forum 84 (May 1946):8. “House for Henry J. Stentiford, Wilmette, III.“ Architectural Forum 72 (February 1940):117. “House in Wilmette, III.” Architectural Forum 80 (May 1944):100-101. “Houses.” Architectural Record 98 (December 1945): 107-122. “Houses: Revere Institute’s Indiana House is Based on a Thrifty Rectangle.” Architectural Forum 90 (March 1949):92-93. “Nine on Modern Questions Most Often Asked About Modern Houses.” House and Garden 89 (April 1946):76-79. “Residence of Mr. and Mrs. Norman C. Deno, Highland Park, III.” Architectural Record 110 (July 1951):110-112. Scrapbook of Yost. Compiled by and in possession of Yost. “Staggered Levels Allow Important Savings in This Small House.” Architectural Forum 86 (February 1947):87-89. “Two Houses.” House and Garden 89 (April 1946):92-95. Tigerman, Stanley. “The Postwar American Dream.” Architecture in Context: The Postwar American Dream. The Art Institute of and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1985. Yost, L. Morgan. “Architect’s Suggestions.” Architectural Forum 95 (October 1951):248. Yost, L. Morgan. “Built for an Active Family.” Architectural Forum 89 (October 1948):164-165. Yost, L. Morgan. “Greene and Greene of Pasadena.” Journal of the AIA 14 (September 1950):115- 125. Yost, L. Morgan. “Greene and Greene of Pasadena.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 9 (May 1950):11-19. Yost, L. Morgan. “The Architect and the Operative Home Builder.” Journal of the AIA 28 (December 1957):439-441. Yost, L. Morgan, Fickett, Edward I., Eichler, Joseph. “The Architects’ New Frontier: The Volume-Built House.” House and Home 3-4 (July 1953):91-92.

In addition to the above listings, Yost was the subject of frequent articles in The Wilmette Life (Pioneer Press), and he contributed numerous illustrated articles the following publications: American Lumberman (1942-1952), Plumbing and Heating Business (1946-957), and Small Homes Guide (1943-1947).

118 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

Adler, David 6, 15 Elmslie, George 93 Anderson, K. C. (Carl) 18 Arnold, Robert 27, 28, 43, 45, 97 Fine Arts Building, Chicago, Illinois 39 Atwood, Charles B. 7, 9 First National Bank, Wilmette, Illinois 27 Fisher Building, Chicago, Illinois 7 Bargelt, Louise 1 Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Barrow, David 111 Architecture 14 Benkert, Ernst 41, 43, 45 Fuller, Buckminster 25 Blacker, Robert (house), Pasadena, California 92, 93, 114 Gamble, David (house), Pasadena, Blouke, Pierre 21 California 92 Bowman, Irving and Monroe 18 Gathercoal, James 43 Brewster, Walter (house), Lake Forest, Gerhardt, Paul 98 Illinois 15 Glessner, John H. 95, 105 Burnham & Root 8 Glessner, John H. (house), Chicago, Illinois Burnham, Daniel H. 8, 9, 10, 11 96, 105 Goodhue, Bertram G. 6 Campbell, S. J. 12, 13 Goodman, Charles 18 Capehart Housing 109 Greene & Greene 89, 91-94 Capehart, Homer Earl (Senator) 109 Greene, Charles Sumner 92 Capper, Arthur 48 Greene, Henry Mather 93 Century of Progress International Griffin, Walter Burley 115 Exposition, 1933-34, Chicago, Illinois 22-25 Hall, Gilbert P. 6 see also: Havoline Oil Thermometer Tower, Hamill, Alfred (house), Lake Forest, Illinois House of Tomorrow, Rostone House, 15 Travel and Transport Building Hammond, C. Herrick 97 Chermayeff, Serge 83-84 Hansen, Stanley (house), Kenilworth, Chicago Architectural Sketch Club 95, 96 Illinois 71 Chicago Architecture Foundation 105 Harrison, Harwell Hamilton 88-89 Coddington, Gilbert 18 Harrison, Jean 89 Colpaert, Achille 87 Havoline Oil Thermometer Tower (Century Colpaert Realty Subdivision, South Bend, of Progress International Exposition, Indiana 85, 87 1933-34), Chicago, Illinois 23 Cordiner, Ralph Jarrow 109 Historic American Buildings Survey Crawford, Nelson Atrim 48 (HABS) 27 Crosstown Expressway (project) 103 Holabird & Root 3, 6, 7, 8 Culbertson, Cordelia (house), Pasadena, Holabird, John A. 15 California 93 Holsman & Holsman 106 Curtis, Nathaniel Courtland 4 Hong, Anna Helga 115 Hood, Raymond 7 Danielson, Philip 20 House of Tomorrow (Century of Progress Darling, Sharon 13 International Exposition, 1933-34), Deno, Norman 71-74 Chicago, Illinois 23, 24 Deno, Norman (house), Highland Park, Howe & Lescaze 3 Illinois 62, 71-76 Hunt, Willard (Miss) 19 Dietrich, Raymond 2 Dudok, Willem M. 4 Iannelli, Alfonso 22-23 Dymaxion Car 25

119 Johnson Chair Company 13 International Exposition, 1933-34), Chicago, Illinois 24 Kamrath, Karl 90 Ruskin, John 38-39 Keck, George Fred 23, 25, 88 Kimball, W.W. (house), Chicago, Illinois 95- Saarinen, Eliel 6 96 Sax, Phil 22 Schlossman, Norman 98 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jenneret 3, Schweikher & Lamb 26 4, 5, 11, 94 Schweikher, Paul 6, 98 Loebl, Jerrold 98 Schweinfurth, Albert C. 91 Schweppe, Charles (house), Lake Forest, McCormick, Robert (house), Lake Forest, Illinois 15 Illinois 15 Seyfarth, Robert 43 Marshall Field Garden Apartments, Shaw, Alfred 98 Chicago, Illinois 15 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 112 Marshall, Lauren 18 Smith, F. A. Cushing 15 Matot, Edward (house), Kenilworth, Illinois Spencer, Robert C. 39 29 Steigelman, Tom 35 Maybeck, Bernard 89, 91, 93, 113 Stuart & Revett 21 Merrill, John 98 Sullivan, Louis 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 32 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 3, 4, 11, 36, 66, Suter, Lindsey 98 94 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 36 Tallmadge, Thomas 5 Monroe, Harriet 8 Taylor, D. Coder 106, 109, 110, 112 Moore, Charles 8 333 North Michigan Building, Chicago, Morse, Leland (house project) 76-77 Illinois 3 Morton, Oliver (house), Wilmette, Illinois Travel and Transport Building (Century of 31 Progress International Exposition, 1933- Myers, Howard 39, 91 34), Chicago, Illinois 24

Netsch, Walter 72-73, 80, 81, 82, 112-13 Unity Center of Christianity, Evanston, Neutra, Richard 84, 89 Illinois 115

Osterhage, Walter H. 36 Van Bergen, John S. 32, 39, 43, 114 Owings, Nathaniel 99, 103 Vitale, Ferruccio 15

Perkins, Lawrence 98 Wachsmann, Konrad 11 Polk, Willis 113 Weber, Peter J. 7 Pre-Emption House, Naperville, Illinois 27 Western Homes (project), Highland Park, Pullman, George (house), Chicago, Illinois Illinois 80-83 96 White, Stanley 14 Purcell, William G. 93 Will, Philip 98 Wood, W. Wadsworth 48, 50, 56, 57 Rebori, Andrew 24 Woolworth Building, New York City, New Reed, Earl Howell, Jr. 27 York 7 Reinking, Donald Leonard 81, 111-12 Wright, Frank Lloyd 4, 5, 32, 36-39, 47, 52, Reliance Building, Chicago, Illinois 7 62, 89-91, 93, 94, 99, 114 Rich, Albert (house), Kenilworth, Illinois 30, 31, 32, 35, 51, 53 Yost, Lloyd (father of L. Morgan) 1, 2 Robie, Frederick (house), Chicago, Illinois Yost, Winogene Springer (wife of L. 114 Morgan) 5, 11, 12, 29, 31, 93, 104-5, 113 Root, John Wellborn 5, 9 Rostone House (Century of Progress Zettler, Emil 41

120 Zoned House (project) 58-65 Zuver, Kenneth (house), Highland Park, Illinois 40-41

121