#leenhouts

Stationery Saturday: Summer Vacation

It’s the end of the 2020 Spring Semester here at UW-Milwaukee. We hope everyone did well on their finals!

We are dreaming about how we would love to spend our ideal summer vacation and thought it would be fun to haul this fancy trailer across the country and explore. (Bonus--no worrying about catching coronavirus in a hotel or airplane!)

This sationery was found in the Willis and Lillian Leenhouts Architects Records. The letterhead of The Patenaude Trailer Company prominantly features this 1940s style recreational trailer.

You can find this particular artifact in UWM Mss 223, box 4, folder 21 and much more throughout the collection of local architechts Willis and Lillian Leenhouts.

Stationery Saturday: Marketing!

Having a hard time selling canned peas to kids? Put something they love on the label!

What could make playtime and puppies even better? Canned Peas, of course!

Enjoy Recess early peas!

Holidays 1950′s Style

These are two trade publications from 1953. The first is issue 8 of The Business of Farming which was sponsored by Farmers Lumber Company Farmersville, Massachusetts. The feature story tells of the Grenlunds’ get-together room and showcases images of children stringing popcorn next to a fire place. It also has a lovely winter scene “Maple Sugaring in Vermont” by Paul Sample as the center fold. The second publication is issue 8 of Popular Home and features the story of how the Williams family had their remodeling finished just in time for Christmas. Young Peggy Henschel, shown in front of the fireplace is waiting patiently to find out what gifts were left in her stocking while admiring the decorations created by her mother.

Stationery Saturday: Slide Fasteners (zippers)

We couldn’t resist the logo for the Conmar Products Corporation.

This letter from 1948 is requesting plans for the Leenhouts Compact Comfort House No. 6 which was featured in “Popular Home” of that year. Willis and Lillian Leenhouts were husband and wife architects from Milwaukee. They designed single family, multi-family, and institutional buildings. The Compact Comfort House was very popular and the couple recieved hundreds of requests for plans from all over the country.

Surprises in the Archives

This small card is among the papers of the architectural firm of Willis and Lillian Leenhouts. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the firm was working on designs for the Adyar Library and Research Centre part of the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in India.

We were curious about the notecard with Girl with a Hoop by Renoir on the cover. It seemed out of place among the business letters and sketches. When we opened the card, we were surprised by the colorful painting inside. As noted on the back this design was handpainted by a Tibetan Lama youth on handmade paper.

October is American Archives Month. We will be showing you some of the behind-the-scenes work and surprises we come across during our day-to-day tasks here in the Archives throughout the month.

Architecture Project Presentations

UW-Archives recently worked with Mo Zell and her Architecture 650 class "Intermediate Design Studio: Unmaking of the Museum.” Their assignment was to create a museum display that will hold archival material safely. They were instructed to use the architectural drawings in the Willis and Lillian Leenhouts Architects records. After visiting the archives and viewing some of the architectural drawings and files, the incredibly creative students morphed the assignment. In just two weeks they went from concept to full scale and developed interactive displays that used representations of archival material in innovative ways. They not only honored the work of the Leenhouts’ but showed that the work is still relevant. 

I truly enjoyed being involved peripherally in this project. Seeing the students explore the physical collection and then by using digital representations of the artifacts were able to create dynamic displays that told a clear story about how they interpreted the work of the Leenhouts’.

Yesterday the students presented their work to a group that included their peers, members of the art and architecture community in and around campus, myself, and Robin Leenhouts, the daughter of Willis and Lillian. You can see Robin in some of the images above interacting with the displays. At the end of the presentation, Robin explained to the group how moved she was to see the students working with the drawings that she grew up with and had such a close connection to. She said it was a chance to once again connect with her parents.

The exhibits will be up for the next month in the 1st floor Commons of the Architecture building. If you are in the area, I highly recommend seeing the work that was created.

Willis and Lillian Leenhouts Architecture

We at UWM have a great appreciation for architecture thanks to our very own School of Architecture & Urban Planning. The Milwaukee area is home to its fair share of architecturally interesting buildings, many thanks to the design work of Willis and Lillian Leenhouts. However, their designs weren’t limited to Milwaukee County, they designed houses and other buildings around the state, as well as in several other states, even one in Madras, India. The Leenhoutses began their professional partnership in Milwaukee in 1945 after marrying in 1943, finding much work in designing houses in the postwar housing boom. In 1975, they were inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects – the first husband and wife duo to be inducted together. Lillian had her own share of firsts, including being the first licensed female architect in Wisconsin in 1942.

The images above come from the Leenhoutses designs for the Ted Friedlander residence on Lake Michigan in Door County, Wisconsin. The house was designed to be well integrated into its surroundings, respecting and becoming part of nature. The handwritten text was included with a conceptual drawing from February of 1965 and is referred to as “An Ode to the White Pine of a Natural Forest Country.” It expresses a desire for people to become better integrated with nature as they once were, declaring that the Friedlander residence would “live harmoniously and happily with Nature and in its effort to preserve Her, hope it will be an example to the exploding population which will value and need Her the more.” These ideas are mirrored in other works by the Leenhoutses; for example, two proposed public works projects that made great use of green space, as well as other works that were environmentally conscious.

The Willis and Lillian Leenhouts Digital Collection houses additional plans for homes and buildings in the Milwaukee area, as well as the library in Madras, India. The physical collection consists of project notes for each building as well as two filing cabinets worth of architectural drawings available to researchers. Check out the collection’s finding aid (UWM MSS 223) and see if any building piques your interest!

Specializing in single-family residences, the firm of Willis and Lillian Leenhouts Architects was well-known for its regional modernist style and utilization of passive solar technologies. The collection includes project records of the        firm (both files and drawings), as well as Willis and Lillian Leenhouts' professional papers. The project records are the most extensive portion of the collection and pertain to over 500 built and unbuilt projects from 1936 to 1990. Of the projects represented in this collection, the vast majority are single- or multi-family residences in the Milwaukee area.

Since it's Women's History Month, we'd be remiss not to mention that Lillian Leenhouts' career was especially distinguished. From 1929 to 1932, she studied at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, where she discovered the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. She graduated from the University of Michigan School of Architecture in 1936, returning to Milwaukee and working in the architectural office of Harry Bogner, president of the Milwaukee Art Institute. Lillian had the distinction of becoming Wisconsin's first licensed female architect in 1942, and she helped to form the Milwaukee chapter of the Society of Women Engineers in 1973. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning awarded her an honorary doctorate in May 1989. In 1990, the School established a financial scholarship in Willis and Lillian Leenhouts' name. Willis and Lillian were inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) in 1975, marking the first time in the A.I.A.'s history that a husband and wife earned a fellowship together.