Monthly Column

Gertrude Lempp Kerbis: A Career of Determination, Problem Solving, and Proactivity

July 24, 2023

In her monthly column, Elizabeth Blasius focuses on the late architect Gertrude Lempp Kerbis (1926–2016), whose career in architecture thrived on problem solving and proactivity. Her legacy includes not only what she built, but the bold nature of her outspokenness, occurring during a period of radical cultural change for women across the globe.

Contributors

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis at the Seven Continents Building / Rotunda Building, O’Hare International Airport, Chicago. © Chris Deford.

In the fall of 1946, architect Gertrude Lempp Kerbis, then a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, found herself in the cab of a pickup truck driven by a steamfitter on the last leg of a hitchhiking trip to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Gertrude, a Chicago native, had recently been introduced to Wright’s work via a spread in Life magazine and, expressing her obsession to others, learned that Wright’s famous home, school, and studio campus was less than forty miles away. Amongst the rolling hills and silos of the Midwest countryside, a nervous Gertrude, aware of the potential dangers of hitchhiking, eyed the flat roofs of Taliesin. The steamfitter let her out and she began to walk toward them. “They were just so wonderful,” Gertrude Lempp Kerbis would say about the buildings of Taliesin in a 2006 oral history interview with Susan King.1 Her nervousness overcome by excitement, Gertrude found herself walking closer and closer, eventually finding herself between the low-slung Prairie-style eaves and the sunken sandstone patios, pressing up to a floor to ceiling window to peer inside. There were no other people around. “I looked into the windows and the windows were doors that would come down to the ground,” Gertrude recalled.

An inspirational moment with architecture was to become a prophetic one. Gertrude heard heavy footsteps behind her. She turned around to face not a groundskeeper, but an albino peacock in full display, its resplendent tail fanned and shimmering. “This confrontation of this new physical experience of this building and this bird was simply too much,” Gertrude recalled. Following this “out of body experience,” Gertrude found an open bathroom window, and as twilight was approaching, she crawled in. She spent the night inside Taliesin, listening to Beethoven records. “The next morning, I had decided I wanted to be an architect.”

It is unclear how Gertrude Lempp Kerbis might have spent a night inside Taliesin undetected, or what specific buildings she might have interacted with. But by the 1940s, Frank Lloyd Wright and his Taliesin Fellowship students were already commuting twice yearly between Taliesin and Taliesin West, Wright’s winter home and studio in Arizona. What is clear is that the visit, and the peacock encounter (peacocks were confirmed to have been kept on the grounds in the 1940s) set Gertrude on an ambitious course for the future—a course without a blueprint—that she would design for herself.

“It doesn’t surprise me that she would drop everything to hitchhike there,” says Kim Kerbis, Gertrude’s daughter and a realtor based in Chicago, in a phone interview. “It personifies her will and determination, and naïveté at the same time.”

Gertrude Lempp Kerbis, FAIA, created a career in architecture that thrived on problem solving and proactivity. When Gertrude found herself disillusioned with the paternalism of large architecture firms, she established her own practice. When she couldn’t find a developer to work with, she learned how to develop her own projects. Facing a lack of access, support, and equity as a female architect, she established the organization Chicago Women in Architecture.

While fewer than ten built works can be attributed to Gertrude Lempp Kerbis, her legacy includes not only what she built, but the bold nature of her outspokenness, occurring during a period of radical cultural change for women across the globe.

Fresh from Taliesin, the newly inspired twenty-year-old Gertrude returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus only to find that the school had no architecture program—the first problem she would need to solve if she was to become an architect.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis with her parents, Eugene and Emma Lempp. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

Gertrude Lempp Kerbis was born Gertrude Mary Lempp “on a kitchen table on Chicago’s Northwest Side” to Russian and German immigrant parents. The family lived in the basement apartment of a two flat at 5454 West Cornelia Avenue, renting the apartments above. Living through the Great Depression forged Gertrude’s mindset toward being as creative as possible with less.

After graduating from Forman High School, where she excelled in math, Gertrude enrolled in Wright Junior College. When her father purchased a farm in the Wisconsin countryside, Gertrude moved with her parents, capitalizing on in-state tuition available at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She would return to Illinois to attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, determined to finish her degree in two years and enter into employment by 1948. She was accepted as an advanced student and tested out of introductory drafting classes toward a degree in architectural engineering.

“From the time I entered architecture that spring until I graduated, I virtually never left the campus,” Gertrude shared with Betty J. Blum in an oral history interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project.2 To pay tuition and living expenses, Gertrude worked in the school library and took a job as a maid. She was one of only two women in her cohort of students, with many of her fellow male students taking advantage of the funds available from the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, also known as the G.I. Bill, of 1944, which provided veterans returning from service in World War II with money for their education, supplies, and housing.

Gertrude would pay for it all on her own. “I had very limited funds to buy all of the papers and paints and drafting equipment that were required—it seemed like these supplies were so expensive,” she recalled.3 While at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the interest in modern architecture borne from her exposure to Frank Lloyd Wright’s work flourished, which worked against the University’s tendency towards the Beaux Arts on campus and in the classroom. For her first registration exam, Gertrude would design a modern building, a move which caused her to flunk it, and required that she retake her design courses.

“When I graduated from the University of Illinois [Urbana-Champaign], I sent out twenty-one letters to every architect that I thought had done great modern things. People that I would love to work with, all across the country,” recalled Gertrude.4 Those architects included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright responded, but with an application to join the Taliesin Fellowship. Architect Carl Koch responded with a job offer out of his home studio in Belmont, Massachusetts. The proximity to Harvard, where Walter Gropius was both teaching and redesigning the campus, appealed to Gertrude as she aspired to acquire a design degree to complement her engineering degree. She would work for Koch for a year, designing furniture and single-family homes while Koch served as the design consultant for the Lustron Corporation, but went to Harvard for only one year. While at Harvard, she began to explore the possibilities of concrete, using her engineering knowledge as a guide for experimental design.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis (standing, fourth from the right) and Carl Koch (standing, far right). Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

Gertrude Lempp Kerbis returned to Chicago in 1949. Never afraid of a cold call, she went to Bertrand Goldberg, asked for a job, and got one. In 1950, Gertrude won second place in the Chicago Tribune’s Better Rooms competition, winning a $500 prize for her design of a double bedroom.5 By the next year, Gertrude would go to work for Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett. She watched the construction of Mies van der Rohe’s 860–880 North Lake Shore Drive rise in the air from the Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett offices, and decided that she wouldn’t return to Harvard to get her graduate degree but would instead study with Mies. “Why am I going back to Boston when there is all this action in Chicago?” she reminisced in a 2008 video interview, filmed to celebrate her AIA Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award.6 After working in the field of architecture for two years, Gertrude looked to earn a master’s degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture.

While a student at IIT in 1951, Gertrude met, fell in love, and married Walter Peterhans in the timespan of six months. Peterhans, a photographer, had emigrated to Chicago from Germany alongside Mies in 1938. “I was distracted by this love affair,” Gertrude would share with Betty Blum later in life. After their wedding, Gertrude and Peterhans spent six months in Europe, which delayed the completion of her graduate degree, but provided her with an opportunity to observe the architecture of Germany, France, and Italy via her ever-evolving eye for design. Peterhans was fifty-four to Gertrude’s twenty-six, and the union produced a son, Julian.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis and Walter Peterhans. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis and her son Julian Kerbis Peterhans. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

According to Gertrude, Mies was “only really interested when women were fluttering around him in a certain kind of way.”7 While Gertrude had come to IIT because Mies’s work had captivated her, she was less than starstruck when engaging with Mies at the school, and he ignored her work. Gertrude’s relationship with Mies was further complicated by her relationship with Walter Peterhans, as Peterhans’s ex wife—who had emigrated alongside him—was well liked among the cohort of men that came to IIT from the Bauhaus. When Mies provided Gertrude an opportunity to work on a speculative project under his patronage, Gertrude joined the team, but left the project because she wanted to pursue her own ideas.

“I then decided that I couldn’t stand it because the reason I had come to all these goddamn graduate schools was that I wanted to work on my own project and to do my own designs.”8 Starting on her graduate thesis project in the same drafting room as the Mies project she had left, Mies deserted her, and she was left without a team of professors to critique her work for a year. Once her thesis was completed—a study of a flexible building for a merchandise mart in the Netherlands—a member of her review team credited Gertrude’s writing on her own project to her husband, Walter Peterhans.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis during her thesis at IIT. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

A summer job during the second (and last) year of Gertrude’s marriage to Walter Peterhans led her to work as an architect for the Chicago Park District. Applying for a job that turned out to be for chief architect, Gertrude excelled in the written and oral interviews, and as a part of the civil service exam requirement she was hired. “I had the possibility of studying these parks and future parks and finding out what is a field house and what is appropriate for these communities. They had vast resources for studying communities. I had these incredible dreams of building into that job. But they were not ready for me.”9

By 1954, Gertrude had a two-year-old son and a master’s degree from IIT, and she had divorced Peterhans. Living in a cottage with her parents and child, she went to work for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), a position that would allow her to make the most of her knowledge of building systems while integrating her own design ideas. Her first project was Mitchell Hall, the dining hall at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Air Force needed the dining hall to serve thousands of cadets at once, necessitating a large volume of space. To solve the problem, Gertrude designed a two-way truss system and cantilevered it. To assist in the development of this design, the team used a UNIVAC computer, the first general computer for commercial use. According to Gertrude, this was the first time a UNIVAC computer was used in architecture.

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Air Force Academy dining hall, Colorado Springs, Colorado. © SOM.

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Air Force Academy dining hall under construction, Colorado Springs, Colorado. © H LaPlant.

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Air Force Academy dining hall, Colorado Springs, Colorado. © Hedrich Blessing Photographers.

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Air Force Academy dining hall interior, Colorado Springs, Colorado. © Hedrich Blessing Photographers.

In the early 1950s, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill began working on a large-scale urban renewal project east of the South Side neighborhood of Douglas. The nearly 100-acre Lake Meadows housing development between 31st and 35th Streets and the Illinois Central railroad tracks called for the demolition of over six hundred buildings to be replaced with a series of twenty-one-story high-rises as well as duplexes, a new elementary school, and a shopping center. Completed in 1958, the project also included a club building, which Gertrude would work to design. The two-story reinforced concrete building featured expansive window walls and a pyramidal hipped roof clad in glazed tile—a juxtaposition against the rectangular high rises surrounding it. The club building’s lower level was built into a hill, leaving the second level to open out to terraces at grade and expand upward into a skylight with wooden beams and timber decking. Terrazzo floors inside were polished and continued outside onto the terraces. The building was enclosed with a brick wall, with the brick laid to create a breeze block effect around the club building’s entrance. The club building was demolished in 2008.

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Lake Meadows Club building, Chicago. © Johansen Krause.

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Lake Meadows Club building, Chicago. © Lewellyn Studio.

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Lake Meadows Club building, Chicago. © Hedrich Blessing Photographers.

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Lake Meadows Club building, Chicago. © Hedrich Blessing Photographers.

While designing the Lake Meadows Club building and with Mitchell Hall nearing completion, Gertrude began working on the Skokie Public Library, situated in a northwest suburb of Chicago. The library featured massive rooftop cantilevers and interior courtyards that were enclosed using creative methods, a design feature that Gertrude would use later in her career. The Skokie Public Library, completed in 1959, was given an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor Award in 1962 and a National Building Award from the American Library Association that same year. In 1963, the Chicago Fine Arts Council gave the library an Outstanding Building Award.

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Skokie Public Library, Skokie, Illinois. © Torkel Korling.

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Skokie Public Library, Skokie, Illinois. © WC Martin.

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Skokie Public Library, Skokie, Illinois. © Torkel Korling.

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Skokie Public Library, Skokie, Illinois. © Torkel Korling.

While working at SOM and assisting to build out the “SOM style,” as Gertrude called it, Gertrude was simultaneously questioning the tradition of firm credit, which limited design ownership to the firm and not to individual designers. “I think what was happening at SOM is that we were told that no one would be getting credit for any of the projects; that it would be a design by SOM and no one,” she told Susan King in a 2006 interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project.10

A new commission that embraced technology and the jet age inspired Gertrude Kerbis to leave SOM for Naess and Murphy in 1959, which was soon to become C.F. Murphy Associates. She began working on the design for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, specifically the Seven Continents Building (also known as the O’Hare Rotunda Building). The building, designed to connect portions of the airport while also housing a restaurant, has a circular form with a two-story atrium. Its two floating staircases lead to a mezzanine above. The building is covered by a shallow concrete roof dome and hung by metal cables from a steel support structure. The 190-foot concrete ceiling has a thickness of only five inches, a testament to Gertrude Lempp Kerbis’s understanding of how materials functioned.

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Seven Continents Building / Rotunda Building, O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, 1963. C.F. Murphy and Associates, Gertrude Lempp Kerbis, designer. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

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Interior of the Seven Continents Building / Rotunda Building, O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, 1963. C.F. Murphy and Associates, Gertrude Lempp Kerbis, designer. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

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Interior of the Seven Continents Building / Rotunda Building, O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, 1963. C.F. Murphy and Associates, Gertrude Lempp Kerbis, designer. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

The round design might have ultimately been inspired by Gertrude’s personal life. “My mom was pregnant with me while she was designing the Rotunda at O’Hare,” shares Kim Kerbis. Gertrude married Don Kerbis, Julian’s tennis instructor and Kim’s father, in 1961. She also gained a stepdaughter, Lisa. The opening of O’Hare Airport in 1963 was to be celebrated by a gala in the restaurant, with President John F. Kennedy and Mayor Richard J. Daley in attendance. Gertrude Kerbis, who had stepped away from C.F. Murphy Associates to design an indoor/outdoor tennis club with Don, was not invited. Gertrude was livid, sending letters to the Mayor and the President expressing her frustration. She eventually received an invite. Speaking to Betty Blum, she recalled her anger: “I really made a ruckus, I said that it was because I was a woman. I felt, again, that I was powerless, that I was not given a partnership, that I was not brought into the inner circle. I felt it was because I was a woman. Anytime all these slights would happen, where it was a power struggle, I always ended up with a question of why didn't I have power? The bottom line was always because I was a woman.”11 The Seven Continents Building was given an AIA Chicago Chapter Citation of Merit in 1965.

Taking leave from C.F. Murphy Associates, Gertrude and Don purchased a parcel of land off the Edens Expressway in suburban Highland Park and acquired a construction loan to build an indoor/outdoor tennis club. Working together, Don would develop the clientele for the Don Kerbis Tennis Club while Gertrude would design the building. Nine years Gertrude’s junior, Don always wanted to own his own tennis club. Working within the constraints of the existing zoning, which provided height limits on the building, Gertrude designed the interior tennis courts underground, or in the basement of the building, while the outdoor courts were on the roof. To handle the load, Gertrude designed hyperbolic paraboloid panels that were twisted at the “two opposing ends and would therefore create a curve as the panel went up.”12 The complex project required Gertrude to act as architect, developer, and general contractor.

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Don Kerbis Tennis Club, Highland Park, Illinois. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Don Kerbis Tennis Club under construction, Highland Park, Illinois. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Don Kerbis Tennis Club under construction, Highland Park, Illinois. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Don Kerbis Tennis Club, Highland Park, Illinois. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Don Kerbis Tennis Club, Highland Park, Illinois. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

“The building is still there because the cost would be prohibitive to be taken down,” says Julian Kerbis Peterhans, Gertrude’s son, a zoologist. “It was so ahead of its time that it was obsolete in fifteen years!” Gertrude acknowledged that the building was likely “overdesigned,” and while the project left her and Don strained, it gave her an entirely new skill set that could supplement her career as a designer.

During her break from C.F. Murphy Associates, Gertrude Kerbis teamed up with four other architects—Y.C. Wong, T.C. Chang, Otto Stark, and Sam C. Sit—to enter a design competition for a new city hall in Boston. The Boston City Hall Competition was the first modern competition for a major public building in the United States.13

Gertrude returned to C.F. Murphy Associates in 1965. Her role was relegated to projects that were routine. “I was not given very important work,” she shared with Susan King. When C.F. Murphy Associates was awarded the high-profile commission to design McCormick Place, a large indoor convention center on the Near South Side of Chicago, Gertrude felt that her expertise would be ideal for a leadership position on the project. Instead, she was snubbed in favor of architect Gene Summers. Fed up with the sexism she had faced working in big firms, she founded Lempp Kerbis & Associates in 1967.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis business card. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis business card. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

“My mom was fearless,” says Kim Kerbis. “But she was also passed over when she was an award-winning architect, and that was untenable for her.” Breaking free from big firm culture gave Gertrude the opportunity to speak openly and publicly about how the field of architecture could be improved upon, which became a character of her practice. “We have to seek new solutions for the construction of housing because we will not anywhere near fill the enormous need with conventional methods,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1968.14

The Lempp Kerbis & Associates offices were located at 664 North Michigan Avenue, north of Chicago’s Loop. “My mother was always working,” continues Kim Kerbis, but making a profit was hard to come by. “She had a bachelor’s and master’s and engineering degree, and she was a single mom. Here she is, with the best CV, better than her male counterparts, and she is being denied work.”

In 1964, Gertrude was chosen to serve on an advisory committee created by the City of Chicago’s Department of Urban Renewal to evaluate plans for urban renewal projects. The only woman selected for the committee, Gertrude, then a longtime resident of Lincoln Park, developed nuanced opinions on the concept of urban renewal, calling for it to examine the convenience, amenities, and cultural diversity of existing neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Hyde Park prior to wholesale demolition.15 In 1970, Gertrude, now separated from Don (their divorce was not finalized until 1980), began going by Gertrude Lempp Kerbis as she also became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She was only the eleventh woman to be given the distinction.16

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis teaching at Harper College, Palatine, Illinois. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Gertrude Lempp Kerbis teaching at Harper College, Palatine, Illinois. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

That same year, Gertrude began teaching at Harper College in suburban Palatine, where she would remain for twenty-six years. “She loved Harper,” shares Gertrude’s daughter, Lisa, in a phone interview. “As a member of the founding faculty, she got to have a hand in designing a curriculum.” Gertrude would also teach at Washington University in St. Louis, Ball State University, the University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the College of Fine & Applied Arts created the Gertrude Lempp Kerbis Endowed Chair in Architecture in 2018. “Teaching clarifies your values,” she stated in a 2008 video interview. Teaching also provided Gertrude with income to support herself and to pay for tuition for Julian, Lisa, and Kim. In the late 1970s, she purchased an 1890s row house at 172 Burton Place, in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood, returning to the two-flat experience of her youth on the Northwest Side and operating her architecture practice from her home office.

Lisa has fond childhood memories of going to look at works of architecture her mother had read about or was interested in, as well as trips to buildings Gertrude had worked on herself. “We would go and look at buildings she had designed, like the Skokie Public Library or the Rotunda,” says Lisa. “We would have tea and watch the planes. But mom would always be looking back to see how people were moving through the space.”

Gertrude was honest about the role family played in her life and the significance of her friendships with colleagues. Yet she had harsher words regarding her choices in romantic partners. When asked by Betty Blum if she would go into architecture again, she responded: “Absolutely! There’s no question about that. I probably would not have married the men I married. Those were not of necessity.”17

With her own practice, Gertrude returned to the model developed for the Don Kerbis Tennis Club. Familiar with the process to acquire land cleared for urban renewal from her time at C.F. Murphy Associates, she purchased a piece of cheap land on Clark Street in Lincoln Park for $10,000 and began designing a four-story, multi-unit residential development.18 “The Greenhouse Townhome Condominiums only had eleven units and I thought that one way to isolate the traffic on Clark Street was to have a greenhouse between your living room space and the outdoors; you would have this intervening greenhouse space which would take some of the sound and dirt and be able to provide a very interesting transition. So everybody had a two-story greenhouse space that they could use however they wanted.”19 Acting as developer, architect, and sales agent, Gertrude won an AIA Chicago Distinguished Building Award for the project in 1976.

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Greenhouse Apartments, Chicago, IL, 1976. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

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Greenhouse Apartments, Chicago, IL, 1976. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Greenhouse Apartments, Chicago, IL, 1976. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

It is worth noting that, just a few doors north of the Greenhouse Townhome Condominiums, Gertrude designed the Webster-Clark Townhouses project located on 339 West Webster Avenue. The project includes nine townhouses (five four-story townhouses and four three-story townhouses) located over an enclosed parking garage.

Gertrude was still pondering a lack of commissions and clients coming to her and began a shift toward trying to solve that for herself and others. “I’m a woman. People don’t come to me,” she shared with the Chicago Tribune in an article on the Greenhouse. “I want to be an architect. I want to practice and if I can't get it one way, I’ll do it another.”20 Sensing that she wasn’t alone, she asked everyone she knew for their contact list of women architects in Chicago, including architect Carol Ross Barney, who was one of two women working for Holabird & Root. She received a letter in 1974 from Gertrude inviting her to “come and meet other female architects re: coalition.”

“We all sat on the floor, or various chairs in Gert’s little office,” shares Carol Ross Barney in a phone interview about the first meeting of the organization that would become Chicago Women in Architecture (CWA). “The founding group was very counterculture,” continues Barney. “When you look at Chicago and the landscape, it was totally unique for the time.” Founded by Nancy Abshire, Natalie de Blois, Pao Chi-Chang, Gunduz Dagdelen, Laura Fisher, Pu Hu Shao, Jane M. Jacobsen, Barbara Ralph, Carol Ross Barney, Cynthia Weese, Margaret Zirkel Young, and Gertrude Lempp Kerbis in 1974, CWA is a nonprofit, volunteer-led organization that functions as a forum for women in architecture and related professions. “We had these objectives that we dedicated ourselves to,” says Barney. One of those early objectives was a scholarship, which the CWA established early in its tenure. The other objective was to create more opportunities for women architects through networking and advocating for issues of concern to women within the profession.

In 1978, Gertrude’s work was featured alongside the work of Marion Mahoney Griffin, as well as current projects by Carol Ross Barney, Cynthia Wees, and Pao-Chi Chang, in an exhibit titled Chicago Women Architects at the Artemisia Gallery, which raised the profiles of each of the architects involved. “I think any kind of movement depends upon when people are ready to hear certain things because you can be whistling to the wind and it’s just not going to be working until someone is ready to listen to you,” Gertrude shared regarding the CWA efforts in her conversation with Susan King. In 1980, she was made president of the AIA Chicago Chapter, another first for a woman architect in Chicago: “Just to show a woman could be a capable administrator,” she would say later.21 In 1988, she became the first woman president of the Cliff Dwellers Club, a private civic arts and architecture organization founded in 1907.

“Gert was ambitious. She was a force,” adds Barney. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis continued to teach until she was in her 70s. “Her ideas didn’t stop,” shares Kim Kerbis. “She remodeled a house in Sarasota, Florida, and wanted to do a vineyard in Mexico.” In 2000, she designed a vacation home for herself in Beverly Shores, Indiana, across from the Indiana Dunes. “The house is a legacy moment, because it is the only single-family home my mom designed that is still standing.” Kim now owns the property.

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Vacation home in Beverly Shores, Indiana. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

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Vacation home in Beverly Shores, Indiana. Courtesy of the Kerbis family.

Yet, the execution of one idea eluded Gertrude, who passed away in 2016. “The tragedy of my mom is that she never got to design a skyscraper,” Kim says. Gertrude mentions this desire in print and in interviews across several decades and multiple career iterations. Seeing the phallic nature of skyscrapers, she pondered what a skyscraper designed by a woman, or with female sensibility, might have looked like. “That’s my dream project, even as we speak,” Gertrude shared with Betty Blum in 1997. “I would love to do some studies and develop some models about skyscraper design.” Citing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile-High skyscraper project, she stated, “That was very impressive and I still want to do that.”22

Kim refers to her mother’s body of work as a “jewel box” consisting of approximately ten built and extant works of architecture. Gertrude Lempp Kerbis was not a prolific architect, but each project holds significance for how it conveys both her resourcefulness and command of engineering, technology, and design. Yet, her legacy may be in the ways in which she chose to support her colleagues and her unwavering desire to instigate the profession, through the CWA and through her instigations in the press, in lectures, and later, in her generosity and autonomy in telling her story to Betty Blum and Susan King through a series of extensive oral histories and interviews.

In the conclusion of her groundbreaking essay, “Only Girl Architect Lonely,” architect Susan King writes: “As architects place more emphasis on diversity, the ability of organizations like CWA to record the otherwise unrecoverable early histories of women architects and their organizations takes on increased significance.”23 Carol Ross Barney adds, “Until Title IX [the federal civil rights law in the United States enacted in 1972] women worked largely behind the scenes, particularly within those massive practices. But now you look around and you see what [those women] were responsible for.”

Carol Ross Barney continues, “There weren’t many people who were ready to trust a woman practitioner or give her an opportunity. You had two options. Work on modest projects like Gertrude, or do what Natalie de Blois did, work on big projects at a big firm like SOM but accept the backseat.”

Deconstructing that obfuscation could start with recognizing Gertrude Kerbis in an official fashion, through a street being named in her honor, an installation, or by landmarking a building she designed. In Chicago, where she made her life and her career, there are no designated landmarks designed by Gertrude Kerbis—or any woman, for that matter. Nationwide, only 24% of registered architects are women as of 2021.24 In closing her 1997 interview with Betty Blum, Gertrude shared, “Women still have to keep plugging along because we are not there yet.”

Acknowledgements

The author and publisher would like to thank Kim Kerbis, Lisa Kerbis, Julian Kerbis Peterhans, and Margaret Young for their personal recollections. Thanks to Carol Ross Barney and Laura Saviano from Ross Barney Architects, and Susan King, Principal and Studio Leader at HED. Thanks to Karen Widi, Manager of Library, Records and Information Services at SOM. Finally, thanks to Nathaniel Parks, Tigerman McCurry Director, Art Institute of Chicago Archives, Research Center, and JT de la Torre, Access and Reference Archivist Research Center, at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Selected Projects by Gertrude Lempp Kerbis

As part of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Cadet Dining Hall, US Air Force Academy
Air Force Academy, CO 80840

Skokie Public Library
5215 Oakton St, Skokie, IL 60077

Lake Meadows Club
3211 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60616

As part of C.F. Murphy Associates

Seven Continents Building, O’Hare International Airport
Rotunda Building, Chicago, IL 60666

As part of Lempp Kerbis & Associates

Don Kerbis Tennis Club
1660 Old Skokie Valley Rd, Highland Park, IL 60035

Greenhouse Townhome Condominiums
2131 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60614

Webster-Clark Townhouses
339 W Webster Ave, Chicago, IL 60614

Kerbis Vacation Home
849 Lake Front Dr, Beverly Shores, IN 46301

Comments
1 Gertrude Kerbis, interviewed by Susan F. King, transcription of tape recording, 2006 (Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Department of Architecture, The Art Institute of Chicago), 2.
2 Gertrude Kerbis, interviewed by Betty J. Blum, transcription of tape recording, 1997 (Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Department of Architecture, The Art Institute of Chicago), 17.
3 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 11.
4 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 20.
5 “Museum Slates Tribune Prize Rooms Exhibit,” Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1950.
6 Karen Carter, “Gertrude Lempp Kerbis: Modern Architect,” Vimeo, 2008, 18:18.
7 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 50.
8 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 54.
9 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 60.
10 Kerbis interviewed by Susan F. King, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 18.
11 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 110.
12 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 121.
13 “Woman Architect,” Chicago Tribune, March 23, 1962.
14 “Woman Architect Assails Outmoded Building Methods,” Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1968.
15 Kit Barrett, “Neighborhoods–can they survive urban sickness,” Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1970.
17 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 176.
18 Kerbis interviewed by Susan F. King, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 30.
19 Kerbis interviewed by Susan F. King, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 30.
20 “Developer is ‘down’ on high-rises,” Chicago Tribune, October 5, 1975.
21 Jeff Lyon, “Women have big designs on world of architecture,” Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1983.
22 Kerbis interviewed by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, 175.
23 Susan King, “Only Girl Architect Lonely,” Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Article republished on MAS Context in 2021 with permission. See: mascontext.com/observations/only-girl-architect-lonely.
24 AIA Membership Demographics Report 2021,” The American Institute of Architects, 2022.