Biographical Summary
Lawrence Bradford Perkins was born in 1907 in Evanston, Illinois, the son of noted Prairie School architect Dwight H. Perkins (1867-1941). In 1930 Lawrence received his bachelor's degree in architecture from Cornell University, where he met Philip Will, the man who was to become his partner. In 1935 they opened a practice in Chicago and were soon joined by E. Todd Wheeler, renaming the firm Perkins, Wheeler and Will. The young firm first gained national attention when it associated with Eliel and Eero Saarinen on the design of the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois (1939-40). Perkins, Wheeler, and Will soon established a national reputation as respected school specialists. Perkins retired from the firm in 1972 but by 1974 he had embarked on a new career as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Perkins was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1953. He died in Evanston in 1997.

Interview Highlights
Perkins speaks about his father 's education, friends, colleagues, the Committee on the Universe, and his vision of creating the Forest Preserve system. Perkins then speaks about his own education at Cornell University; meeting Philip Will; working for Howard Fisher's General Houses; how the office of Perkins, Wheeler and Will took shape; the Crow Island School commission; collaborating with the Saarinens; the shift to steel and glass; the United States Gypsum building; building the First National Bank building; the Cliff Dwellers Club; travel; the American Institute of Architects.

Crow Island School; Winnetka, IL, 1939. Photo by Wayne Cable, Cable Studios; courtesy of Perkins & Will.

U.S. Gypsum Building; Chicago, 1963. Photo courtesy of Perkins & Will.

Interview Excerpt
"[How Dad got started as an independent was] Mr. Burnham said, 'Dwight, I can't reduce you to the ranks and I can't put you over Ernest Graham. Here is a year's office rent and I will help you get the building [Steinway Hall] for you to start with.' Dad got that....They got Steinway Hall built and occupied by the time he was twenty-nine years old, all fourteen floors of it. Dad, characteristically and somewhat like his father before him, spread a little too much sail and took for himself the top two floors, much more than he had the business to consume. He invited a bunch of his friends to have their private offices on the thirteenth floor and they'd share the drafting room on the walk up to the fourteenth floor. I have just the dimmest memory of that space up in the steel beams, rafters and trusses, of this very much improvised, but whole, building space. People wonder why the Prairie School stuff all looks related to each other. Think about the people that were there: Myron Hunt, Jules Guerin, Tom Tallmadge from Tallmadge & Watson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony... when any one of them got a job they'd all pile upstairs and work on it together. Of course everything looked related to everything else....My dad was what they all had in common. He put them together; he collected the rent from them." (p. 6)

Other Resources at The Art Institute of Chicago
Architectural drawings and travel sketches may be consulted by appointment in the Department of Architecture. Photographs of work by Dwight Perkins and his associated firms are held in the Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection in the Ryerson and Burnham Archives.

See also oral histories of other architects at Perkins, Wheeler and Will: C. William Brubaker, Wesley Wieting and E. Todd Wheeler; and other second-generation architects in Chicago: Arthur Dubin, Sidney Epstein, Ernest A. Grunsfeld, John Holabird, and Bertram Weber.

Funding for this oral history was provided by the Cliff Dwellers Club.

About the Chicago Architects Oral History Project

Department of Architecture • Ryerson & Burnham Archives

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