Friday, Oct. 11, 7:00 pm
Elmer Carlson and Richard Carlson, Architects, of Beverly: Two Local Modernists of Wider Impact
– Alfred Willis, PhD, Presenter
Elmer C. Carlson (1897-1956) was a Chicago architect of Swedish descent who settled in Beverly in the 1920s. Despite the depressed economic circumstances of the 1930s, he managed to prosper in that decade as a designer of residential, commercial, and institutional buildings in southern Chicago and several of its suburbs. While an accomplished creator of 'period' designs of striking charm, he simultaneously evinced a fine flair for Modernism.
Working out of an ultramodern building on 95th Street, completed to his own design in 1946-47, he went on to even greater success after World War II as a prolific local architect of major projects sited both close to home and further afield. Elmer Carlson died in 1956 while developing a proposal for what should have been his greatest achievement in the residential sector, a villa in Robbins for the wealthy African-American entrepreneur S. B. Fuller.
Responsibility for refining the preliminary form of that interrupted project passed to his son, Richard E. Carlson (1930-2017) who had recently graduated in architecture form the University of Illinois and joined his father's Beverly practice. Thus making the most of a rare opportunity to begin his own career with what for his father (and mentor) had been the blank-check chance of a lifetime, Richard Carlson soon landed a wealthy clientele of his own that permitted a full display of his own unique taste and talent. His subsequent professional success unfolded first in Beverly but later in Colorado Springs.
About the Presenter: Alfred Willis, PhD is an architectural historian who grew up in Georgia. He was educated at Clemson University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. After retiring from a career in academic librarianship, he is now working as a consultant specializing in Modernism on nominations to the National Register. He is currently working as a contract librarian with the Historic Preservation Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Ridge Historical Society
10621 S. Seeley Ave., Chicago, IL 60643
Limited Capacity. Get tickets here: https://bit.ly/RHScarlson