Henry P. Glass (1911-2003) - A Chicago Designer with Old World Viennese Elegance
Updated: May 11, 2021
by: Vicki Matranga
Frustrated by clumsy eating while standing at a party, in 1992 (at the age of 81) Henry Glass designed a better way to hold a drink and a snack.
“Pleasure and enjoyment is a basic and legitimate human requirement and I am emphatically one hundred percent all out for it for as much as you can get out of life,” Henry P. Glass pronounced in 1944, as one of “Eight Crack Designers and Architects Taking Fiercely Partisan Stands” featured in the October issue of Interiors magazine.(1) A mere five years after his release from Nazi concentration camps, Glass was working for a display company in Chicago and reimagined “Dining Rooms in the Homes of Tomorrow.”(2)
This statement revealed Glass’s resilient and optimistic nature, his zest for life, and his understanding of promotion. Glass called himself a “functionalist” and predicted that the enclosed dining room would vanish in the postwar home of an American family without domestic help. His drawing on the article’s opening page also forecast the solution he would design a few years later for his own family’s home in suburban Chicago.
A Promising Career in Europe – Redirected
Henry Peter Glass was born in 1911 into a cultured Viennese family. His father was a physician who played violin; his mother, a refined woman who furnished their home with tasteful products and Biedermeier furniture. Glass attended Vienna’s Technische Hochschule from 1929 to 1936, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in architecture. As typical of European views of design at the time, architects were also trained to design graphics and products.
Glass began his career designing private homes and interiors for Vienna’s artistic intelligentsia. He credited modernist architect Adolf Loos as a key influence and the progressive Wiener Werkstatte and the nearby Bauhaus, which educated future architects, designers, and artists according to the same principles, as models for his belief that design benefitted from integrating multiple disciplines into a unified approach to problem-solving.
Henry and apparel designer and dressmaker Eleanor Knopp (Elly) married in March 1937. She created gowns and accessories for herself and her clients that suited their elegant café society life. He designed stationery for her business in a graceful script representing a needle and thread. Henry designed clothes and jewelry for Elly as well as his own attire.(3)
The business card, envelope, and writing paper designed for Elly’s business (Kultivierte Massarbeit = Cultured/Refined Custom Work). (Matranga archive.)
Glass’s vibrant young practice ceased abruptly in March 1938 when the Germans terminated Austria’s independence and took control of the country. Immediately, thousands were arrested. The Glasses suspected that a jealous neighbor had informed the Nazis about him, who was of Jewish descent and had participated in anti-Fascist activities. For several months, Glass was imprisoned in Dachau. He was then transferred to Buchenwald, where officials took advantage of his talents by compelling him to design a cemetery for Nazi officers.(4) Released due to Elly’s efforts, he had to leave the country within three weeks—just enough time to pack up his portfolio of drawings and documents that he would need to hustle for work in New York. Because of their Jewish heritage, many of his relatives left behind were killed by the Nazis.
Coming to America: The New York Years
Henry arrived in New York in February 1939, and Elly followed in May. He soon found a job at modernist designer Gilbert Rohde’s office. There he prepared detailed drawings of furniture Rohde was developing for Herman Miller and contributed to several pavilions for the New York World’s Fair in the hectic final months before the fair’s opening on April 30, 1939.
Glass then freelanced for other offices. While working for architect Morris Sanders, he met Russel Wright, who in 1940-42 invited 65 manufacturers and designers to participate in his American-Way merchandising program to produce furnishings and tableware for modern lifestyles. In 1941, Glass designed a wrought iron outdoor furniture series, which included nearly a dozen shapes of tables and chairs.(5) Inspired by Elly’s morning routine of pinning up her hair, Henry designed the furniture’s V-shaped legs that Alfred Auerbach, then editor of the trade journal Home Furnishings Daily, named the “Hairpin Group.”(6)
(Left) Glass designed a line of 11 types of tables and seating for the American-Way program. (Right) The outdoor furniture series included a variety of glass-topped tables and lightweight chairs. Users could remove and reinstall the sturdy sailcloth stretched for the chair seat and back. The tie-back laces added visual interest to the spare geometry of the wrought-iron frames.(7)
Although the furniture line carried the name of designer Russel Wright, Glass was later recognized as its originator. Recent attention rekindled interest in Glass’s work. In May 2020, The New York Times article “The Enduring Trends That Rule Our Décor” included his brief biography and credited Henry Glass as the creator of the Hairpin Leg, which appeared in the market long before other designers began to incorporate such V-shaped legs into their furnishings in the 1950s.(8)
Settling in Chicago
Shortly after the debut of the American-Way product line, design assignments in New York became scarce as the attack on Pearl Harbor redirected the U.S. economy from consumer products to war production. The work he had been doing in New York helped Glass realize that he preferred to design for a wider market, rather than for a single client as an architect. He also learned that to become a licensed architect, U.S. rules required he work for an architect for five years; he had no time for that, needing to earn money to support his family.(9)
Glass visited Chicago to scout the furniture trade shows and seek clients. The offer to become the director of architectural design at W. L. Stensgaard and Associates, Inc., a display firm in Chicago, brought the Glasses to the city in 1942. After New York, Chicago seemed like an ugly, small town (with the stench of stockyards) to Elly but Henry saw opportunity even though the Midwest was further away from Europe.
At Stensgaard, he engaged in retail store planning and product design. He designed trade show exhibits, visual education devices, and airplane cockpits and camouflage for the armed forces. The company also ventured into making lightweight furniture for defense housing. There he saw how the production and shipping of goods resulted in much wasted material and added labor. This spurred his inventiveness and determination to reduce waste. Propelled by wartime materials shortages, he created innovative, sturdy products made of plywood and Masonite that nested and folded for efficient shipping and space-saving storage. As he designed merchandising displays for Stensgaard’s clients, he also became acquainted with products manufactured by regional companies and their decision-makers.
At the same time, Glass attended evening classes at the School of Design (renamed the Institute of Design in 1945), then located at 247 East Ontario, to study with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, and architect George Fred Keck, each of whom influenced Glass’s design directions.(10) Lectures by Buckminster Fuller inspired his thinking on design’s responsibility decades before the term “sustainability” emerged. Not only did he learn from his teachers, but his classmates provided valuable information on local businesses and widened his network. In the fall 1943 semester, his class in camouflage included display artists employed by six retailers, manufacturers, machinery suppliers, engineering firms, an occupational therapist, and an Esquire magazine art director.(11)
A Most Productive Period: First Decades in Chicago
While working at Stensgaard, in 1946 Glass took on the most ambitious commission of his early career: designing the building and interiors of Kling Studios, an advertising art agency. One of the first postwar buildings erected in downtown Chicago, the two-story structure occupied a full block at Fairbanks and Ohio to Ontario in the city’s Streeterville area. It stood across the street from the building that housed the famed Chez Paree nightclub and the Institute of Design. Because Glass was not a licensed architect in the United States, he was listed as the designer with architects and engineers Friedman, Alschuler and Sincere, a respected Chicago architectural firm.
After the building opened, Architectural Forum devoted seven pages in its October 1947 issue to reviewing the building and its dramatic interior.(12) The reporter commented, “Confronted with the limiting requirements of reasonable cost and utmost speed, the associated designer-architects combined imaginative design and relatively inexpensive materials to produce in record time (Kling began moving in six months after ground was broken) one of Chicago’s most attractive, most efficient, most talked about commercial buildings.”
The time required for this project and its income allowed Glass in 1946 to open his own office, Henry P. Glass, Designer, on the 25th floor of the American Furniture Mart.(13) There he was close to client showrooms, trade fair activity, and media contacts, and he engaged a small staff. He was based there until the late 1960s. For a short time, he partnered with Louis Huebner, a local modernist architect a decade his junior, so he could continue his architectural work.
Glass outside his new office in the American Furniture Mart. (Photo courtesy of the Glass family.)
Glass managed all aspects of his business, from client contact to promotion, with flair and precision. He produced scale models that were miniature works of art and tested the mechanisms of his inventive folding furniture. As historian Jeffrey Head noted, “Glass was often called ‘Folding Glass,’ because he created so much collapsible furniture. Even his palm-sized scale models and prototypes were collapsible. He developed his extensive understanding of materials and manufacturing processes largely by constructing his models exactly as he would the full-size pieces. ‘If the scaled design and materials created problems,’ Glass once commented, ‘it could create production problems.’”(14) Henry did not make his own models but hired local skilled craftsmen. He employed a Japanese and a Polish model maker in his workshop.(15)
Glass and group inside his office at the American Furniture Mart. Note the display of folding furniture on the shelves. (Photo courtesy of the Glass family.)
A heart attack in 1964 barely slowed Glass down. While in the hospital, he designed the Glass G’spass, his family’s ski chalet in Harbor Springs, Michigan.(16) Constructed in 1965, the cozy home, with a conversation pit surrounding the central fireplace, provided a refreshing weekend getaway in nature.
His most notable designs feature innovative mechanisms for convenient storage and consider user comfort. The 1952 Swingline series of furniture for children introduced primary colors for juvenile furnishings. The set featured a wardrobe with doors and color-coded swing-out drawers to help children learn how to organize their clothes. The series also included a round table with space-saving swing-out stools.
Swingline Furniture, Fleetwood Furniture Company, Zeeland, Michigan, 1952. (Photo courtesy of the Glass family.)
Glass’s Cricket chair for Brown Jordan in 1979, which folded into a three-quarter-inch thickness, won several awards. This minimalist chair revealed how Glass took advantage of the behavior of flexible fabric and his keen interest in efficient, space-saving design. The Cylindra set of dining room furniture demonstrates Glass’s concern for efficient production. The chair shapes were cut to maximize materials use and reduce waste. Glass designed the Intimate Island set of living room furniture to encourage comfortable conversations, as guests could stretch their legs and rest their feet on the upholstered edge of the table. You can see many more examples of Glass’s furniture, household products, and architectural projects through the online exhibitions at the ArchiTech Gallery: Henry P. Glass: An Inventive Mind (part 1) and (part 2) and The World of Henry Glass: Mid-Century Modernist (link).
(Left) Cricket Folding Beach Chair, Brown Jordan, El Monte, California, 1979 (Middle) Cylindra Dining Room Group, Richbilt Manufacturing Company, Cincinnati, Ohio. 1966 (Photo courtesy of the Glass family.) (Right) Intimate Island Curved Plywood and Upholstery Living Room Group, Deco House, Inc., Birmingham, Alabama, 1966.
Plans to convert the Furniture Mart to residential use triggered Glass’s decision to work from home and avoid expensive downtown rent. Twenty years after building the family home in north suburban Northfield, in 1969 Glass built an addition for an office and studio. The studio included a reception room and drafting tables for two. He continued his pace of activity and employed an assistant.
A Devoted Educator and Mentor
In addition to running his busy practice and serving in designers’ organizations, Glass taught generations of young designers. In 1946, he accepted a faculty position at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC). He reinvigorated the Department of Industrial Design, which had been established in 1927.(17) He was named full professor in 1952 and taught at the SAIC for 21 years, until the school terminated its industrial design program in 1967.(18)
Glass was a taskmaster with his students, but also a kind mentor who provided support and opportunities. His coordinated with local manufacturers to sponsor student competitions and award prizes, thus introducing students to the requirements of business and potential employers. He also directly influenced the development of careers of talented young designers at the school.
For example, he jumpstarted the career of textile designer Ben Rose, who had been a student of painting and fine arts at the SAIC and enlisted in the Navy in 1941. When Rose returned after the war to continue his studies under the G.I. Bill, Rose and his wife Frances produced handmade cards and other items. In the winter of 1945, they gave their friend Henry Glass (19) some of their screen printed placemats as a Christmas gift. Glass recognized Rose’s talent in textile design and commissioned him to produce placemats featuring silkscreened abstract motifs,(20) which encouraged Rose to consider producing screen printed designs for draperies and upholstery. Glass offered Rose his first big project: 3,000 yards of printed fabric.(21) Suddenly, Rose had to rent a warehouse workspace, source the fabric, and learn how to run a business. Ben and Frances rushed to screen print the draperies themselves, without assistance. Fran and her friend, display artist Helen Stern, called on decorators to offer their services. They built the company that became Ben Rose, Ltd., a firm known for its stylish fabrics and wallcoverings for modern interiors.(22)
Charles Harrison, a determined and talented Black student who had studied in Glass’s classes, could not find a job after graduating from the SAIC in 1954. As Glass had suffered from violent discrimination, he was sensitive to Harrison’s struggle in a segregated society and offered Harrison his first position. After advancing his skills at Glass’s office assisting in furniture projects, Harrison was then able to gain the confidence of other design firms to employ him. Hired at Sears, Roebuck & Co., America’s most powerful retailer, in 1961, Harrison eventually became the first Black person to hold an executive-level position when he was promoted to design director. In his later life, Harrison also became an industrial design educator. Harrison was forever grateful to Glass as a teacher, employer, and friend.
Decades after his career as a professor ended, Glass extended the reach of his teaching by publishing a text for students and the public. Glass outlined his philosophy of ecologically responsible and innovative design in his 1996 book The Shape of Manmade Things. Written in simple language accessible to both the general reader and the professional designer, the text was based on his classroom lectures and was illustrated with drawings of his own work and examples of objects from around the world.
The cover of Glass’s 1996 book. (Matranga archive.)
A summary of his approach to design and his teaching, the book outlined his “Basics of Good Design” and compares the rules of nature to the principles of human-produced items:
For an article to be labeled good design, it should meet the following six qualifications:
Function—Does the object serve the purpose for which it is made?
Aesthetics—Are the visual and tactile characteristics (proportion, balance, texture, color) pleasing to the perception of human senses?
Matter—Has the right material(s) been chosen and has it been used properly?
Process—Does the object express the method by which it was made, by hand or machine?
Ecology—Is the object and its intended usage beneficial to the environment? Is it recyclable?
Originality—Is the form and the purpose of the object a novel concept, or invention, or a copy of an old idea, or fake of something else?
Taking the Lead in Chicago Design Organizations
Glass became a local design leader soon after settling in Chicago. By March 1944, he was elected treasurer of the Chicago chapter of the American Designers Institute (ADI) (24) and ascended to secretary the next year.(25) He was president of the Chicago Chapter of the Industrial Designers Institute (IDI) in 1957-59, served as a judge for IDI’s national design awards, and ebulliently hosted numerous events for the organization’s members in the city and at his home.
IDI members, families and guests at a polo match, c. 1950. Industrial designers Glass (left foreground) with his children, Joe Mango and his wife (back row) and Lionel Algoren (right foreground). (Photo courtesy of Hampton Wayt.)
In 1958 he also served as the IDI’s national chairman of the Committee on Design Protection. He peppered legislators with letters in which he stated that to advocate for changes in design patent procedures, IDI’s “675 members in ten chapters coast to coast … will write to their individual congressmen.”(26) Glass served as IDI national vice-chair from 1960 to 1962. After the Industrial Designers Society of America was founded in 1965, Glass was named a fellow.
Glass delivered presentations at designers’ gatherings and appeared on radio and TV broadcasts. His work was featured in numerous architecture and design publications and trade journals from the 1940s through the 1970s.
In September 1967, Glass attended the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) congress in Montreal at Expo 67. The congress was chaired by Chicagoan Richard Latham and included Institute of Design students in the exhibition The New Designers, Projects of Schools of Industrial Design. As Glass contributed feature articles about design for Woodworking Digest, its editor had requested a press pass from the congress organizers,(27) which allowed Glass to attend and report on the sessions. He enjoyed the invigorating programs and visiting the experimental modular housing project designed by architect Moshe Safdie, which may have influenced his design for a factory-produced modular low-cost housing project, which he designed in 1967 for a mobile home manufacturer in Indiana.
Exhibitions
Glass received numerous honors, including decoration by the Republic of Austria, where his work is included in Vienna’s Museum for Applied Arts, and many of his designs have received awards from design organizations and trade associations. His work is held in the Brooklyn Museum and other institutions. Several furniture pieces and drawings are exhibited in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Glass’s work was featured in the exhibitions Design from the Heartland (1999) and 1945 Creativity and Crisis: Chicago Architecture and Design of the World War II Era (2005).
Victoria Matranga and Charles Harrison discuss Glass’s career legacy in the Art Institute gallery, November 2005. (Matranga archive)
The ArchiTech Gallery (28) presented Glass’s work in several exhibitions. In 2001, The Perfect Chair exhibition propelled him to design a chair made of titanium and reintroduced his 1941-designed convertible chair made of wood and canvas, which served as a recliner chair that could be extended to become a stretcher for carrying war casualties.(29) After his passing, the gallery presented a review of his work in The World of Henry Glass exhibit in January-April 2004 and included his work in the 2005 Designed for Living: The Modern Interior exhibit. In 2007, the gallery also served as the setting for filming interviews about Glass for the documentary Elly & Henry, a film about their lives together. It is available for viewing here.
ArchiTech Gallery proprietor David Jameson, Victoria Matranga, and Charles Harrison with AnneKarin Glass, during a break from recording their interviews for the Elly & Henry film, June 2007. (Matranga archive.)
A Life Well-Lived
Transplanted to the United States, Glass blended his European sensibilities with American ingenuity. Upon his arrival, he was dismayed to discover that conservative Americans favored traditional styles over modern design. His product designs were often ahead of the times and too advanced for commercial success. In the 1930s, he designed inflatable furniture and a car shaped like the Volkswagen Beetle that came to market decades later. In the 1940s he devised innovative production methods for low-cost plywood and Masonite furniture, and in the 1960s he invented a collapsible aluminum accordion-folding camper for Alcoa Corporation. In the 1990s his work included an elegant piano for Steinway, tableware, and acrylic bath accessories that captured the prismatic light of everyday life.
Indefatigable and persistent, he energetically pursued clients until his last years. In 2001, at the age of 90, he met with a product development manager at the Crate and Barrel corporate office to present drawings for fireplace tools, kitchenware, and tableware.(30) He never wavered from his principles of good design for all.
Glass’s romantic drawings are immediately recognizable; his fluid hand was unmistakable. During their travels, Glass drew souvenir sketches of buildings he and Elly saw in Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and North America. In 1998, he exhibited his travel sketches locally at the Northfield Library and a selection of his drawings were selected for the Churches and Pulpits exhibition at the Society of the Divine Word Mission Gallery in Techny, Illinois. His florid architectural drawings graced his annual bilingual Christmas card, which also included his witty logo that joined the initials of Elly and Henry and their surname in the shape of wine goblet. He and Elly found joy in small things until their final days together. They had survived life’s greatest losses yet radiated cheerfulness and optimism.
The Glass’s 2002 Christmas card. With an architect’s script, Henry wrote in all capital letters; he also typed in all caps. Matranga archive.
Visionary Henry Glass, even in his 92nd year, could not see or hold an object without thinking about how to improve it. Granted 52 mechanical and design patents (31) during his prodigious nearly 70-year career, he designed everything from buildings to birdfeeders. Best known for his multifunctional space-saving furniture, Glass left a vast body of work that is yet to be examined. The Chicago History Museum holds his archive of 20,000 drawings, studio contents, and furniture. The collection is in storage awaiting accessioning.
Henry Glass and Charles “Chuck” Harrison introduced me to industrial design sometime around 1991. Together they redirected my career from public education about architecture and ignited the passion that became my vocation for 30 years. In Henry’s final decade, I spent a good deal of time at his home and video recorded Henry and Elly several times. I enjoyed listening to their moving stories and impish humor over the charming lunches Elly prepared. Sitting in the Egmont Arens-designed chairs at their table, we savored glasses of Riesling and open-faced liverwurst sandwiches with egg salad and gherkins on the side. Henry’s gentlemanly manner reminded me of my father, who was also born in Europe in 1911.
Because of my background in the housewares industry and as a museum consultant, I tried to promote Henry’s work. I carried his portfolio as we walked Chicago’s sprawling McCormick Place to call on prospects at the Hardware Show. Despite Henry’s enthusiasm and unflappability, I grew irritated with the young sales staff in the manufacturers’ booths who couldn’t see beyond the 80-year-old man with the thick Austrian accent and barely looked at the drawings we showed. I contacted museums and magazines to offer drawings and articles, attempted to capture the attention of prospective clients to arrange pitch meetings, and tried to help with publishing his book, The Shape of Manmade Things. I purchased selections from his runs of design magazines and in other instances he gifted publications to me in thanks for my efforts. (He began subscribing to Interiors and other periodicals soon after his arrival in this country.) I treasure the books that set me on the path of design history and seeded my expanding library.
After Henry’s passing, Chuck Harrison and I visited Elly periodically at their home to reminisce; she passed away at the age of 94 in 2010. I am grateful that their daughter, AnneKarin (AK), became a friend.
The work of Henry Glass is interpreted in the following publications:
“Shaping the Modern: American Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1917-1965.”, 90-91, Museum Studies, Volume 27, No. 2, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001.
John Zukowsky, 1945: Creativity and Crisis: Chicago Architecture and Design of the World War II Era, The Art Institute of Chicago 2005, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and presented from May 7, 2005 to January 8, 2006.
Carma Gorman, “Henry P. Glass and World War II,” Design Issues, Vol. 22, Number 4, Autumn 2006.
Sources
1. Architects and designers quoted included Alfons Bach, Everett Brown, Dan Cooper, Virginia Connor Dick, Gladys Miller, T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, and Morris Sanders. 2. In this article, Henry Glass maintained that he was against an enclosed dining room, which was inefficient and labor intensive for serving. An eating space should, he wrote, “provide a maximum of dining pleasure and a minimum of trouble.” 3. Fond of textures, in 1975 Henry designed a custom suit made of mustard-colored leather, which he wore for decades. He also designed a suede jacket without lapels (an unnecessary feature, in his view) that Elly sewed for him. 4. In America, he assisted the U.S. military during World War II by drawing a plan of Buchenwald from memory. He donated such a drawing to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. 5. Wrought Iron Furniture, Source: Molla, Inc., 410 East 32 Street, N.Y.C.; Designers: Walter Sobotka, Henry P. Glass, American-Way.” Russel Wright Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. 6. Dianne O. Pierce, Design, Craft, and American Identity: Russel Wright’s “American-Way” project, 1940-2. Master’s thesis, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Parsons The New School for Design. This chapter about the Wright’s American-Way program describes Glass’s Hairpin Group and credited Glass as one of the few participants who truly understood the program’s goal to use practical materials in minimalist ways for new American lifestyles. The author also acknowledged how Glass’s furniture design respected contemporary materials shortages. The author also stated that Russel and Mary Wright used this furniture on the patio of their New York City apartment. 7. Photo used in the book of projects Glass produced to promote his own work, c.2001 8. Julie Lasky, May 17, 2020. 9. Daughter AnneKarin was born in 1943 and son Peter in 1947. 10. Elly and Henry lived at 160 West Burton Place, an area frequented by artist and designers; Sol Kogen and Edgar Miller were their neighbors. 11. Class list Fall 1943 semester, MSIDES72, Institute of Design Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. 12. “Kling Studios, Block Square Art Studio in Downtown Chicago,” The Architectural Forum, October 1947, 114. 13. The American Furniture Mart, 666 North Lake Shore Drive, housed showrooms of furniture makers and dealers of interiors products and hosted multiple annual trade fairs. Companies based in the states bordering Lake Michigan led the nation in furniture production, and Chicago was home to many suppliers and small custom workshops. Built in 1923-26, the Furniture Mart was sold in the 1970s to be reformatted into condominiums, with the new address of 680 North Lake Shore Drive. 14. Jeffrey Head, “How Things Work: The Inventions of Henry P. Glass,” Modernism magazine, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2004. 15. Email from AnneKarin Glass to Matranga, March 16, 2021. 16. Email from AnneKarin Glass to Matranga, December 23, 2020. 17. The Association of Arts and Industries (AAI) formed in Chicago in 1922 by a group of local manufacturers and retailers, donated funds to the School of the Art Institute in 1925 to create a program in industrial design. In 1927 Alfonso Iannelli, was hired to head the program that would address the needs of industry. The SAIC used the terms “industrial art,” “product design,” and “industrial design” inconsistently and named the program the School of Industrial Art in 1931. 18. In a letter dated April 10, 1967, Roger Gilmore, acting dean, notified Glass that his contract would not be renewed after the end of the current academic year. After retiring from active teaching, he was named professor emeritus and received a small pension. School of the Art Institute Faculty Records, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. 19. Glass worked with Frances Rose and Helen Stern at Stensgaard, as explained by John Zukowsky,“Ben Rose,” Rooted in Chicago, Fifty Years of Textile Design Traditions, 26. Museum Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1997. Rose married his SAIC classmate Frances Landrum in 1942. 20. “While at the Art Institute, an architect friend of Ben’s, Henry Glass, commissioned Ben to produce some placemats featuring silkscreened abstract motifs.” Privately printed pamphlet, Ben Rose Ltd., c. 1990. Matranga archive. Unpaginated; 10 pages. 21. Glass ordered this fabric for his Kling Studios project, described in Zukowsky, 25. Rose also designed the curtains for Glass’s office in the American Furniture Mart. 22. In a video interview with Matranga, Glass recalled that Helen Stern was very skilled in business development and promotion. She offered to help Glass build his design business and he regretted refusing her assistance. 23. Henry P. Glass, The Shape of Manmade Things, E.C.G. Publishers, Northfield, IL 1996. His lecture notes, drawings, and correspondence are held at the Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago. 24. The American Designers Institute was formed in Chicago in 1938 primarily for designers in the home furnishings industry and its office was in the Furniture Mart. In 1951 it changed its name to the Industrial Designers Institute. The IDI and two other societies merged to form the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) in 1965. 25. The elections of the officers for professional organizations were published as news items in Interiors magazine. 26. Glass letter to Illinois representative Edwin E. Willis, March 18, 1958 quoted in Tempo, Vol. VII, No. 1 March 1958. Tempo was the monthly newsletter of the Chicago Chapter IDI. 27. Darrell Ward, editor, Woodworking Digest August 17, 1967 letter to Robert B. Wolcott Associates, New York. Carbon copy of letter, Matranga archive. 28. The ArchiTech Gallery, Chicago’s only commercial gallery of architectural and industrial design, operated at 730 N. Franklin from 1998 to 2014. Founder David Jameson, who had been an art dealer and gallery manager and had directed a commercial photography studio, managed an extensive inventory of drawings and prints by Frank Lloyd Wright and other Prairie School architects, European etchings and engravings from the 18th and 19th century, and work by living artists. Jameson owned hundreds of original works by Alfonso Iannelli and produced the biography Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design (2013) and Everyday Modern: The Industrial Design of Alfonso Iannelli (2015). 29. Mary Daniels, “Styles to Know: A chair fit for the beach or beachhead,” Chicago Tribune, April 1, 2001. 30. The Crate and Barrel office was near Glass’s home. I arranged the meeting. Excited to be making a sales call again, Henry drove us in his Volkswagen Beetle; the fresh flower in the dashboard bud vase enhanced his mood. 31. Handwritten list of patents, 1941-1985.
