Inspired by a Life magazine article about Frank Lloyd Wright, Gertrude Kerbis, then a student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, hitchhiked to Wright’s Taliesin estate in Spring Green, Wis. Entranced by the rooms she was seeing as she peered through glass exterior walls, she crawled in a bathroom window and somehow managed to stay the night.
By the time she awoke the next morning, she recalled in a short 2008 film about her life, “I had decided I was going to be an architect.”
Thus began a trailblazing career in a male-dominated profession, one that saw Kerbis become the first woman president of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), design innovative structures like the Rotunda building at O’Hare International Airport and become a developer of buildings as well as their architect.
Kerbis, 89, who lived in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood and was one of the first woman architects in Chicago to design in the modernist style, died Tuesday at The Clare, a downtown senior living facility. The cause was liver cancer, said her daughter Kim Kerbis.
Kerbis began her career in an era when women at architecture firms typically were receptionists or secretaries. If they were permitted to design, they were relegated to interiors departments. “She was a couple of decades ahead of her time,” her son, Julian Kerbis Peterhans, recalled in the 2008 film, which was made when the Chicago chapter of the AIA recognized Kerbis with a lifetime achievement award.
The former Gertrude Lempp was born in 1926 on Chicago’s Northwest Side, the daughter of German and Russian immigrants. She wound up leaving the University of Wisconsin after her impromptu stay at Taliesin. The university, she was distressed to learn, did not have an architecture program.
She transferred to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating in 1948 with a bachelor of science in architectural engineering. She then attended Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she studied with the noted architect Walter Gropius.
But she left Harvard for the architecture school at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, which was headed by another giant of 20th century modernism, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. She and Mies had a falling out after he asked her to join a group of students working on his conceptual plan for a Chicago convention hall and she declined. Yet she graduated from IIT in 1954 with a master’s in architecture and planning.
In the drafting room of Chicago architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where Kerbis worked until 1959, she was a rare sight — a woman in a sea of men wearing white shirts and ties. A highlight of those years was the cadet dining hall she designed as part of SOM’s futuristic U.S. Air Force Academy campus in Colorado Springs, Colo. The long-span structure, which had overhanging roof trusses, was designed to serve thousands of cadets at a time. Kerbis took pride in the building though she found it amusing that she, a woman, was assigned to shape the dining hall.
Before leaving SOM, she served as the firm’s designer for the Skokie public library, a low-slung courtyard building with atriums that won national design honors from the AIA in the early 1960s.
Shifting to the Chicago firm of Naess & Murphy (later C.F. Murphy & Associates), where Kerbis worked from 1959 to 1962 and 1965 to 1967, she designed the Rotunda building, a circular structure linking Terminals 2 and 3 at O’Hare.
The building, whose thin concrete roof is suspended by steel cables from a central steel ring, is “Chicago’s only such structural tour de force,” according to the “AIA Guide to Chicago.” It housed the now-closed Seven Continents restaurant and provided an oasis of calm amid the airport’s busy corridors.
Kerbis started her own firm in 1967, where she took on the unusual role of simultaneously designing and developing projects. Her works included the award-winning Greenhouse condominiums at 2131 N. Clark St. and a Highland Park tennis club built for her second husband, the teaching pro Don Kerbis, who survives her.
She got into the development business because she had to. “It was the only way I could get an opportunity to design something,” she once told an interviewer. She also taught architecture at Harper College in Palatine and helped found the group Chicago Women in Architecture.
“She was a very staunch supporter of women in architecture,” said Mary Jo Graf, a former executive director of the Chicago AIA chapter. Kerbis, Graf said, encouraged “people to pursue their own personal ambition and to show by example what a woman can do.”
Kerbis’ first husband, Walter Peterhans, whom Mies recruited to develop a visual training curriculum for what would become IIT’s architecture program, died in 1960.
Kerbis also is survived by another daughter, Lisa Kerbis.
A memorial service is planned for Aug. 23 at the Cliff Dwellers Club.
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @BlairKamin
