Quick—name a Chicago architect in the center of a Venn diagram containing:

• Mies van der Rohe,
• A defunct automobile company,
• The 1933 Century of Progress Exposition,
• Michelle Obama, and
• The shortest (perhaps?) federal prison term on record.

As you can tell, this is quite a story.

Henry Holsman was born in 1866 in Dale, Iowa (pop. 40). After working as a farm laborer, he earned an undergraduate degree from Grinnell College at age 25.  His early career is obscure, but he seems to have studied architecture at the short-lived Chicago School of Architecture at the Art Institute.[1]  After working for two years as a superintendent for interior decorators and contractors, he opened a practice with William L. Brainerd, an MIT graduate, in 1893.[2]  Brainerd & Holsman were successful, designing houses, churches, and college buildings throughout the Midwest, including the Rand Gymnasium at Grinnell (burned, 1940), the Kimball Conservatory of Music at the University of Nebraska, churches at Illinois College in Jacksonville and in Keokuk, Iowa, and homes, apartments, and commercial buildings in Chicago and Paducah, Kentucky.[3] 

That partnership lasted only four years—Brainerd left Chicago for Paducah, where he set up his own practice. On his own, Holsman designed several buildings at Parsons College (now Maharishi University) in Fairfield, Iowa.  As those projects were underway, he and his brother built a prototype automobile, a “highwheeler” that debuted in 1902. The car was an immediate success.  The Holsman Automobile Works produced more than 2400 of them over the next eight years from its factory at 36^th and Morgan; the company’s main office and Holsman’s architectural practice were in adjacent suites in the Monadnock Block; Holsman and his artist wife, Elizabeth Tuttle Holsman, lived in a comfortable suburban home in Beverly.

Holsman filed a dozen patents for automobile parts and systems, but the company failed to keep pace with industry developments, continuing to manufacture the buggy-style “highwheeler” even as other manufacturers moved to more compact, lower chassis designs.  After an overly ambitious financing scheme left the company with inventory it couldn’t sell, Holsman Automobile sold its patents to the Plano-based Independent Harvester Company, which manufactured tractors.[4] 

Henry Holsman returned to architecture, but his experience in the automotive industry left him frustrated by the comparatively slow pace of construction development and interested in applying automobile engineering’s more rigorous standards to building projects.  He designed suburban houses at first, gaining attention for his (understandable) interest in refining garage designs, and eventually rose within the profession to become President of the Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1919.  His inaugural address included a paean to the “professional man,” who “stands ready to serve other men in their health and happiness, in their organizations and enterprises, in all their conceptions and achievements.

“What great commercial enterprise or what mighty utilization of forces would have been achieved by the so-called masters of industry had it not been for the professional man who patiently and systematically worked it out, practically for the joy of achieving it; or what one of the great machines of finance or industry, or what government in war or peace could survive and develop, but for the continued devotion of the professional man?”[5]

Holsman’s career—as both a mechanical engineer and an architect—had thus far illustrated exactly this sort of diligent “working out” of technical problems.  In his houses, these solutions were dressed with aesthetically acceptable styles at a domestic scale.  His houses appeared alongside those of Frank Lloyd Wright, George Maher, and others in House Beautiful and similar magazines during the 1910s, but never attracted the same national recognition.  Holsman, however, was increasingly interested in the materials and systems that were typically hidden by that decade’s prairie and craftsman styles, and in how those could be applied to the city’s growing housing issues. 

In addition to suburban houses, Holsman and his son, Henry T. Holsman, built and managed half a dozen four-story walkup apartment complexes in Hyde Park and South Shore in the early 1920s, all still extant, including 5529 University Avenue (1921), 1145-51 East Fifty-sixth Street (1925), and the Rainbow Park Apartments at 7855-61 South Shore Drive (1926). All drew attention for their clever use of concrete.  Done in a nominally collegiate gothic style appropriate to the neighborhoods adjacent to the University of Chicago, Holsman noted in published accounts that their structures—concrete slabs on shallow beams, supported by girders integrated into brick supporting walls—saved considerable height over traditional wooden construction. 

“The saving in height thus secured makes it feasible to omit the usual partly underground full basement and to lay the first floor six inches above sidewalk level. This permits the planning of four floors for residential purposes and needs a height from ground level to roof of only a little over 37 feet. The usual English basement apartment house would have but three residential floors in about the same height of structure.”[7]

Exposing the concrete and painting it, rather than concealing it with plaster ceilings, further saved time and construction expense.  Holsman explained:

“The lumber for the forms for the reinforced concrete floor beams is dressed and selected for grain,” “Then when the beams are cast and the forms removed the imprint of the wood grain makes it possible to finish and decorate these beams to resemble wood.  Thus they form part of the decorative scheme of the apartment interiors.”[8]

To be sure, this was a minor innovation, and one that other Chicago architects had already put to good use—Marshall and Fox described a similar approach to decorating concrete beams in their Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1917.  The University Avenue apartments also used steel instead of concrete for their beams and girders.  But while this tentative improvement would set the stage for Holsman’s later work, he and his son also pioneered what I’ve come to think of as financial technology.  Multi-unit apartments suffered from real estate legislation grounded in archaic English common law, which defined ownership in terms of land (“real estate”).  Taking ownership of a unit above others was impossible given this definition.  Wealthy residents had long used a financial mechanism, the co-operative apartment, as a way around this, buying shares in a building corporation that gave them the right to then rent a unit within the building. The first of these in Chicago, a nine-story building at Elm St. and Lake Shore Drive, was built in 1911. The “Millionaire’s Flat,” as it became known, was a working model for other “co-ops” that catered to wealthy residents who already owned “town houses and country homes,” but who wanted a pied-a-terre on the Drive–with rooms for butlers and chauffeurs among the dozen or more rooms such developments offered.[9] 

Holsman pioneered methods for bringing the “co-op” to middle-class residents.  “Most of the shareholders of the property at 5529 University Avenue are members of the University of Chicago, and these shareholders will be the first occupants of the apartments, holding leases in perpetuity at fixed rental rates,” he explained about the first of these in 1921.[10]  The units in the building, and those in the subsequent projects, were occupied by the sixteen shareholders, who each put up an initial investment of $3000 (about $55,000 in 2026 dollars) that gave them “1/16 interest in the land and building” and entitled them to rent a unit (at a substantial discount to rates in surrounding apartment buildings) in perpetuity.  Holsman’s real estate company then managed the project’s finances and upkeep, adjusting rents annually to cover their costs and to take a 10% profit. By handling the legal and financial machinations that had been typically handled by lawyers and bankers available only to the city’s wealthy, Holsman’s company made it possible, for the first time, for ordinary residents to have equity in multi-unit buildings.

These early middle-class co-ops were successful enough that Holsman ventured higher, designing, constructing, and financing taller buildings around Hyde Park and South Shore that gently pushed concrete technology—and co-op financing—further.  While these were aimed entirely at those neighborhoods, his interest in addressing the city’s housing shortage, his latent interest in optimizing building construction based on his automotive endeavors, and his skill at putting the latter to work in service of the former would make him a Zelig-like figure through the next decades—figuring in some of Chicago’s most prominent residential buildings while constructing across the city’s economic, social, and racial lines. 

(To be continued)

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[1] “Holsman, Noted Designer, Dies in Genoa City.”  Lake Geneva Regional News, May 25, 1961.  19.

[2] Grinnell College. Quinquennial Register of Iowa College, 1897: Semi-Centennial 1848-1898. [N.p.], 1898.

[3] “Among Architects and Builders.: Building Planned or Under Way in and About Chicago.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 Apr., 1897. 34; “New Structure for Illinois College.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 19, 1896. 10; and “Chicago and the West,” Engineering Review, Dec. 15, 1894.  18.

[4]David Young “Unhappy With Early Autos, Architect Designed His Own.” Chicago Tribune, Jun 21, 1998. J1

[5] “Inaugural Address of Henry K. Holsman, President-Elect Illinois Chapter American Institute of Architects.” The American Architect, vol. 116, no. 2271, 1919. 2-a6.

[6] “Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Housing Corporation, Correspondence with Field Agents.” Black Workers in the Era of the Great Migration, 1916-1929; Entry 64: Correspondence with Field Agents. 1918. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/archival-materials/chicago-illinois-u-s-housing-corporation/docview/2900640223/se-2.

[7] “An Economically Designed, Fireproof, Cooperative Apartment House.”  Buildings and Building Management I, vol. XXIII, no. 23.  Nov. 12, 1921.  36-41.

[8] “Space Saving Design for Apartments.”  Buildings and Building Management, Vol. XXVI, no. 24.  Nov. 22, 1926.  40-43.

[9] “Prominent Families Favor Apartments; Lake Shore Drive Scene of ‘Flat’ Building.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 29, 1911. 1

[10] “An Economically Designed, Fireproof, Cooperative Apartment House,” op. cit. Among those University of Chicago faculty members was Arthur Compton, a physics professor who was one of the original owners. He would win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1927.