David Adler (1882 - 1949) was an American architect revered for his creative use of historical style in the service of his clients. His traditional American architecture drew from many design vocabularies and the work was built primarily for Chicago clients in that city and it’s suburbs but also in interesting locations where Chicagoans had homes. Adler designed country houses for Chicago based or associated clients on New York’s Long Island (Marshall Field), Boston’s North Shore (Richard Crane), California’s Bay Area (Tobin Clark and Frances Elkins) and in Hawaii (Walter Dillingham). Much admired over the course of his architectural practice (1912 - 1947) Adler has also become a respected resource among a generation of architects building homes for modern Americans in traditional styles today. Several monographs exist describing David Adler’s architectural designs. An early monograph by Richard Pratt has long been out of print and that work has been supplemented by a passionate volume by Stephen Salny as well as a book edited by Richard Guy Wilson and Martha Thorne that accompanied an exhibit on the architect’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002.
The images scanned and presented here are for scholarly use. Any commercial user should track and investigate the holder of any copyright for these images. The David Adler Cultural Center holds an archive of David Adler’s personal papers which were scanned by Laura Graham and Erik Liederbach of Liederbach and Graham, Architects in the summer of 2014 so that the content of those papers might be preserved electronically in case of any damage to the physical material. These papers were collected by David Adler, mounted on shirt cardboards and organized into a reference file for his own personal use in serving his clients. It is a wonderful glimpse into the material that interested the architect and which formed a part of his working library. Anyone with a working knowledge of the operation of a traditional architectural practice will understand the value and use of such an archive. What is remarkable about this collection is the breadth of the architect’s interests.
