The Biographical/Personal series (3 folders) consists of collected biographical information about Lorch and materials that he accumulated about the Lorch family. Some of this material is quite early, dating from 1806, and written in German script.
18 linear feet — 14 oversize folders
The Emil Lorch papers are valuable for their documentation of the career of this important architectural educator and for that material about Michigan architecture and historic structures that Lorch accumulated in the course of his professional study and organizational involvement. The collection includes extensive correspondence with many of the country's leading architects, most notably members of the "Chicago School," and architectural educators, and manuscript and photographic documentation resulting from Lorch's involvement with the Michigan Historic Buildings Survey and various restoration projects, including Mackinac Island.
9.5 linear feet
Correspondence is the largest series in the collection. Arranged chronologically, the series includes interchanges between Lorch and his university and professional colleagues. This series also includes items other than correspondence, such as reports, memoranda, and speeches. Because Lorch was in Chicago at the turn-of-the-century, he came to know Louis Sullivan and other members of the "Chicago School" of architecture. Within his collection, there is correspondence with W. M. R. French, director of the Chicago Art Institute as well as some letters from Sullivan himself. More important is Lorch's lifelong correspondence spanning forty years with George Elmslie, intimate associate and colleague of Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and Lorch's brother-in-law. As Lorch was also a student at M.I.T. and Harvard, Lorch knew and came to correspond with Denman Ross, F.W. Chandler and Warren H. Langford. Lorch's correspondence covers a range of topics, not just matters relating to architecture. For example, there is much lore and information about early 20th century academia, some documentation of the effect of the Great Depression on a vulnerable profession - architecture, the effects of World War I and II on the academic community (especially young people), and official state and professional attempts to save a visible and concrete past via architecture.
Appended to this finding aid is a selective listing of correspondents and subjects documented in the collection. This listing was prepared soon after the collection came to the library in 1965.