Jens Jensen drawings and papers, 1903-1951 (majority within 1910-1934)

One of America's most visionary prairie school landscape architects, Jensen's design work incorporated horizontal lines in landforms and stonework, the natural branching habits of plants, and the restoration and conservation of native plant materials. The collection is comprised mainly of landscape architectural drawings for more than four hundred and sixty projects, along with a small amount of manuscript material and photographs.

Jensen's landscape work encompassed a broad range of projects -- residential, subdivisions, parks and preserves, schools and educational facilities, hospitals, office complexes and government centers, all of which are represented in the collection. Jensen's view of landscape architecture as a social force for integrating art, home, and commerce is a significant and unique characteristic of his work. While the native landscape itself, both as he experienced it in Denmark and in America, was his primary inspiration, Jensen was also influenced by the social and economic reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His theories related to urban planning, his recognition of the restorative value of nature and wilderness, his genuine concern for the environment, and his love of people are reflected in the material and will interest researchers from a range of disciplines and subject areas -- although the documentation is almost wholly visual.

When looked upon as a whole, the collection richly illustrates Jensen's consistent philosophy of design. While each project had its own character reflecting the nature of the site and client requirements, certain recurring design features in the drawings are evidence of Jensen's particular style. His plans almost always show plants in masses -- creating unity through repetition of similar species, textures, and forms and suggesting groupings found in native habitats. The hawthorn, with its low, horizontal branching habit, a symbol of the prairie for Jensen, is found often in his designs, along with other small native trees, sometimes scattered individually, but more often in repetition to reinforce prairie views and provide a transition to larger trees along woodland borders. Also evident is the adept handling of open spaces found at the core of most of his designs -- great meadows, linear "long views," prairie views and prairie vistas, sun openings, garden rooms, clearings. Smaller clearings and sun openings emphasize the importance Jensen placed on light and shadow as integral to the art of landscaping; a series of broad curving drives, footpaths, and trails invite movement and ensure that visitors experience sequences of sun and shade, sometimes leading "to the setting sun" or "to the rising sun." Water is another distinctive feature -- quiet pools, prairie rivers, lagoons, ponds, streams enhanced with rock work skillfully executed to suggest ravines and bluffs. The drawings also provide many examples of Jensen's council rings tucked into edges of woodland borders, surrounded by trees or placed to view a meadow or lake; player's greens created for outdoor drama; and small areas set aside and screened with walls, trellises, or shrubbery for vegetable and "picking" gardens.

Drawings

The Architectural Drawings series, containing over 1,700 drawings representing more than four hundred and sixty Jensen projects (including approximately thirty Chicago parks projects), are arranged alphabetically by project title, foldered, and stored in flat file drawers. The project title includes the geographic location when known and, for some projects, the name of the building architect. The item descriptions include the identifying code assigned by Jensen, drawing title, date of the drawing, and information on the format, size, medium (the material or process used to produce an image) and support (material on which drawing is produced) of the drawing. Some drawings have been scanned (from copy negatives) and are available online through the Bentley Library Image Bank.

Jensen drawings are most frequently black ink or graphite on linen, sometimes with lines in red ink and borders, stepping stones, council rings and other features filled with yellow or brown ink. There are also a large number of drawings and sketches executed on tracing paper with graphite or black ink, sometimes combined with colored pencil and occasionally embellished with watercolor. Blueprints are rarely from Jensen's office, although they frequently have a few pencil markings. Nearly all of the linen and tracing paper plans hold Jensen's distinctive signature, and many include a note warning that "composition will suffer" if changes are made to the plan. Researchers interested in more item-level detail, including size of a drawing and description of its contents, will want to refer to the index cards prepared by the Art and Architecture Library, which are in box 3 of the collection. There is also a photocopy version of the index, which is available for use from the reference archivist.

There are nearly one hundred drawings of Chicago Parks in the collection. Of particular note for those interested in Jensen's contributions to conservation and his visionary concepts in urban planning are two projects: Proposed Park Extension: West Chicago Park Commission (1918) and A Greater West Park System (1919). Also important are drawings for Jensen's celebrated Columbus Park, which he considered his most successful. Humboldt Park, Douglas Park and Garfield Park, executed earlier, are equally significant for tracing the evolution of Jensen's career in the public realm. Among the parks represented beyond the Chicago area are designs for the Lincoln Garden, Springfield, Illinois; Racine, Wisconsin; Benton Harbor, Michigan; Oak Park, Illinois; Pasadena, California (blueprints only); Glencoe, Illinois; and River Forest, Illinois. Unlike most of Jensen's public work, the Racine park system (thirty original drawings) survives today much as Jensen planned it, as does the Lincoln Garden, Jensen's last major public design. While there are thirteen original drawings and six prints for various Springfield, Illinois projects, there are, unfortunately, only two prints in the collection of the Lincoln Garden.

The most fully documented Residential projects are two that Jensen executed for Edsel Ford -- Grosse Pointe, Michigan (1926-1932), Albert Kahn, architect; and Seal Harbor, Maine (1922-1926), Duncan Candler, architect. The two together total forty-one original drawings and six blueprints. The Grosse Point Shores estate has been reported to be the most expensive and extensive of any of Jensen's residential designs. The Seal Harbor project is of particular interest because it was the only major work Jensen ever undertook in the East, where he worked to create a garden that would fit into "the ruggedness and mystery" of the coast. Another important residence is the Henry B. Babson house, Riverside, Illinois (1909-1911), a collaboration with Louis Sullivan. Drawings include a topographical survey, grading plan, designs for entrance and grape arbors, and planting plans. The landscape scheme reflects and accentuates the horizontal lines of the prairie house; crab apples are sited to frame a view of it and of the nearby open "prairie" space. The prairie style as a collaboration is also evident in two projects with Frank Lloyd Wright -- the Avery Coonley house in Riverside, Illinois (1908-1917) and the Sherman M. Booth place in Glencoe, Illinois (1911-1912). In addition, researchers will find the sixteen original drawings for the Harry Rubens estate in Glencoe, Illinois (1902; George Maher, architect) a particularly fine example of an early integration of design elements that came to signify the Jensen style. Other relatively early and important projects undertaken with prairie school architects for which there are significant drawings are the I.B. Grommes house in Lake Geneva (1902), Richard Schmidt, architect; and the August Magnus house in Winnetka, Illinois (1905), Robert Spencer, architect.

Additional notable residential work in the collection includes the E.L. Ryerson Estate, Lake Forest, Illinois, (1912); the Wallace W. Gill Place, Glencoe, Illinois (1922); the Harold Florsheim Place, Highland Park, Illinois (1926-1928); the Harley Clark Place, Evanston, Illinois (1928); the Julius Rosenwald Estate (1911), and the E.F. Simms Estate, Paris, Kentucky (1915). The Gill Place is of particular interest because it is a smaller project than most, yet a carefully designed example of landscape art; the Florsheim estate is an excellent illustration of the skillfulness Jensen brought to rock work -- in this case overlooking a Lake Michigan ravine.

Jensen's interest in Schools and Education spanned his career, from his notion of the underutilization of schools as a center for lifelong learning while designing for Chicago parks, to the establishment of The Clearing, the school he developed in Wisconsin. Influenced by his experiences in Danish folk schools, Jensen believed that the grounds of schools and educational settings could -- and should -- play a major role in enhancing learning. The collection illustrates his theories in designing for very young children with the Avery Coonley Kindergarten in Downer's Grove, Illinois, a project undertaken with Frank Lloyd Wright as one example, to settings for adolescents, such as the Manitowac, Wisconsin High School with architect Dwight Perkins as another. Drawings for Manitowac include a council ring, a court of debates, a rock of wisdom, play rings, campfire areas, study rings, and a player's hill with torch. Researchers interested in Jensen's orientation to the landscape as it intersects with education and urban planning will also want to look at his Chicago park work, particularly the neighborhood centers, such as those he designed for Lloyd and Logan schools. The Helen Pierce School of Chicago and the theater area of the University of Wisconsin are also a part of the collection. Researchers should note that a distinguishing characteristic of Jensen's work for children (he was a charter member of the Chicago chapter of the Playground Association of America) are his playgrounds, which were comprised of a variety of settings and types of spaces deliberately designed to encourage creativity, imaginative play, dreaming and reflection, and open-ended interaction with the natural world.

Jensen's unwavering belief in the restorative power of nature is evident in his designs for Hospital grounds. Plans generally include curving footpaths, flower gardens, council rings and tranquil water systems, and often incorporate orchards, vegetable gardens, "picking" gardens into the landscape -- all intended to provide a restful setting and aid in the healing process. The drawings for the grounds of the Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium include details for campsites and campfire areas. The collection also has drawings for Decatur Memorial Hospital, Decatur, Illinois; Edward Hines, Jr. Hospital in Maywood, Illinois; the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit; and the Milwaukee Convalescent Home.

Miscellaneous types of projects Jensen undertook include highways, golf courses, hotels, office complexes, government centers, suburban subdivisions, and monuments. There are examples of each in the collection. Of special note is his landscape work for the Lincoln Highway Association -- plans for the "ideal section," which he designed to reflect a prairie setting. Jensen included wide hiking trails that wound across the prairie and among the native grasses, flowers, hawthorns, crabapples. His plans incorporated a rest area, campsites, and council rings. There are twenty-three original drawings in the Lincoln Highway file, along with a number of prints. Drawings include suggested planting along a mile of prairie, a Lincoln Way concrete bridge, a detail for lamp post and memorial seat, and plans for the ideal section tourist camp.

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