Category Archives: Archive

Zig Zag love May 1st

April 7, 2022 – 8:36 pm

For our first event in more than two years, we are excited to offer fans of midcentury modern industrial style buildings—count us among them—the opportunity to tour one of the most noteworthy examples in Lawrence, the Zimmerman Steel building, now owned by Mar Lan Construction. Built in 1959 (an office designed by the local architecture firm […]

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Modern meets the levee on May 11

April 23, 2019 – 11:27 pm

The fusion of vernacular and modern is not unique to Lawrence but so many interesting examples abound here—Dan Rockhill’s contemporary prairie designs come to mind—that they have become a kind of regional architectural dialect. Nowhere is this more evident than in North Lawrence, where cues from the surrounding landscape and architecture—broad, flat floodplain with grain elevators […]

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All Aboard for Depot celebration!

February 3, 2019 – 8:28 pm

The extensive renovation of the Santa Fe Depot is completed. It is one of the greatest midcentury preservation efforts in the State of Kansas and arguably the most significant in Lawrence history. The Depot was designed by Warren Corman and Warren Jones and completed in 1956. Preservation efforts have drawn a diverse group of activists […]

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Family ties spawn modern magic

March 14, 2018 – 7:47 pm

The Zimmerman House, built in 1955, is a thoroughly modern house of a kind not otherwise found in Lawrence. Strongly influenced by Japanese architecture and to a lesser extent by European modernism, it presented a strikingly different house than most people in Lawrence had ever experienced. It was so different that it bewildered, even offended, which […]

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A brutalist sanctuary Nov. 12th

October 24, 2017 – 11:10 pm

Lawrence Modern’s infatuation with 1960s brutalist architecture continues with our next event at the Immanuel Lutheran Church, a building most of us (non-Lutherans) drive by quite often. Brutalist architecture tends to elicit strong reactions, but love it or hate it you can’t ignore it. Rising from the ground like a stripped classical belfry, the Immanuel […]

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