Louis John Johnson papers, 1964-1982

Papers of Louis John Johnson, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology from 1962-circa 1990. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1969. Johnson was also partner with another IIT Assistant/Associate Architecture Professor, Arthur S. Takeuchi, in the firm of Takeuchi and Johnson, Architects, of 37 S. Wabash in the 1960s and 1970s.

The first file consists primarily of correspondence (1964-1969) conducted by Johnson while assembling a book about the renowned Visual Training course of Walter Peterhans (1897-1960), a member of Mies van der Rohe's architecture faculty at IIT who had previously taught with Mies at the Bauhaus in Germany. Johnson corresponded with Walter Peterhans' widow Brigitte Schlaich-Peterhans, informing her of the challenges he faced in completing the book. These challenges included collecting illustrations, soliciting a "forward" from Mies, receiving rejections from two publishers, Theobald and Chanticleer. Also present in the file is an outline of work in the book.

The second file contains correspondence (1974-1982) illustrating Johnson's chairmanship of IIT's Mies van der Rohe Lecture series in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the letters received by Johnson express interest in receiving audiotape copies and transcriptions of the lectures, particularly the one given by George Wald in 1974.