Wright Auction

Donald Powell may not be well-known outside of architectural circles, but his CV is teeming with connections to many of the great figures of mid-century design. The furnishings he designed for his apartment at the landmark Mies van der Rohe-designed 860 Lake Shore Drive clearly reflect their influence.

Powell arrived in Chicago in 1961 from Minneapolis, as no stranger to modernism. He had served in the Air Force and received a traveling Fulbright fellowship, but his career as an architect began in earnest when, as president of the student AIA at University of Minnesota, he met Walter Netsch, who suggested he come to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Chicago office for a meeting which culminated in an on-the-spot job offer.


Image courtesy of Jon Miller (c) Hedrich Blessing

Scrambling to find a place to live, Powell got a tip that the developers of the newly-completed Mies-designed 2400 Lakeview tower were renting the furnished model apartments - the furnishings for which had been selected by the Knoll Planning Unit. Powell says he was happy to live with a Saarinen table and stools that were like those at the Four Seasons bar, but he brought his own sofa bed, Eames lounge chair and ottoman.

Powell matured professionally at Skidmore Owings & Merrill during its emergence as the world’s most successful purveyor of Miesian design [more successful at it, actually, than the master himself], and he was instrumental in the emergence of the interiors practice as a distinct discipline in the field of architecture. In addition to Netsch, Powell was mentored at SOM by partners Myron Goldsmith, Bruce Graham, Fazlur Khan and Davis Allan. But his design sensibility was equally influenced by close collaborations with designers like Gene Summers, Jack Lenor Larsen, Gretchen Bellinger and Nicos Zographo, and manufacturers like Woodwork Corporation and Interior Crafts.

At SOM and - perhaps more significantly, in his practice at Powell/Kleinschmidt - Powell’s approach to interiors evolved into a sumptuous variation on Miesian minimalism, expressed in quality materials, rich textures and painstaking craftsmanship: the very details where - according to the oft-repeated aphorism attributed to Mies - one should expect to find God.


Image courtesy of Jon Miller (c) Hedrich Blessing

Powell’s own apartment at 860 Lake Shore Drive, where he moved in1983, best illustrates his aesthetic. Its interior surfaces - travertine floors, teak room dividers, Saint Laurent marble and steel mesh wall cladding - frankly reference two of Mies’ most famous projects: the Barcelona Pavilion and the Tugendhat villa. And nearly every piece of furniture was a variation on a Mies design from his Bauhaus period. Although Mies exclusively licensed several designs to Knoll Furniture, most of his furniture designs were unprotected. Powell based most of the furniture in his apartment on various Mies designs that William Dunlap - one of Mies’ first employees who spent most of his career at SOM - had meticulously documented in a series of measured drawings. Dunlap gifted these drawings to Don Powell who in turned gave them to Phyllis Lambert for the Mies collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Powell/Kleinschmidt’s designs for the Powell apartment exemplify how their interpretation of Mies took his principles to an even higher level: yielding objects that significantly enhanced the physical comfort, functional utility, long-term durability and simple beauty of their progenitors.