I am a part of all that I have met–for better or for worse; and vice versa. Consequently, Agincourt is populated with many people I have known and a handful that I’d like to meet before lying down for the dirt nap.

Edith and Franz Wasserman had a son named Karl, who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and, like his near contemporary Anson Tennant, came back to home base for the majority of his life. A significant death facilitated Karl’s return and appointment to teach art at the Normal School. One result of that event will be the series of Stations of the Cross in the 2011 exhibit.

Another, as yet unexplored, design opportunity will come from Edith Wasserman’s younger brother Herr Dr Reinhold Kölb, psychologist who had more sense than god gave a rutabaga and got the hell out of Vienna in the 1920s (when the gittin was good). Kölb had become a friend of Jacob Levy Moreno, inventor of psychodrama, and decided a visit to sister and brother-in-law in America might allow him to bring that new therapy to the so-called New World. The result was the establishment of “Walden,” his appropriately named private hospital at the east end of Thoreau Avenue.

It’s relatively easy for me to shift into Progressive or Arts & Craft design mode; those periods of design are comfortable, familiar. Nineteen-twenties European Modernism, however, is a vocabulary I recognize but don’t yet fully understand: it’s not yet a part of my arsenal. So, among many other diversions and distractions, “Walden” is on my plate. What do you think about some inspiration from Mies van der Rohe?

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