When Stephen Salny was an economics major at Lake Forest College in Illinois, he liked to take a break from classes and drive around town, a tony community 30 miles from Chicago on the north shore of Lake Michigan.
Salny marveled at the beauty of the homes in Lake Forest - the sense of proportion they had, the elegant details, the variety of styles. He became intrigued when he learned from a classmate that all of the houses he liked most were designed by the same architect, David Adler.
"He could be excellent in any style - Federal, English Tudor, Italian Renaissance," Salny recalled recently. "It never dawned on me that one architect could be responsible for such an array of styles. That's what made him so popular."
Two decades later, Salny still marvels at the work of David Adler, but now he has a different perspective.
His casual fascination with the homes on Lake Michigan has grown into a lifelong study of the architect and his sister, interior designer Frances Elkins. It also prompted him to write a book, The Country Houses of David Adler, the first comprehensive survey of the architect's career.
Published last year by W.W. Norton & Co., with photographs and drawings of 20 country houses and gardens commissioned by Adler's socially prominent clients, Salny's book has sold so well it has gone to a third printing. Since then, Salny has been busy with speaking engagements from coast to coast, tours of Adler homes in Illinois, and interviews with writers for publications such as W, Vogue, House and Garden and The New York Times. He's even involved with a museum exhibition, one of two about Adler that are opening in the Chicago area in December.
As a result of the book and related activities, the former economics major from Lake Forest College has emerged as an authority on the life and work of David Adler, who lived from 1882 to 1949. In the process, he has been almost single-handedly responsible for putting Adler back in the limelight 53 years after his death and exposing a new generation of architects and interior designers to his country houses.
Because of Salny's efforts, Adler's work may be getting more national attention today that it did when he was alive.
"There is clearly a cult that surrounds David Adler and Frances Elkins right now," he said. "It's magical, what's going on with these two people. It's Adler-mania."
A Baltimore resident who runs a family real-estate business when not researching architectural history, Salny will discuss Adler's work in a talk at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Meyerhoff Arts Center at Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road in Towson. His presentation, the college's annual Irwin C. Schroedl Jr. Lecture in the Decorative Arts and Material Culture, is free and open to the public.
Salny, 47, said he is delighted with the reception to the book, his first, and gratified to think its publication may have sparked renewed interest in Adler.
Although the architect was clearly well known to his patrons in Chicago, Salny said, he never received as much attention nationally as some American architects practicing in the first half of the 20th century, such as John Russell Pope and Charles Platt.
In part, Salny says, that's because he was a classically trained architect, working in traditional styles, at a time when modern architecture was commanding most of the attention in the American press for being "cutting edge."
In addition, Salny said, Adler was a shy man who had plenty of work, so he didn't go out of his way to seek publicity. Also, because he was based in the Midwest, Salny said, he may not have been regarded as highly as architects on the East Coast.
"There was an attitude that if you weren't based on the East Coast," he said, "you weren't important."
Even without national attention, Adler attracted prestigious clients and developed a body of work as impressive as that of any residential designer in America. According to Salny, he left behind a legacy of grandeur and elegance, for clients who represented the inner circle of Chicago society. Many of the interiors were created by his sister, who was based in California.
Adler was in such demand, Salny said, that he could pick and choose his clients, not the other way around.
"If you wanted to be a client, you didn't interview him," Salny said. "He interviewed you. He didn't want wealth or power. He wanted taste. If you didn't have taste, he didn't work for you."
The book grew out of an independent study project that Salny completed in college for Franz Schultze, a faculty member who has written biographies of architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.
In his senior year, Salny wrote to the owners of all the Adler houses in Lake Forest, the community with the largest concentration of Adler houses. He ended up touring and studying 17 of them, including six still occupied by their original owners. He also visited others outside Illinois, and finished his study in the spring of his senior year.
After graduation from college, with Schultze's encouragement, Salny tried to find a publisher for a book or article about Adler, but he was unsuccessful. In 1980, however, Architectural Digest commissioned him to write an article about Elkins - the first "historic interiors" feature in the magazine's history.
Salny moved to Baltimore to work in the family business and for the most part put his writing aspirations on hold. Then in 1995, his alma mater was given a large collection of books, and administrators wanted to know if Adler and Elkins had designed the library in the house where they had been.
The college archivist consulted Schultze, who suggested seeking an opinion from Salny. Salny flew to Illinois and concluded the library was not the work of Adler or Elkins. But that inquiry, he says, prompted him to resume his efforts to finish a book on Adler's work. Over the next five years, he traveled frequently to conduct research at Lake Forest Public Library, the Art Institute of Chicago and other Illinois locations, investing his own time and money.
In all, Salny visited more than 30 Adler houses and extensively interviewed many of Adler's and Elkins' clients and colleagues. Examining projects from Illinois to Florida to Hawaii, he shows how each house relates with its surroundings, combining European grandeur with country comfort. He also shows how Adler drew inspiration from a variety of precedents, including the Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis.
Salny said he was particularly impressed by the ability of each house to be both monumental and intimate, as the occasion required.
"His houses were not mausoleums," he said. "They worked just as well if you were sitting at home reading a book or having a party for 800."
Although it's primarily an architectural study, Salny's book is also valuable as social history. Adler's clients included some of the wealthiest families in the country. By tracing Adler's career, Salny offers a glimpse into the life of the "great house" in America, from its Beaux Arts origins to its decline in the throes of the Great Depression.
Salny has given talks about Adler in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and Palm Beach, Fla. Advance registration was so high for his talk to members of the Institute of Classical Architecture in New York that it had to be moved to a larger space.
Part of the reason for the strong interest is that there is a resurgence of interest in classical architecture. Salny's book is part of a wave of books that have been published about architects who were active in the first half of the 20th century and are being rediscovered in the 21st.
"You have a lot of designers who are looking back at Adler and other classicists," Salny said. "It's as if they were buried under the carpet, and now they're on the tips of everybody's tongues."
Salny is now working on a book about Elkins, who was just as much of a pioneer in her field as Adler was in his.
Before Elkins, interior decorating "wasn't really a profession in this country," he said. "She showed that you could mix vibrant colors with textiles, old with new. You can look at photographs of her work and they seem like they were taken yesterday, when they were actually taken 70 to 80 years ago. Her interiors were revolutionary, yet timeless."
More than anything, he said, he is glad that architects are using his book as a resource, as they design houses for today's clients.
"The most important thing for me was to get the word out," he said. "David Adler, I feel, was one of the greatest country house architects of the 20th century but among the least appreciated, on a national scale. Now that has clearly changed."