From artic.edu
Illinois USA: The Art Institute Archives possesses a trove of unique materials that offer rare insight into the minds and lives of artists and designers.
These personal, hand-assembled volumes serve as inventive diaries. Using a range of media from photographs and sketches to fabric swatches and handwritten notes, each one captures the rhythms of daily life, the evolution of ideas, and the networks of influence that can shape an artist or designer’s practice.
Let’s explore selections from scrapbooks by Otti Berger, Else Regensteiner, and Carter Manny, whose work and legacies are deeply entwined with the history of design and architecture in Chicago. Each demonstrates how the city became a vital hub for modernist innovation, particularly through the influence of the Chicago Bauhaus and its descendants. Their stories, preserved in part through materials like these in the Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, allow us to view art history through a more personal lens.
Otti Berger (1898–1944)
The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919 and later relocated to Dessau and Berlin, was more than a design school; it was a bold experiment in communal living and interdisciplinary practice. Students and masters, including figures like Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy, lived, worked, and created together in a community where architecture, craft, and industry were seamlessly integrated.
Among the many archival records that survive from the Bauhaus in Germany, few are as personal as this modest scrapbook compiled by textile designer Otti Berger, entitled “Otti’s Bauhausbilderbuch,” meaning “Bauhaus picture book.”
Bauhausbildersbuch, front cover
Made at the Dessau campus in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the scrapbook offers a rare, unpolished glimpse into the daily rhythms of Bauhaus life. Its pages are filled with candid photographs, textile scraps, and doodles that capture the creative atmosphere of the school in a new light, highlighting both its legendary output, as well as the interpersonal collaborations that fuelled it. Its unique, accordion-style structure—seen in the video below—speaks to the innovative ethos of the Bauhaus, which pushed students to experiment with ideas of form and function.
A standout student in the weaving workshop, Berger helped redefine textiles as a site of innovation, rather than of domesticity. At a time when few women held authority in design, Berger ran the Bauhaus weaving department in 1931, and when the Bauhaus was forced to close by the Nazi party in 1932, Otti Berger opened her own design studio, with aims to establish herself as an independent designer.
Two pages from Otti’s Bauhausbilderbuch
Though her promising career was cut short, Berger’s legacy lives on in her designs and documents like this scrapbook. After the Bauhaus was shuttered and the political situation in Germany worsened, Berger, who was Jewish, made efforts to emigrate and continue her work abroad. She even attempted to travel to the United States, where her former teacher László Moholy-Nagy had founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago. However, her visa applications were ultimately denied. In 1944, Berger was deported from Yugoslavia to a detention camp, and thereafter to Auschwitz, where she was murdered shortly after arrival. She was 45 years old.
Portrait of Otti Berger from the Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer Papers
Berger’s scrapbook joins correspondence and personal materials within the papers of her fiancé, colleague, and frequent collaborator, the Bauhaus professor, architect, and urban planner Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer. It stands not just as a record of a revolutionary school, but as a deeply human testament to a community shaped by collaboration, experimentation, and hope—a poignant reminder of both what was possible at the Bauhaus, and what was lost.
– Elio Canale-Parola, Ray Johnson Project Cataloger, Archives, Research Center
Carter Manny (1918–2017)
Due to their unique size or fragility, certain materials in the approximately 250 collections held in the Art Institute of Chicago Archives require extra attention. That’s the case of the papers of the late architect Carter H. Manny, Jr., whose 57 scrapbooks chronicle his rich personal and professional life through photographs, printed matter, and handwritten annotations.
Carter Manny pictured in front of a model of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, 1972
Manny might not share the mainstream acclaim as notable architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but he studied under both architectural masters at Taliesin/Taliesin West and IIT, respectively. Later, while employed with Naess & Murphy (later C.F. Murphy Associates and then Murphy/Jahn), Manny contributed to several significant projects such as O’Hare International Airport, Daley Center, and the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC. From 1971 until 1993, Manny served as director of Chicago’s Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, who in 1996 established the Carter Manny Award, which “supports the completion of outstanding doctoral dissertations on architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.”
Interestingly, even with a résumé as accomplished as Manny’s, he’s perhaps best known for his work in the public art sphere. Under his directorship, the Graham Foundation was instrumental in bringing Alexander Calder’s Flamingo to the Federal Center in 1974. He also served as a liaison for C.F. Murphy and Murphy/Jahn to bring Marc Chagall’s The Four Seasons (1974) and Jean Dubuffet’s Monument with Standing Beast (1984) to Chicago’s Loop.
The aforementioned 57 scrapbooks—one of which is seen below—show an architect on the cutting edge of then-current trends.
Both Flamingo and The Four Seasons arrived four years prior to the Chicago City Council unanimously approving an ordinance stipulating that “a percentage of the cost of constructing or renovating municipal buildings be set aside for the commission or purchase of artworks.” Chicago was one of the first (and largest) municipalities to legislate the incorporation of public art into its official building program, a trend that has since extended to over 200 cities across the United States.
—Dave Hofer, access and reference archivist, Archives, Research Center
ELSE REGENSTEINER (1906-2003)
An influential Chicago-based weaver, textile designer, and teacher, Else Regensteiner meticulously documented her life’s work in scrapbooks. These volumes trace her professional career from the 1940s through the 1990s and capture her connections to the Bauhaus tradition, her innovations in weaving, and her influence as an educator and designer. As she once reflected, “Perfect form, perfect proportion, perfect rhythm, perfect colour surrounds us, if we will only pay attention,” a sentiment that encapsulates both her design philosophy and the spirit of her collection.
Born in Munich, Germany, Regensteiner emigrated to Chicago after the Nazi regime uprooted her family. In 1939, she met Marli Ehrman, Bauhaus-trained head of the weaving department at Chicago’s School of Design, who offered her an assistantship in exchange for instruction in textile theory and drafting. This mentorship, and later her studies at Black Mountain College with Josef and Anni Albers, grounded her practice in Bauhaus principles of design, colour theory, and structural experimentation.
Regensteiner’s scrapbooks are layered with weaving samples, instructional handouts, diagrams, patterns, invitations, catalogues, correspondence, inspiration sources from magazines to modernist art, and hand-woven holiday cards. They document her teaching at Jane Addams Hull House, her partnership with Julia McVicker in the reg/wick Hand Woven Originals studio, and her tenure at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she founded the Weaving Department in 1957 and served as its head until retiring in 1971. The scrapbooks also reflect her workshops, lectures, consulting work, and juries.
Thematically organized, the scrapbooks cover topics such as specialty fabrics, warp sequencing techniques, and leather weaving. Pages reveal her innovation of giving the warp (the vertical threads in weaving) visual prominence with “discontinuous weft” techniques, a departure from conventional practice.
Inspiration is traced to artists like Piet Mondrian, her Bauhaus teachers, and fellow weavers including Dorothy Liebes and Marianne Strengell. Marginal notes, purchase lists, and supplier references provide valuable insight for textile conservators, revealing mid-century sources of fibres, dyes, and equipment.
Regensteiner’s scrapbooks are more than personal archives; they are teaching tools, design laboratories, and professional records. They preserve her role in shaping modern weaving in the United States, her Bauhaus-inspired pedagogy, and her collaborative spirit. Through their combination of visual material, technical documentation, and personal reflection, they stand as a testament to a lifetime of experimentation, education, and innovation in textile arts.
—Jessica Smith, associate director, Archives, Research Center
Curious to learn more about these scrapbooks? Visit the Franke Reading Room during our regular hours, where changing selections from these collections will be on view through summer 2026, or make an appointment.
The reading room is open, with museum admission, on Mondays, Wednesday, Thursdays, and Fridays from 1:30 until 5:00. Find more information about accessing archival collections.
https://www.artic.edu/articles/1232/scrapbooks-as-visual-diaries
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