Henry Slaby: Regional Catholic Modernist

In 2023, the Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), the Milwaukee Historic Preservation Commission, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee launched a project to survey Milwaukee’s 20th-century houses of worship. The Wisconsin SHPO, like many others, uses a portion of its annual federally allocated Historic Preservation Fund (HPF) to sponsor community projects around the state. Community surveys, like the one in Milwaukee, offer opportunities for preservation planning; identifying threats and preservation priorities; and strengthening connections between property owners and local and state preservation offices.

The Milwaukee thematic survey accomplished all of the above objectives, eventually cataloguing nearly 200 churches, synagogues, and related buildings in the city. The survey also identified three dozen properties that met the criteria for historic designation, two of which are currently in the process of being listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The survey had one unexpected outcome, however – the discovery of a relatively unknown architect whose work extended beyond the geographic boundaries of Milwaukee: Henry R. Slaby, AIA. Slaby (1906-1995) was born in Milwaukee and apprenticed in the local architectural office of Herbst & Kuenzli. This firm was a prolific designer of churches, and family lore tells that Slaby’s first project there was detailing the tower of St. Sebastian’s, an elaborate Late Gothic Revival church constructed in 1929 for an affluent neighborhood of Milwaukee. After striking out on his own (and completing a few Depression-era commercial projects to pay the bills), Slaby would specialize in Roman Catholic religious commissions for the rest of his career. Slaby eventually designed three dozen known buildings, which, until now, have remained underappreciated. Looking closely at his work reveals an idiosyncratic use of modern and historicist styles and astoundingly high levels of craftsmanship and finish, offering lessons in creative interpretation that remain relevant today.

Slaby’s complex modernist pedigree is evident in his earliest commissions, many of which were Catholic schools. His work of the 1930s and 1940s was influenced by the Brick Expressionist movement in Germany and architects like Hans Poelzig, Fritz Schumacher, and Dominikus Böhm, who explored the material’s structural and ornamental possibilities. Slaby was also influenced by the Prairie School architect Barry Byrne, himself a designer of progressive Catholic churches. Lastly, select elements in Slaby’s work seem to derive from Frank Lloyd Wright, which may have been specific client requests.

In the 1940s, Slaby’s reputation spread beyond Wisconsin as he began designing projects across the Midwest for at least a half-dozen Catholic religious orders. These projects display a variety of architectural styles, partly because of regional traditions, and partly because of the religious leaders involved in each project. St. Joseph Home for the Aged, completed in 1948 in Monroe, Louisiana, draws on the region’s antebellum architectural heritage with its two-story porticos, lacy ironwork railings, and latticework cupola. St. Joseph Home was reported to be the first racially integrated nursing home in the South at its completion and was founded by the Illinois-based Hospital Sisters of St. Francis under the direction of Mother Magdalene Wiedlocher, OSF.

Slaby also completed two later projects for the Hospital Sisters. St. Anthony Hospital, built in 1951 in Effingham, Illinois, also incorporates a two-story portico along with inventive, vaguely Stripped Classicism details. In contrast, St. Elizabeth Hospital in Belleville, Illinois (built 1956 and demolished 2019), was almost industrial in feeling with gridded windows and an open-frame tower bookended by brick wall planes. Slaby’s 1955 design for the Kilroe Seminary in Honesdale, Pennsylvania drew on the European modernism favored by the project’s German-born client, Rev. Richard Kiefer, SCJ.

A decade after the Kilroe project, Fr. Kiefer’s religious order returned to Slaby to design their provincial headquarters, completed in 1968. The original presentation rendering (courtesy of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus USA provincial archives) illustrates the building sprawled over its landscape. The round chapel, the heart of the complex, is surrounded by a crescent containing classrooms and residential space with a round dining hall at the rear. A library and gymnasium are attached to the crescent by a thin corridor that bridges the service road below.

Sacred Heart Seminary, in Hales Corners, Wisconsin, is a sprawling complex whose design evolved as new ideas about Catholic liturgy and aesthetics emerged from the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II, as it is commonly known, was a convening of representatives of the entire Catholic Church between 1962 and 1965 with the goal of updating the church for the modern world. At Sacred Heart, Slaby began exploring the Vatican II principles of ressourcement (returning to the sacred traditions of the early church) and aggiornamento (bringing the church up to date with the present day).

In addition to his large-scale projects, Slaby was also quietly building long-term relationships with fledgling parishes. He designed their schools and temporary worship spaces. As enrollment and finances grew, he designed their convents and rectories. And then in the mid-1960s, just as these parishes had the resources to finally build their own churches, Vatican II validated Slaby’s long-held progressive design ideas. The timing could not have been more perfect. Slaby, at last, had large-scale canvases on which to create sanctuaries that drew on Catholicism’s rich traditions and looked forward to the modern world.

Slaby designed three churches that represent the culmination of his mature career. Mother of Good Counsel Church was completed in 1968 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The interior of the church is dominated by a procession of dalle de verre windows and a dramatic chancel wall of bookmatched marble. The figural plan and large-scale sculptural forms of the church contrast with the rectangular geometry of the rectory next door, designed by Slaby ten years earlier.

Holy Family Parish is located in the affluent Milwaukee suburb of Whitefish Bay. Slaby’s 1953 design for the school foreshadowed detailing on the church, completed 17 years later. The rectangular massing and basilican plan of Holy Family Church are more conservative than Slaby’s other churches of the period, most likely out of sensitivity to the surrounding context of Period Revival houses and two other churches, but the detailing inside the church is a Space Age symphony of circular design motifs.

The complex of buildings at St. Mark the Evangelist Parish in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is arguably Henry Slaby’s masterpiece. Completed over the course of two decades under the patronage of parish priest Monsignor Ralph Altstadt, Slaby took the materials and design motifs of an existing 1931 school and transformed them into a progression of showstopping buildings.

St. Mark’s occupies two full city blocks and required purchasing and vacating a city street that ran through the site. Slaby’s rendering, courtesy of St. Mark’s Parish, shows the entire complex. The round church (dedicated in 1970) occupies the center of the site. To the left of the church is the original 1931 school designed by Milwaukee architect E.B. LaCroix. Slaby’s 1951 school addition and rectory are partially visible behind the school. To the right of the church is Slaby’s 1957 L-shaped gymnasium and school. At the rear of the site is Slaby’s 1964 convent, complete with enclosed breezeblock patio and private chapel with curved sculpture wall and rank of dalle de verre windows.

A recurring theme in all of Slaby’s projects is exceptional craftsmanship, perhaps as a reflection of his early interest in Brick Expressionism. Throughout his career, Slaby demonstrated a masterful control of texture, surfaces, and materials. His mature projects combine formal austerity and material richness – and above all, an almost-obsessive consideration of detail. Slaby also collaborated with other artists to create thoughtfully integrated allied arts in his worship spaces. Slaby was a devout Catholic himself. He regarded the act of building as an act of worship, and he demanded – and frequently achieved – near-perfection from his contractors and artisans.

Henry Slaby retired from practice in the 1970s. Most of his buildings are still as fresh and as striking as the day they were built, and yet the identity of their designer remains unfamiliar even among Wisconsin’s architectural community. Slaby’s legacy has been hiding in plain sight. The fact that his work is not more well known underscores the importance of community surveys to identify and celebrate unsung heroes and untold stories. There is still so much to learn about modern religious architecture and its creators. Programs like the federal Historic Preservation Fund are crucial to continue the good work of documenting, studying, and appreciating significant designers from this era all across the country.

Henry Slaby’s life and career illustrates the value of nurturing strong relationships with clients – and Slaby’s unique ability to fashion a usable past that resonated with those clients’ values and aspirations. His work also undermines the tenacious myth that modernists didn’t care about ornamentation. In Slaby’s buildings, ornament and detail become one. In retrospect, his genius lay in using the vital and dynamic architectural heritage of the Catholic Church and expressing it in the art of its own time. It has simply taken nearly eighty years for us to rediscover something that Henry Slaby knew all along:

It is not necessary to follow blindly all details of the past; but to rather give the old a new and contemporary application …

Henry Slaby, 1947

Special thanks to the many people who have shared archives, offered guidance, and graciously opened their Slaby buildings: Kathi Manchester; Kathy Harty, Mary Gorski, and Fr. Wayne Jenkins, SCJ; Fr. Reed Mungovan, SDS; Rev. Martin Childs, Jr. and Linda Griffin; Sydney Kellenberger and Tom Fehring; Kris Meeker and Sr. Sylvia Leonardi, SSSF; Brian Blasco; Shelly Taylor; Daina Penkiunas; Tim Askin; Kevin Block; and most importantly, Bernadette and Michael Monroe.

About the Author

Justin Miller is an architectural historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee specializing in preservation consulting and cultural resource compliance. He is the author of multiple National Register nominations and studies, including a recent thematic survey and context statement on the work of Alonzo Robinson, Jr., Wisconsin’s first Black registered architect. Justin recently led a yearlong project to document Milwaukee’s twentieth century houses of worship and to evaluate their historical and architectural significance – including several projects by Henry Slaby. Justin is also the author of a chapter on Slaby’s work in the forthcoming publication Milwaukee Moderns.