Jens J. Jensen

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Jensen, Jens J. was an architect. He designed the following houses/buildings:

Chicago Landmarks Historic Resources Survey

1400 W. Devon Avenue at Sheridan Road was photographed in 1929.

Jazz Age Article

Any study of the architectural heritage of Chicago, and Chicago architectural history, in general, really requires a look at the architect. The Danish-American architect, Jens J. Jensen (1891-1969), built houses and buildings primarily in Chicago during an astounding 50-year long career.

Jens J. Jensen wasn’t the only Danish-born Jens Jensen working in Chicago during the first decades of the Twentieth Century. He is still often confused with the great landscape architect, Jens Jensen, even though Jens J. was no relation and was in fact 30 years younger. Even the definitive ‘’AIA Guide to Chicago’’ incorrectly attributes the Guyon Hotel, 4000 W. Washington Boulevard, to the elder Jensen (a hotel tower for a jazz impresario would certainly have been some departure for an elder landscape architect used to designing parks and conservatories). In addition there were a handful of Jens Jensens practicing architecture in Chicago during the 1910s and 1920s, but his conspicuous designs and high-level clients have pushed Jens J. Jensen’s very singular reputation to the fore.

Jensen was born in Herning, Denmark in 1891 and immigrated as a child with his parents to the United States around the turn-of-the-20th Century, settling in Chicago. Jensen attended Chicago’s Lewis Institute (one of the predecessors of the Illinois Institute of Technology), apprenticed in the architecture firm of Francis M. Barton,(1878-1935), and received his Illinois State architectural license in 1915. By the age of thirty, Jensen had established his office at 1103 W. Lawrence Avenue in Chicago (the John Eberson-designed Aragon Ballroom was later built across the street) and soon gained the reputation of an architect with technical acumen and stylistic versatility, able to work in any size, type, or style.

Jensen’s capacity for creativity fit his times. The amount of construction in Chicago during the 1920s was at a level unprecedented since the Great Fire of 1871 and builders and investors of this boom decade built big and built extravagantly in almost every conceivable historically-inspired style. The varied demands and tastes of Jensen’s 1920s clients can be seen in his work of the decade, including small storefronts, multi-level apartment buildings, and large-scale commercial, hospitality and entertainment developments: such as 1412 W. Devon Avenue, a 1920s mixed-use development designed by Jens J. Jensen.

In the mid-1920s, Jens J. Jensen formed a powerful creative partnership with Greek-American developer George W. Prassas, acting as architect for several of Prassas’ block-size multi-use developments on Chicago’s North and West sides. Jensen’s designs typically included sidewalk-level commercial storefronts and one to two stories of apartment residences above, all wrapped in elegant Classical Revival style facades of gleaming glazed terra cotta. George W. Prassas would later expand on his commercial development success of the 1920s and become a pioneer builder of Chicago’s first large-scale suburban shopping malls. Several of Jens J. Jensen’s 1920s Prassas commissions survive.

Jens J. Jensen was one of Chicago’s more successful young solo architects of the 1920s, completing a scale of work that’s pretty hard to conceive of today. Jensen was also among the scores of architects put out in the cold by the events of Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. The Wall Street crash and the decade-long economic disaster that followed it all but obliterated the building market in Chicago and sent many of the 1920s development spendthrifts into forced hibernation. For many young architects across America, this meant the disappearance of reliable work and, for some, the end of their architectural careers.

Jens J. Jensen, however, survived the 1930s and managed to reinvent his office by bringing in new clientele. He helped to invent the burgeoning retail experience of supermarket shopping and in the process developed a new personal style that appealed to mid-20th Century America’s fast-changing tastes in architecture and design.

Taking a long view of the long career of Chicago architect Jens J. Jensen (1891-1969), two elements of his work stand out: his ability to work for any client (commercial, residential, institutional) and in almost any style. Placing his early works side by side with his late works reveals an architect who truly felt comfortable in his own skin as a designer.

For Jens J. Jensen, the simplification of his design sense over the 1930s and 1940s was an enforced one. None of Jensen’s former clients could afford to build much at all, much less in the grandiose revival styles that typified mainstream Jazz Age architecture in Chicago. The change in Jensen’s building aesthetic was also in part a result of changing architectural tastes across the country. After all, Jensen spent his entire working life in Chicago, the proving ground for American Modernism, a movement which over time banished the kind of obsessive ornamentation and historicism that had been this architect’s calling card through the boom years of the 1920s. As America moved through the lean years of the Depression and World War II, Jensen, like many struggling architects of his generation, felt the shift in public tastes and followed it drafting board in-hand.

Around 1930, after the Depression appeared to have ended his mixed-use commissions for Chicago developer George W. Prassas, Jensen forged a new relationship with the Charles L. Schrager Company, a developer for the Chicago-based Jewel Food Stores. Beginning as a simple one-wagon outfit in 1891, the Jewel Tea Company had by the mid-1930s expanded from being a mere coffee, tea, and spice dealer to operating dozens of stores in the Chicago area offering all manner of packaged food product and housewares. While most of Depression-era America businesses expected only doom, Jewel Tea in fact grew throughout the 1930s.

Jens J. Jensen put a face on Jewel’s optimistic growth, designing many of the grocer’s new shops in Chicago’s outlying residential neighborhoods. Images of these early stores are scarce but it is known that they were generally one-story high and constructed at the corners of busy intersections. Sometimes these Jewel stores were only one tenant of many in these new developments, but more often than not, Jewel was the sole tenant.

Jens J. Jensen’s son, Jens J. Jensen, Jr., joined his father’s firm in 1955. Jens, Jr. studied architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his training in modern architecture helped reshape the output of his father’s firm. The renamed office of Jensen & Jensen continued its close relationship with Jewel stores, developing several prototype stores for the supermarket chain as it expanded out into Chicago’s suburbs. The typical Jensen Jewel store was a low-slung one-story structure, usually with an adjacent parking lot. These new Jewels were clad in clean glazed white block with long uninterrupted strings of plate glass displaying towers of can goods and giving glimpses of shoppers inside. Always positioned at a store’s entrance was the chain’s signature tower fin with the easily-recognizable “Jewel” neon sign.

Jens J. Jensen continued working until he retired in 1961, moving to Scotsdale, Arizona where he died eight years later. Jens, Jr. continued his father’s close partnership with the Jewel chain (later Jewel-Osco). The firm Jensen & Jensen is still active in retail work and is now under the direction of Jens J. Jensen’s grandson, Jarrett Jensen.

In many ways, Jens J. Jensen’s work with Jewel from the 1930s through the 1950s gave form to a kind of retail architecture that most Americans visit every day: the full-service supermarket and drug store. It was through Jensen’s work that many Chicagoans first came to experience supermarket shopping. A combined greengrocer- dry goods-bakery-butcher-housewares emporium was met by 1930s investors and the shopping public with some skepticism and it was in Jensen’s and his son’s solutions for Jewel’s logistically-complex business model that made the chain such a success.

Jens J. Jensen’s work on entertainment structures, on apartment houses, on office, and his suburban Jewel stores (1930-1960) added to the variety of architecture seen along Chicago’s streets during the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his buildings, particularly his Jewel stores, are lost which is why it’s so important for us to hold close his work that does survive.

AIA Listing

File: ahd1022021 Jens J. Jensen

Name: Jensen, Jens J.

Personal Information

Birth/Death:

Occupation: American architect

Location (state): IL

This record has not been verified for accuracy.

AIA Affiliation

Member of The American Institute of Architects (AIA) 1929-1931

Biographical Sources

Related Records

Archival Holdings

The American Institute of Architects

Membership file may contain membership application, related correspondence. Membership files of living persons are not available. Contact the AIA Archives at archives@aia.org for further information.

Publications