House in Progress Diary

jm,

Your house likely did not have an architect, per se. It falls within the category of the vernacular, though distinctly a Chicago vernacular style. In the era when your house was built, the concept was to come up with a bungalow style, which was becoming very popular at the time, that would fit on a typical narrow city lot.

The Califirnia Bungalow from which your style is partly dreived, more often than not sat on a wider lot and sat width-wise.

There are many clues to the vernacular nature of your house, the more obvious is the lack of any kind of a distinctive "motif", or motifs, reflected in architectural detail or construction - which would have been a particular architect's signature.

The genealology of the bungalow is interesting. Originating in the Far East, India and other parts of the world, the progressive American architects in the Midwest, and mostly in Chicago, including the Prairie School borrowed this form. Many of these very same architects then brought it to the desert towns of southern Califirnia, where it evolved and then spread back throughout the country.

When the style really settled down in Chicago it became our great local vernacular - the Chicago brick bungalow, of which tens of thousands were built in the 1920s.

Long story short: An archichect may have been involved, to have signed the plans to get a building permit. However, it's likely that the house was commissioned from a builder/developer, or was a developer built, spec house.

This does not diminish the house in any way, and in fact makes your home-ownership that of a long Chicago tradition - with a lot of extra, and interesting twists and turns along the way!

I too, love the AIC libraries. And how about those white gloves?!

Marty

Marty--

I couldn't agree with you more. It IS very unlikely that any "regular-sized" Chicago bungalow would have had an architect assigned to it...and I doubt ours was done by anyone famous. A few things still nag at me though:

- The house is built in a part of the city that was BARELY settled at the time. We've seen only 2 houses like ours in Chicago and the other two are in this neighborhood.

-Although our house (layout, details, design) places it firmly as a bungalow, we are NOTHING like the Chicago-style bungalows that surround us and which were built much later.

-Due to the proximity of two college campuses, many of the larger homes in our neighborhood (we fall in the middle to larger category) were designed for college presidents and esteemed faculty and architects have been identified for these.

-Whoever designed this house was influenced by three particular styles of the day: Prairie-style, Craftsman style and (a little) Mission style.

-The "signature" features are interesting for this section of Chicago...exposed rafter tails and roof brackets, an original oversized dormer with enclosed sunroom underneath, distinctive exterior trim (which is hard to see in photographs...everything is presently painted the same color as the stucco), high ceilings on the main floor, in the attic and in the basement.

-The house also has certain repeated themes which I call, "Prairie squares on the edges", "long vertical lines crossed by high or low long horizontals", and "triads". These are repeated in windows, doors, woodwork, room layout, etc. Most decorative items are grouped in odd numbers and are placed in straight lines. The only interior angles in the house are made by some of the roof lines... otherwise everything lines up horizontally and vertically. There are no curves. This is why I grit my teeth when I see the newer molding in the front rooms (which had been replaced) because they are miter joints...on a diagonal, and the molding curves at the sides and on the top. This is very different from all of the other trim joints in the house for the windows and doors.

I haven't seen many exposed rafter tails or completely stucco houses on this side of Chicago. Further up on the North Shore, it is very common (Wilmette, Winnetka, etc.) Nor are there many of its layout or size in the neighborhood. Although we may not be able to find a specific architect, smaller houses than ours have architects listed in the same time period in this neighborhood. I don't think it is VERY likely, but it is not completely unlikely either. :) And it definitely gave me insight into the competing architectural firms building houses in Chicago the same year ours was built. That alone was worth the research...what an interesting bunch they were! Names that rarely get mentioned in the mainstream... Axel Teisen, Pond & Pond, Oscar Johnson, George Klewer, Otis & Clark, Anders Lund, William Schilling, Georg Pursell, Horatio Wilson, Walter Griffin, Roenberg & Pierce, and others.

They don't use white gloves anymore! Not that I saw. But they were very careful in handling the materials. It was nice to see.

To abet you in your further search, here is a resource you might want to try: http://www.dgunning.org/opdb/

Don Gunning put together just a fantastic database of Oak Park's inventory of builings and architects. OP contains residences of just about every conceivable style. You might even contcat him with a photo of your house, and he might be willing to link to you several which are similar.

Many architects of that period did not just design for one location, but worked throughout the Chicago area and suburbs.

The Pond bros. and Walter Burely Griffin, alas not given their due, were among the greats. Without Griffin, there would have been no Wright.

Marty

We were lucky enough to "inherit" the original blueprints to our house from the former owners. Though Tudors are very common in Cincinnati, and our particular Tudor isn't grand or special (except to us), it was designed and built in 1932 for a specific client by an architect named CJ Winnes.

I'd guess that the blueprints were adapted from a spec house plan, since there are a handful of similar but slightly different Tudors on our block---basic floorplans are the same, but exterior details and bedroom layouts are different in each house. So CJ came up with a great Tudor design and either he or the builder tweaked it for each client...

Have you contacted the owners of the two houses that are similar to yours? It's very likely that they were all built by the same builder/architect, if they're the only three in the neighborhood. Maybe one of your fellow homeowners has the information you're looking for.