Modern in the Middle
Susan S. Benjamin, Michelangelo Sabatino
The Monacelli Press, September 2020
Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11-1/2 inches | 296 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1580935265 | $60.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century architecture, the skyscraper, Chicago also cultivated a more humble but no less consequential form of modernism–the private residence. Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75 explores the substantial yet overlooked role that Chicago and its suburbs played in the development of the modern single-family house in the twentieth century. In a city often associated with the outsize reputations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the examples discussed in this generously illustrated book expand and enrich the story of the region’s built environment.
Authors Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino survey dozens of influential houses by architects whose contributions are ripe for reappraisal, such as Paul Schweikher, Harry Weese, Keck & Keck, and William Pereira. From the bold, early example of the “Battledeck House” by Henry Dubin (1930) to John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny’s gem the Freeark House (1975), the generation-spanning residences discussed here reveal how these architects contended with climate and natural setting while negotiating the dominant influences of Wright and Mies. They also reveal how residential clients–typically middle-class professionals, progressive in their thinking–helped to trailblaze modern architecture in America. Though reflecting different approaches to site, space, structure, and materials, the examples in Modern in the Middle reveal an abundance of astonishing houses that have never been collected into one study–until now.
Susan Benjamin is a noted historic preservationist and published architectural historian based in Chicago. Michelangelo Sabatino directs the PhD program in architecture and is the inaugural John Vinci Distinguished Research Fellow at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
I grew up in Northbrook, a Chicago suburb located about twenty miles north of the Loop. My childhood home was a long walk from the village's main shopping area, the public library, and the adjacent water tower, the last of which was famously emblazoned with "Save Ferris" for John Hughes's Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Given that Hughes lived in the area, much of the movie — and others he made in the 1980s — was filmed on location in Chicago and the north suburbs. Yet the titular character's house (among many other locales) is actually located in Los Angeles, specifically 4160 Country Club Drive in Long Beach. I chalk this up to suburban sameness and the ability of one to pass off as any other.
But what about Cameron's house, the glass box dramatically perched over a ravine, the same ravine his parent's red Ferrari lands in near the end of the film? That is the Rose House designed by A. James Speyer and located in Highland Park, just northeast of Northbrook. More accurately, the structure damaged by the car is the Rose Auto Pavilion designed by architect David Haid, a student of Speyer's, who added the detached structure in 1974, 21 years after the original was completed. I can only guess that if Hughes used a modern house in Los Angeles, of which there are plenty, the North Shore-ness of the film would have been derailed. Yes, I can see a Ferrari being launched through a plate glass wall of John Lautner's Chemosphere, but not without it looking obviously Los Angeles rather than being able to pull off suburban Chicago.
The lover of modern houses in me chalks up the above to a few things, most notably the particular way modern houses relate to their landscapes, especially compared to typical suburban blocks lined with typical suburban houses. Not all Chicago houses have such dramatic properties as the Rose House, but the dozens of houses collected in Modern in the Middle — of which Cameron's family's house is one of them — exhibit some tendencies that capture the flavor of modern residential architecture in Chicagoland in the middle of last century. Much of that flavor comes about through the selection of houses by historian Susan Benjamin and architect Michelangelo Sabatino.
Spanning from 1929 to 1975, as the subtitle makes clear, there is a predominance of International Style modernism, much of it influenced by Mies van der Rohe. Naturally, Mies is included in the book (Plano falls into the Chicago orbit with this book's fairly large geographical reach), but so are Frank Lloyd Wright, Bertrand Goldberg, Stanley Tigerman, Bruce Goff, Keck & Keck, and Harry Weese; all familiar names. But architects who know a lot about architecture in Chicago will be more enamored with the many houses designed by forgotten architects. How many people know, for instance, Le Roy Binkley? I didn't, so the house he designed for himself in Long Grove is a treat — one of many in the book. Binkley's house is given only two pages and doesn't include a plan, but most houses are given at least four pages and are documented with a floor plan. Photos are in abundance, but most of them are b/w and appear to be historic rather than contemporary. Reading their descriptions reveals if the houses are still extant.
Bookending the portfolios of houses are one essay by each author at the front of the book, a couple essays at the back of the book, and a section titled "The Authors and Their Homes." The essays are excellent in providing context and making an argument for the appreciation and preservation of the many houses in the book, but the inclusion of the authors' houses is most telling. These peeks make the authors' houses highly personal, and the portfolio that precedes them does the same: telling the histories of the houses in terms of the clients as much as their architects and designs. Given that most of these houses were expensive to design and build, and were built in pricey suburbs, the book's architectural/social history is of an upper-middle-class leaning — one that John Hughes and his cast of characters would have been at home in.
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