“What’s that?” asked the woman pointing to the silo.
There are real villas too, and impressive they are. Schroeder Murchie Laya Associates added 3,000 square feet, including an art gallery and conservatory with pool, to an 1880s Hawthorne Place mansion. Decker and Kemp did a house in Lake Forest set amid 65 acres of orchards, swimming ponds, and stables, next to what the exhibit catalog describes as a “small forest”–a sort of Versailles as imagined by Gomer Pyle. Bauhs and Dring designed an exurban house in Elburn that will eventually feature a paved entry court, solarium, guest house, pool, gazebo with hot tub, tennis court, and three-hole golf course. The house’s 7,000 square feet of interior space is well over twice the area of the average Chicago house lot.
Even the new houses in the show can’t quite be called new designs. There is not a building on display at the Athenaeum that doesn’t recall some other house. (In the case of restorations like the Beaux-Arts mansion on Astor being restored by Marvin Herman & Associates, the house that’s recalled is itself.) We have the “stockbroker’s Tudor,” all the rage in the 1920s, revived for a new generation of stockbrokers. The ghosts of Wright and Le Corbusier are still at large, and there are so many versions of the vernacular of other regions–Swiss chalets, Santa Fe adobes, Arizona stuccos–that you half expect to see scribbled across the photos: “Having a great time. Wish you were here.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In The Natural House, Frank Lloyd Wright complained about people who mistook idiosyncrasy for taste. They built houses he derided as “stupid makeshifts” that were without integrity. Wright was perfectly correct–to this day American houses neither look nor function very coherently–but his complaint is largely irrelevant. Conformity and comfort are the standards by which most Americans judge a house.
Tigerman has designed his share of suburban villas, and while some are unmistakably–and unlivably–Tigerman, others are not. A house in Hawthorne Woods shown at the Art Institute last winter was inspired by what the exhibit catalog called “rural farm structures,” while a lakeside house in the same exhibit recalled Florentine churches.
This is not a back-to-the-land movement, mind. These are toy farms; and playfulness abounds in all these designs. In one city house, a three-story brick tower culminates in a cupola and widow’s walk shaped like the wheelhouse of a river steamboat. There are so many lookouts and gazebos and bridges and catwalks and spiral staircases that some buildings look like catalog ads for the next generation of playgrounds. (The illusion is strengthened by the fact that many of the vacation houses stand in what amounts to sandboxes beside the lake.) One of the clients of Pappageorge Haymes asked for a vacation cottage that looked like a modernist tree house for grown-ups, and got it. Of course Le Corbusier’s famous Villa Savoye looks like the superstructure of an ocean liner, and Safdie’s Habitat in Montreal looks like a pile of children’s building blocks, so only the ungenerous would begrudge lesser architects a chance to build a house that looks like a Rubik’s cube.
