Reynolds Fisher House

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Reynolds Fisher House (1890) Patton & Fisher, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

In 1889 the City of Chicago and the Village of Hyde Park merged and became one. If you had cut-out a map of the city as it existed back then and placed it over an outline of the borders of the village, the city would have fit snuggly into the boundaries of the village, so in one fell swoop the map of Chicago doubled in size. The oversized village was made-up of a number of small community clusters separated by swatches of open prairie. The area dubbed Kenwood was considered the most fashionable residential section, so when architect Reynolds Fisher decided to build himself a house, he chose the northern edge of the genteel colony as the site for his picturesque shingle-covered dwelling place.

  [Reynolds Fisher House, 4734 S. Kimbark Avenue, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The picturesque style of architecture evolved over a period of time after a group of mid-18th century artists decided that the formality of Neoclassicism was too confining and tightly wound. A bit of Greek, Gothic or Baroque here and there wasn't bad, but it was out with strict formality and in with asymmetry. Idyllic landscapes portrayed in picturesque paintings and gardens reflected a less formal pastoral ideal, and envisioned architecture and art in a much more romaticized fashion. The movement would later provide inspiration for the works of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and the painter Thomas Kinkade. The style was also a perfect jumping-off point for Chicago area real estate developers in the late 1880s offering "sublime and beautiful" urban/suburban settings free of the harsh realities of inner city life. A promotional brochure bore the very straight forward and descriptive title, "Picturesque Kenwood."

  [Reynolds Fisher House, Hyde Park - Kenwood National Historic District, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Fisher's house was about as picturesque as you could get at the close of the 19th century, and bore all of the hallmarks of what would eventually come to be known in the U.S. as the Shingle Style. It's hard to imagine today looking at the painted surfaces and asphalt roofing of the house, but when the structure was completed in 1890 the stained wood shingles covering the roof and walls blended much more effortlessly into the natural landscape. Surrounded by other large shingle-surfaced houses set far back from Kimbark Avenue's curb line, Fisher's street was the consummate expression of a picturesque archetype. But he didn't stay here for very long. After a partnership with architect Normand Patton that lasted for 16 years, in 1901 Fisher decided to leave architecture and Chicago behind, move to Seattle, and join his brother William, president of the Pontiac Brick & Tile Company, as the firm's treasurer.

Chicago Temple - First United Methodist Church

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Chicago Temple - First United Methodist Church (1924) Holabird & Roche, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Approximately 400 feet above the sidewalks of downtown Chicago sits the most elevated place of worship in the city - literally. Tucked in behind the Gothic arches of a 20th century skyscraper, the Sky Chapel is a unique space in a unique structure.

  [Chicago Temple - First United Methodist Church Main Sanctuary, 77 W. Washington Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The First United Methodist Church has occupied the southeast corner of Washington and Clark Streets for a very long time. In 1838 they moved the small frame church building located on the northwest bank of the Chicago River where they had been holding services since 1833. The 30 member congregation had recently acquired a corner lot in the heart of town and floated their little chapel across the Chicago River, then to get it into place rolled it across the town's muddy surface on large logs. Eventually the Baptists, Presbyterians, Unitarians and Universalists joined the Methodists in a line of churchly structures that ran along Washington Street from La Salle eastward to Wabash. As the town grew into a city, only the Methodists stayed put.

  [Chicago Temple - First United Methodist Church, Sky Chapel /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

As the city grew larger the humble church building was replaced by a series of ever larger structures. Then as the First World War came to a close the leaders of First Methodist Episcopal Church began talking about finally leaving the downtown district for the suburbs. But instead of selling their very valuable $3 million plot of land, they decided to tear down their old 1870s-era building, hire architects Holabird & Roche, and build a tall $2 million income producing skyscraper with a 500-seat sanctuary located on the ground floor. When the cornerstone was laid in 1922 Edna May Searles was the honored guest. In 1832 her great-grandfather Reverend Jesse Walker came to the small prairie community of 100 inhabitants where he held regularly scheduled religious services in the timber log building that was floated across the river 6 years later. Holabird & Roche's very non log cabin-like structure for the First Methodist Church was consecrated in 1924, and a new name was carved into the limestone panel above the Washington Street entrance that read: Chicago Temple Building.

  [Chicago Temple - First United Methodist Church, Sky Chapel Altar Face (1952) Alois Lang, master carver /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The sky-high chapel came into being 30 years later when Mrs. Myrtle Walgreen and family made a sizeable donation for a contemplative space to be built in honor of her husband Charles. This dynamic duo had opened a drug store on the south side of Chicago in 1901, and by the time the tribute to her late husband was dedicated in 1952 the Walgreen company had grown to become one of the nation's preeminent drug store chains. And two years after the dedication, Mrs. Walgreen's grandson Peter Whitlock Walgreen Dart married Janelli Charters in front of master wood carver Alois Lang's altar face depicting the figure of Christ looking-out over downtown Chicago, with roses from his grandmother's Dixon, Illinois estate decorating the altar top.

John Rankin House, Oak Park, IL.

 by: chicago designslinger

 [John Rankin House, Oak Park, IL. (ca. 1889) Patton & Fisher, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

In 1889 if you were a somewhat prosperous businessman and you wanted your financial success reflected in your choice of housing, you might opt for the very voluptuous architectural style known as Queen Anne. Voluminous rooflines, a multitude of facade coverings, dormers, brackets, wrap around porches, the more the better. So when John Rankin, a well-to-do commission house owner decided to make his presence known in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, he went Queen Anne.

  [John Rankin House, 245 Kenilworth Avenue, Oak Park, IL. /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Rankin came to the U.S. from Scotland in 1849, settled in Chicago, and got into the crockery business. By 1875 he realized that there was big money to be made in trading grain futures in the Chicago-based commodities market and started a commission house. Commission houses traded futures contracts for clients and collected commissions on those trades. You could make a good living betting on the future price of wheat, corn and barley - and many Chicagoans still do to this day. Rankin came to Oak Park in 1880 by way of another Chicago suburb Elgin, and eventually settled into this large Queen Anne dwelling designed by architects Normand Patton and Reynolds Fisher. The prominent house sat on a very large corner lot at Kenilworth Avenue and Erie (later Elizabeth) Court, and was hard to miss. The Rankins had arrived.

  [John Rankin House, Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School of Architecture National Historic District /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Patton & Fisher had only been in business for four years when the house was built in 1889. Even so, they were already on their way to establishing a firm that would  become one of the area's busiest offices designing practical, client-pleasing, on time, and on budget work. Their domestic projects ranged in style from Queen Anne to Colonial Revival. And although not known for their cutting edge design, over the next decade they would complete just as many houses in Oak Park - including Normand Patton's own residence - as Patton's much more famous neighbor Frank Lloyd Wright. In the year that the Rankin house was built, the commission agent made another investment in Oak Park real estate when he purchased a group of empty lots on nearby Oak Park Avenue. Rankin built spec houses on the narrower more confined lots, and in 1896 his son George bought one of them for he and his wife Charlotte and their baby son John. And in 1900 George Hemingway, father of the future author Ernest, ended-up buying the Rankin's 2 1/2-story house at 639 N. Oak Park Avenue.

  [John Rankin House, Oak Park /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

George had sold the home in 1899 following Charlotte's unexpected death the year before. He moved in with his sister Margaret Rankin Dunlop who lived up-the-street from their parents, while baby John was put under the care of his grandparents and the 3-year-old's four aunts who were unmarried and still lived in the large Kenilworth Avenue house with the senior Rankins. On October 11, 1901 - young John's 5th birthday - a still despondent George Rankin went out on to his sister's porch and shot himself in the head. The following year the Rankins sold their Kenilworth Avenue Queen Anne and moved around the corner on to Forest Avenue just north of Elizabeth Court, where John Rankin the successful commission house owner and broken-hearted father died in 1904.

Charles M. Harper Center

 University of Chicago Booth School of Business

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Charles M. Harper Center - University of Chicago Booth School of Business (2004) Rafael Viñoly Architects PC, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

What's in a name? Well when writing about a building, one usually uses the most commonly recognized and easily identified historical reference. Houses usually keep the name of the original owner, though sometimes a later resident who had an impact on the home's life, or in history, will result in a hyphenated appellation. With commercial or institutional buildings the task gets jumbled and a bit more difficult. Commercial real estate purchases can result in a small notebook listing of name changes, often resulting in a confusing set of historical identities. One generations' Sears Tower becomes anothers' Willis Tower. Corporate changes can result in an unpopular switch of nomenclature, like when the venerable Chicago retail institution Marshall Field & Co. became Macy's. In the case of architect Rafael Viñoly's building for the University of Chicago, name changes and modifications came in rather breathtakingly fast, sign-altering succession.

  [Charles M. Harper Center - University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

In 2000 the University held a competition for the design of a new building to house their Graduate School of Business. The School had been organized in 1898 six years after the University's founding, and was dubbed the College of Commerce and Politics. In 1916 Administration replaced Politics, and by 1932 the the business school was simply named the School of Business. And although the undergraduate portion of the program was dropped in 1942, the word Graduate wasn't added to School of Business until 1959. Then in 1994 a satellite business school campus was opened in downtown Chicago, so by the time the  project was awarded to Viñoly, the name, The Hyde Park Center of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business was long, but perfectly accurate.

  [Charles M. Harper Center - University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Hyde Park /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Viñoly came to New York in 1979 leaving behind a very successful and established architectural career in his native Argentina. He founded his own firm in Manhattan in 1983, and by the time he entered the U of C competition 17 years later, Viñoly had reestablished himself as one of the leaders of emerging 21st century design. The new building was going to replace a building designed by a famous modernist of another era, Eero Saarinen. In the 1950s Sarrinen had come-up with a master plan for the campus and one of the projects that was completed under his tenure was the 500-bed Woodward Court dormitory building. Never a favorite of his - he felt that because of constant budget cuts that the building as constructed had compromised his original design - by the close of the 20th century the dorms were old, outdated and ready for replacement.

  [Charles M. Harper Center - University of Chicago Booth School of Business /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

But it wasn't just any site. Bertram Goodhue's towering Gothic tribute to financial largess the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, was located across the street on one side, while Frank Lloyd Wright's low-slung modern masterpiece the Frederick C. Robie House was on the other. Viñoly's challenge was to integrate a very modern contemporary structure within the context of two very different and opposing stylistic forces. And if that wasn't enough of a challenge, the building had to serve as a study refuge for the students and faculty in one of the most prestigious MBA programs in the country, in an ever changing high-tech world. Viñoly's nod to Wright's horizontal cantilevered design and Goodhue's Gothic inspirations opened in 2004. The Hyde Park Center signage remained the same until a beneficent alumnus made a major contribution to the University in 2007 and the building was renamed the Charles M. Harper Center of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Then a year later alum David Booth gave U of C $300 million, and in honor of the gift the Center became the Charles M. Harper Center - University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Henry Grusendorf House

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Henry Grusendorf House (1886) Gustav Bloedner, architect /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

By the time Henry Grusendorf built his imposing 3-story house on Hoyne Avenue in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood in 1886, the entrepreneurial 57-year-old had tried several different business ventures in a few different professions and in two different states before hitting the jackpot in the Chicago lumber market.

  [Henry Grusendorf House, 1520 N. Hoyne Avenue, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

He was born in Germany in 1829, came to the U.S. in 1850, and settled in a town west of Chicago called Cottage Hill - which changed its name to Elmhurst in 1870. After 4 years, and various business ventures, Henry joined his father and brother and moved across the mighty Mississippi, settling in Iowa. He got into the hotel business, and in 1855 married Dora Neddmayer a young woman who had migrated to the U.S. from the same German town as Henry. But apparently Iowa wasn't exactly Henry's cup-of-tea since soon after his marriage he was back in Cottage Hill where he acquired a small country store, providing provisions for the town's 199 residents. The grocery and dry goods business held Henry's attention for the next four years before he headed back to Iowa in 1860. Then in 1862 he crossed the Mississippi once again, but this time he settled in Chicago and where he became a commission agent. He would remain in the city for the rest of his life, even though there were a few more job changes on the horizon.

  [Henry Grusendorf House, Wicker Park National Historic District, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

By the time Henry hired architect Gustav Bloedner to design a home on a wide double lot on Hoyne Avenue in 1886, he had opened a wholesale grocery business which he operated for less than a year, had become a member of the Chicago Board of Trade, re-entered the commission trade business, and in the summer of 1867 he started Henry Grusendorf & Co., lumber dealers. Never one to sit still, Henry went through several different partners and several different name changes, yet lumber remained the mainstay of his business adventures. And although he made a nice income in the lumber trade, he didn't rest on his wood shavings. In 1902 the Directory of Directors listed Henry as one of the directors of the Mackolite Fireproofing Co.

  [Henry Grusendorf House, Wicker Park Historic District, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Dora died months after the house was completed, leaving Henry a widower with a teenage son to raise. He remarried, but became a widower once again when Augusta Grusendorf died in 1906 at the age of 67. When Henry died in 1913 his son Edward - who had joined his father in the lumber biz - and Edward's wife were living with Henry, and 1520 N. Hoyne Avenue would remain their home address for another decade. As the neighborhood changed and the large single family homes along Hoyne were divided into apartments or chopped-up into rooming houses, the old Grusendorf house held on to its status as a single family dwelling into the late 1950s before it too was broken-up into a multi-family dwelling, which is where it stands today.

Lake View Presbyterian Church, Chicago

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Lake View Presbyterian Church, Chicago (1888) John Wellborn Root, Burnham & Root, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

In 1887 architects Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root were asked to design a  church for the Presbyterian congregation of Lake View township. The membership had come together as a group three years before and were currently holding their Sunday services in a tent. They'd acquired a nice corner lot at Addison Street and Evanston Avenue (later Broadway) within sight of the prominent Lake View Town Hall building at Addison and Halsted Streets, and were ready to build a more permanent place to worship.

  [Lake View Presbyterian Church, 716 W. Addison Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Burnham and Root my have seemed an odd choice to be asked to design a church. Known for their big commercial projects in downtown Chicago like the Grannis, Montauk, Phoenix, Rand McNally and the recently completed Rookery Building, the partners were making quite a reputation for themselves as one of the city's go-to firms for tall building construction. But as successful as Daniel Burnham was in getting the firm the big jobs, John Root, as his sister-in-law and biographer Harriet Monroe wrote, "longed to build churches."

  [Lake View Presbyterian Church, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

John Root had recently undertaken another church project on Chicago's south side for the Roman Catholic parish of St. Gabriel. But his design for the Presbyterians turned away from the heavy brick exterior of the church in the city. Lake View at the time was not located within the corporate boundaries of the city it bordered, and was remote, sparsely populated by people or their buildings, and had a very suburban look and feel. The fire resistant masonry edifice for St. Gabriel was appropriate for its urban site, but for Lake View's largely pastoral setting, Root went for the more organic rustic look and clad his clean-lined building in unpainted wood shingles, which fit nicely into the rural landscape. Tagged the "Shingle Style" in the 1950s, the amalgamation of stained wood surfaces was generally referred to as "Seaside Cottage" in Root's day, and had become a popular style of choice along the shoreline of the country's northeastern seaboard before moving westward. But Root's small building, unlike many of its East Coast predecessors, was a simple statement of organic geometric forms shaped in wood.

  [Lake View Presbyterian Church /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The Lake View Presbyterians had coughed-up $13,000 for Root's design, and by 1898 had grown in size and bank account to build an addition on the north side of the Root structure. A parish house followed in 1911, and then in the early 1940s Root's stained-wood, natural-appearing structure was covered in a very inorganic coat of large white asbestos tiles. Then in 2005 the congregation decided to restore the church back to its original Rootian roots and hired the architectural firm of Holabird & Root (as in John Root, Jr.) to oversee a $1.2 million restoration.

Ferdinand Kaufmann Buildings

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Ferdinand Kaufmann Buildings (1883/1887) Adler & Sullivan, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

A pair of relatively nondescript buildings in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood sit side-by-side, brick line to brick line, on North Lincoln Avenue. Built four years apart and designed by the architectural firm of Adler & Sullivan, the single-looking double buildings were nearly demolished - but somehow survived - to become one of only 15 projects still standing in Chicago, out of the nearly 200 they designed as a team.

  [Ferdinand Kaufmann Buildings, 2310-12 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

They look like any number of handsome brick buildings along this section of the Lincoln Avenue streetscape, and given that they were designed in the early part of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's creative collaboration, they become all the more remarkable for having survived into the 21st century.

  [Ferdinand Kaufmann Buildings, City of  Chicago Landmark /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Louis Sullivan was hired by Dankmar Adler in 1879 when Adler left Burling & Adler to start his own firm. Over the course of the next couple of years Adler realized that his young draftsman had an extraordinary talent and Sullivan became a full partner, and his name was added to the door. It was around this time that a Chicago druggist named Ferdinand Kaufmann came knocking and asked if the architects would design a building containing apartment flats above a ground floor store on his vacant lot at 293 Lincoln Avenue. In 1883 Kaufmann's $10,000 three-flat was ready for occupancy, and four years later he returned to the firm for another building - right next door. Sullivan's decorative scheme hadn't reached the apotheosis of foliage expression quite yet, but he was already experimenting with more organic forms found in the facade's small limestone panels. Sullivan's tightly-bound, Egyptian-like motifs would appear on several buildings the firm designed around this time, before developing his own organic, decorative signature.

  [Ferdinand Kaufmann Buildings, 2310 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The year that the second building was constructed, the Chicago Lakeside Directory listed Ferdinand Kaufmann's home address at 293 Lincoln Avenue, today's 2310 N. Lincoln, with the 1888 addition at 297, or 2312 N. Lincoln. Yet, interestingly enough, Kaufmann & Co. - Ferdinand's drug store - was listed at 285, today's 2308 N. Lincoln Avenue, the building next door to the south, and not in his Adler & Sullivan designed buildings. And by 1894 the Kaufmanns had disappeared from the Lincoln Avenue listings in the Chicago Blue Book altogether, never to show-up again. The architects designed a handful of projects in and around Kaufmann's real estate investment, which have stood the test of time and changing real estate markets. But fate was not as kind to many of the team's other buildings, many of which fell to the wreckers ball in the 1960s, and early 70s before a preservation movement in Chicago began to take hold. The job that put the firm on the map, and brought them world acclaim, still stands on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway. But so many more have been lost, and now survive only in photographs and in the memories of those fortunate enough to have seen the buildings in person, before they became of pile of fragments and dust.