"I wake every morning and purr"

Toured five really lovely homes designed by the architect Dennis Blair in Long Grove, Illinois today, including the one that he designed for himself and his family and lived in for thirty years. All of the homes were nestled along the same sloping street, surrounded by Burr Oak and Japanese Pines.

The architect was in attendance, regal and grey, and told us about apprentencing with Wright at Taliesin (and scoring the Romeo & Juliet Tower as his quarters) as well as at the offices of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago.

Blair won his apprenticeship with Wright through a well turned letter, and earned his keep through his skill as a draftsman -- in particular, his skill at drafting domes, which he came by in wartime Detroit where he worked for the government illustrating captured aircraft; domed bombers a among them. As a result, his was the hand that drafted the dome on the architectural plans for Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York.

His architectural structures capture some of the quality of a heavy aircraft in flight -- long trim lines, brick and beam somehow soaring. That each was unique was the really telling part -- the architect has an eye for the interplay of geometry with the site and used a wide assortment of materials across structures from boulders to cedar planking to brick to flagstone.

The purring of the title came from a woman named Pat, whom we met on the walk between houses, and who lives in another mid-century home elsewhere, but mentioned it in reference to the qualities of really fine architecture and to what living within such a structure does to a person.

She's the caretaker of the home she lives in now; it's owned by a woman who will deed it to a foundation on her death, but this is the second house she's lived in that made her purr.

The first was one she visited with her husband when they first moved to the Midwest. He bought it to surprise her, knowing how she loved it, and called her to give her the news, telling her: "I bought a house for the cat."

made.

Photo: Julius Shulman

This was a happy house.

Cil Rockwell, earlier today, signing my copy of Gary Gand’s Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism.



Mrs. Rockwell was referring to the home we were standing in; the one her husband, Deever Rockwell, designed and built; the one they shared together with their four children ("a symmetrical family") before the children grew up and moved away and they sold it to the nice couple from LA who own it today.

We were there at the invitation of Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond for the release party of the above mentioned book, and we spent our afternoon collecting signatures of the owners of several other Chicago Mid-Century Modern homes, who were also there, whose homes were also photographed by Julius Shulman near the end of his life.

Photographed. Not shot.

Julius Shulman, we learned today, didn’t shoot photography. “No guns,” he would say. He made an image, painstakingly, using a 4x5 view camera, taking on average two hours per frame.

Gary Gand and his wife Joan were friends of Shulman, and we have them to thank for coaxing the master into capturing what may be the only photographic collection of Mid-Century Modern Residential Architecture in Chicago. The story of how they did that is in the book.

Mr. Rockwell was there today too, and kindly signed my book when I offered it to him as though at a yearbook signing party. He also answered my star struck question about what it was like to study under Mies at IIT. (As you may have guessed, it was “extraordinary”, but he made more time for the grad students than the undergrads.)



The home Rockwell built on the bluff alludes fondly to his professor’s Farnsworth House, but unlike the unrelenting steel frame of the house on the Fox River, this one is anchored to the earth through an extraordinary application of red flint. The small vibrant stones run through the concrete forms that anchor the corners of the glass box, and chisel out the terraces against the steep wooded bluff that leads into the ravine at the back of the house. The same red flint runs through the polished floors of the home, and transitions effortlessly to the aggregate walk and the loose pebbles of the courtyard.

About those loose stones: Mrs. Rockwell told us that one winter a gentleman was using a snow blower in the courtyard when he kicked up some pebbles and sent them shattering against one of the large glass panes. The entire wall rained down in cold, brittle shards. They patched it up with neoprene and duct tape while they organized a repair.



I asked the new owner if she had heard the story of the pebbles in the winter. She had. “The first thing we did was get rid of the snow blower,” she said. “We shovel our snow.”

Another cold winter story: the glass walls aren’t Thermopaned – “We didn’t even think of it,” said Mrs. Rockwell. “Oil was so cheap.” So in the winter time when the frost moved in they would move the mattress to the living room and sleep in front of the fire.

“That was nice,” she said, her smiling eyes deep pools of memory.

A happy house.

an angst ridden place

John Neuhart, a former employee of Charles and Ray Eames, and his wife Marilyn, are auctioning their Eames collection next Thursday, April 8th, at the Wright Auction House in Chicago.

More likely than not, if you're in the market, you can score a chair.

More interestingly, you can score a rare piece of industrial design.



Like a pair of the plywood splints that the Eames designed and manufactured for the US Government during WWII, the production of which provided the seed money for their later success.



I have my eye on the trim tab for a Vultee BT-13 airplane in lacquered spruce and enameled aluminum. I don't know why, but I think it's lovely.



Also appealing, if you have $15K (or more) to blow on a dollhouse, is a scale model of the Eames' Office where John Neuhart was employed:

This scale model, constructed on a one-quarter inch to one-foot scale, is a replica of the Eames Office at the time of Charles Eames death in August of 1978. Painstakingly constructed over nearly a decade John Neuhart, with the assistance of Marilyn Neuhart, aimed to recreate the office with precision. With a demountable roof and cross beams the model reveals the 10,000 square foot interior equipped with appropriately-scaled furniture, the equipment and tools of the Eames Design Office, as well as the graphic displays decorating the walls at that time. Signed with applied studio label to corner.

While you're shopping, give a listen to the audio interviews with the Neuharts that the auction house has also posted. (The first of these provided my title.) It seems the Eames' were terrors to work for. The image archive is pretty captivating too.

keck & keck

keck & keckOriginally uploaded by suttonhoo

View from the Gands' bathroom.

Their Riverwoods home is a dream: a 1955 Keck & Keck, furnished in mid-century modern pieces by all the big hitters (Noguchi, Eames, Wakefield, Knoll); Lichtenstein & Miro on the walls; shelves and shelves of Italian art glass; cookies and lemonade in the kitchen.

The Gands, co-founders of Chicago Bauhaus & Beyond, generously let us trounce through their rooms (albeit barefooted).

My favorite part? The Steinway grand that stands in the living room like a warming hearth. Because, as Gary Gand reminded us over lunch when we got to talking about the architect Edward Humrich (who was stop number 2 on our tour) and his formal training in music: that is what architecture is, after all.

Frozen music. [1]

Pattern, line, beat and breath, suspended in space.

And, like good music, architecture done right helps its occupants breathe deeper than before; opens their eyes to unexpected spaces; takes their minds to revelatory places.

Posting by cameraphone from the road home.

[1] Goethe said it first, of course.