One of the many joys of reading Carla Bruni and Phil Thompson’s Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture is the way the book dazzles the reader with the familiar. In other words, how it opens the ordinary like a flower so you can see its beauty in telling details.
For instance, as I read this important new addition to the shelf of essential Chicago books, I turned to page 236 and, to my surprise, found my friend Rob’s three-flat in Edgewater, on Granville Avenue, just west of Broadway.
I’ve often stood in front of the condo building, talking with Rob, or walked past, and it’s always seemed like a nice home, but what do I know? Kind of stately in an understated way, with a big, thick tree in front, and, to the west, the gray asphalt parking lot of the Barr Funeral Home.
But Bruni and Thompson helped me see it much better with just a few words, describing it as “a grand 1929 three-flat…with warm yellow brick and beige terra cotta details surrounding its porches and anchoring its columns.” Rob, who’s an architect, probably knew all that. For me, though, it was eye- and mind-opening.
The illustration of the three-flat was sharp and clear and, for me, made Rob’s home readily identifiable. It’s one of hundreds of illustrations, created by Wonder City Studio, co-founded by Thompson. Bruni, who teaches graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been working for nearly 20 years in the field of preservation nationally and locally, particularly with the Chicago Bungalow Association.
Bungalows, which, the authors report, make up a third of the city’s housing stock, are a big story in Chicago Homes. So are two-flats and three-flats, which comprise another quarter of the city’s houses. Together, these types make up about 60 percent of the million-plus homes in Chicago.
No “Right” Way to Read the Book
As Bruni and Thompson note in an introduction, there’s no “right” way to read Chicago Homes. The reader, they advise, shouldn’t “feel like you need to read it through like a mystery novel” although that’s how I did it because, well, that’s what I do.
Other readers, though, may just go to the Table of Contents or the index to find a section of interest, say, about the Queen Anne style or Bedford limestone or coach houses or Romanesque Revival or Prairie Style. Or turn, now and again, to the book’s crackerjack 11-page hyper-local glossary where one can learn about aspects and details of Chicago home architecture:
common brick: Brick made from locally sourced clay, often rougher and less uniform than face brick. This brick wraps around the non-street facing side and rear walls of most masonry buildings in Chicago.
festoon: A decorative motif resembling a garland of flowers, ribbons, or foliage.
Chicago Homes was published by Evanston-based Agate Publishing, and there are a handful of illustrations of Chicago-type homes in close-in suburbs, such as Evanston and Oak Park. But the vast majority of images are from city neighborhoods, seemingly every city neighborhood, from Lake View to Bronzeville, from Old Town to Albany Park, from Beverly to South Shore to Belmont Cragin to Avondale to Ukrainian Village.
And, in contrast to a great many architecture books, Chicago Homes makes no judgments, finds nothing architecturally “shameful,” as the authors note:
In contrast to a great many architecture books, Chicago Homes makes no judgements, finds nothing architecturally “shameful."
This is decidedly not a book that will slap the hand (or eye?) of the reader who has altered their old home in some way. It’s a curious book that examines the built environment and tries to understand it.
In researching and writing this book, Thompson and Bruni have given free rein to their curiosity, and it’s a book for people who are curious about the homes they’ve lived in and about the homes on their street and about the homes to be found on every Chicago street. It’s a book about many things, and the authors list examples, ending with:
It’s a book about how a Perma-Stone salesman made a killing on Keeler Avenue and the homeowners felt like they lived in castles for a little while. Maybe they still do. We frankly hope they do, because we should all feel like kings and queens, and because that stuff is really hard to get off once it’s on there.
As they explain near the end of their book, Perma-Stone is the local brand name of faux stone siding which, since the 1940s, has been used to make a simple frame cottage look sort of castle-like. It gives the building “a stoney appearance” which inspires “both rabid hatred and nostalgic delight.”
Chicago Homes approaches its story chronologically and, for the most part, focuses on homes constructed before the 1930s, because that’s when most of the homes still standing in the city were built.
Its first two chapters deal with the century before the Great Fire of 1871, including the earliest Chicago homes, the invention of balloon-frame construction, and the design of workers cottages.
Covering 1871 to 1929, the next four chapters deal with the resurrection of the city from the ashes of the conflagration, such as the impact of fire regulations on the sorts of buildings being constructed in the city and in the nearby suburbs, many of which were incorporated into Chicago in 1889. A short chapter eight handles the Depression-World War II era (1930–1941) while a final chapter examines modern modifications to homes, such as vinyl siding, glass block windows and Perma-Stone.
Putting the Story into the Reader's Hands
In contrast to a mystery novel, Chicago Homes isn’t a book designed to answer a simple question. Rather, it’s a work that’s open-ended, one that puts the story into the reader's hands.
For instance, I was interested to find out that Classical Revival is an “everyday” version of Beaux Arts. Before reading Chicago Homes, I was very vague about both styles which, the authors explain, include some classical features, such as pediments, shields, finials and…columns.
Columns?!? It brought me to a quick stop because the home my wife and I have owned in Edgewater for the past 40-plus years is a brick two-flat with a porch featuring two thick yellow (hollow) columns. Now, I can think of our home as, at least, Classical Revival-ish.
Now, I can think of our home as, at least, Classical Revival-ish.
The same thing happened when I got to a page about the brick gambrel roofline of some remodeled bungalows, with an illustration that looked more than a little like the home my parents bought in the late 1960s for their very large family in the Ashburn neighborhood, near 79th Street and California Avenue.
It was the usual one-and-a-half-story bungalow that proliferated in the community, but what Bruni and Thompson call a large “shed” dormer had been added to the top. The barn-shaped addition turned the bungalow into a kind of odd-looking two-flat, large enough for a very large family.
Most other readers of Chicago Homes will find inside some version of their own home or some previous home or some interesting home across the street or one that you passed every morning and evening on a commute to school or work.
It’s that kind of book, very much a book about the whole city and its housing fabric but also very much a book that will resonate with each reader in a very personal and telling way.
Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture is available at bookstores and through the Agate Publishing website.
