As any Chicagoan can attest, the city is a testament to architecture. But that doesn’t just include skyscrapers one might see in the Loop; it also includes the various types of residences throughout the city—homes that come with rich histories.
InChicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture, LGBTQ+ preservation/sustainability consultant Carla Bruni teams with Wonder City Studio President Phil Thompson to present an entertainingly detailed guide to the architecture of the buildings in which most Chicagoans live.
Recently, Bruni talked withWindy City Times aboutChicago Homes, the future of architecture and much more.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Windy City Times: Please talk about the book’s genesis and your collaboration with Phil Thompson.
Carla Bruni: Well, I’ve been writing about this stuff for close to 20 years. I work for a housing nonprofit, the Chicago Bungalow Association, and I’m the go-to person for a lot of things because we have 30,000 members and a staff of seven.
Phil and I both had work at a gallery show on the South Side of Chicago, in Pullman. I was already a huge fan of his work, and he had done a little work for the association. A few months later, he reached out to me and said, “I literally have thousands of drawings of homes that I’ve done and I wanted a more lasting and meaningful way to use them.” And I wanted to write a book about this stuff forever, and I’ve wanted to do it with an illustrator.
We worked on it for three years and got along incredibly well. We both felt strongly about having accessible language and I tried to be funny; he wrote some of the early parts of the book. It was just great timing and our missions matched up.
WCT: Early in the book, it’s stated that “Chicago’s identity has shaped, and has been shaped by, its residential architecture.” Now you’re not discounting commercial architecture, correct?
CB: It’s commercial as well—but residential buildings are a bit of a different animal. To write this book, it was really important to look at the social, political, racial and ethnic [variables] that changed in society, because those changes are reflected in our housing. Sometimes, it can be reflected in the commercial, too—but the way we live every day.
For example, take the courtyard apartment buildings, which are a very Chicago thing. They were mostly built in the 1920s but they really came out of tenement reform in the early 20th century. And then there was science—people discovered that germs, not bad character, made people sick. [Laughs] So there were these reforms, hence the courtroom apartment design.
But there was also this connection between single-family home ownership and morality. So if you lived in a multiunit building, God knows what you’re doing in there—since you’re crammed in with all those strangers. And that actually influenced courtyard buildings; hallways were designed so they more closely resembled single-family homes, for example. There are all of these things that we don’t think about that have literally shaped our houses.
Also, we have these funky, long lots. Like with bungalows that came from the West Coast (although they’re originally from India), Chicagoans had to turn them [a particular] way so it had a shorter front so we smashed things into our lots here.
WCT: And it’s interesting how you might associate a housing style with a particular Chicago neighborhood. In the Gold Coast, you see the rowhouses; in other neighborhoods, you’ll see the courtyard buildings you mentioned.
CB: Right. And rowhouses tend to be earlier. Rowhouses are basically two-flats or three-flats that are stuck together, going back to that idea of single-home ownership and morality.
WCT: I didn’t see this place mentioned in the book, but what type of house is the Henry Gerber House? [Note:Located at 1710 N. Crilly Ct., thethen-boarding housewas the meeting place of the first official organization in the country that advocated for equal rights for gay people.]
CB: I know that became a landmark not too long ago. Let’s see. [Bruni researches.] I would call it Classical Revival, which is a catch-all term for buildings that have certain Classical elements—nice limestone front, a rusticated arch. Anytime I see something like that being acknowledged, it makes me pretty happy.
WCT: Is there a particular style that seems to be endangered?
CB: The Chicago Bungalow Association was started in 2000 becausethosewere being torn down left and right, but now people love bungalows. That tends to happen: There’s a window of time when people hate something—but they like it again 20 years later. I’m actually worried about two-flats; they’re being torn down or being converted into single-family homes. DePaul did a really great study a few years ago about two-flats; it was about the urgency involved with losing that middle-housing stock.
Workers’ cottages are always being screwed around with; people tear them down because they’re smaller [structures]. We have theWorkers’ Cottage Initiativethat started a few years ago. Basically, the smaller a house is, the more vulnerable it is.
WCT: At one point in the book, you say that nothing is architecturally shameful. Does that apply to the boxy buildings on Lake Shore Drive?
CB: [Laughs] I’m talking about stuff through World War II. There can be a really judgmental side to preservation and I work in neighborhoods where there’s been a ton of disinvestment. I’m not going to go through a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of historically racist crap and judge somebody if they made choices that don’t look pristine. That’s more in line with what I mean. Not everybody has the means to do everything to the nines.
This is not a book about preservation in the capital “P” sense. It’s about celebrating how we live and what our houses have looked like. There’s a lot of maintenance that’s changed how things have looked over the years. I don’t know about you, but I know that I look different than I did decades ago. [Laughs] I just want anyone who has an older house to feel like they can pick up this book and see their story.
WCT: What do you feel is the single biggest advancement—whether technological or something else—that kickstarted a particular architectural style?
CB: Certainly, air conditioning really changed things. It may not matter as much how your house was oriented regarding solar gain. Lighting was a huge thing, too; it revolutionized everything. The world wars also changed things in terms of materials.
And tenement reform really changed things. Social movements, like arts and crafts, really changed things such as bungalows having windows because they’re trying to bring the outdoors inside. Even today, you can say that we’re more focused on interior spaces than exterior ones.
WCT: I know that you deal primarily with preservation but where do you see residential architecture going?
CB: I think we have an economy in this country that’s really focused on construction, and I have a lot of concerns about where it’s going. We obviously have an affordable housing crisis, and older buildings still tend to have a higher density of people. And anytime you build something new on a lot where something’s been torn down, it’s going to be more expensive than what was there before—always.
I also have environmental concerns. I work with architectural salvage and energy-efficiency work. And about 40% of our landfill waste is from construction and demolition debris. In Chicago, there’s nothing stopping people from throwing buildings out. You could never afford to purchase the housing stock that’s being torn down today.
We need to do a lot of rethinking and start looking at our existing older architecture as real treasures instead of eyesores. At the same time, we need to make sure there’s available repair funding to keep people in their homes.
WCT: What do you want people to take away from this book?
CB: I don’t think we save anything by lecturing and regulating the heck out of them. If you can show people that they already have awesome houses and why, [that’s better]. I think Phil and I just wanted to bring out those stories that are relatable and that make you understand more. And, to me, the more people know about their homes, the more people can feel pride in them.
Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture can be found at Amazon and other online retailers.
