Take me back to Chicago

I must apologize to my readers for the lack of postings lately, but you see, I've been busy getting married!

Getting married (and its aftermath, and the preceding Christmas holidays) has involved a great deal of travel. Without further elaboration, have as a momentary filler some photos from my recent adventures in:

* Dubai, UAE


* Munich, Germany


* Clinton, Iowa


* Shreveport, Louisiana

Glass Block exhibit

I have a photo exhibit! It's a small compendium of Sculptured Glass Module photographs (such as those seen here.) Curated by Serhii Chrucky of Forgotten Chicago, it's on display this week only through December 6th, at University of Illinois Chicago. 5th Floor, Art & Design Hall. 400 S. Peoria. I'm eager to see it myself!

Fall comes to the North Shore

Fall leaves from Sheridan Road and elsewhere along Lake Michigan's northern shore.




The North Shore, from Evanston on up to Winnetka, is an unbelievable assemblage of wealth. Mansion after mansion lines Sheridan Road as it winds its way up the lake. Compared to the urban hustle of Chicago just a few miles south, the area is unbelievably sylvan and tranquil.




The houses are pretty unbelievable, and there's quite a few of architectural interest, but for now, let's just enjoy the pretty colors, shall we?

Unable to get its way, Chicago smashes all its toys and goes home

The Gropius in Chicago Coalition reports that Chicago has finally acknowledged Walter Gropius's role in designing the Michael Reese campus, and has therefore decided to save... one building.

Yeah.

I still don't get it. Did all those fancy words during the Olympic bid about Chicago's great cultural heritage mean nothing?

3550 Lake Shore Drive

If you drive down LSD enough at night, you've seen this striking MidCentury lobby.



It joins two massive 1962 apartment towers at 3550 Lake Shore Drive. Though the folded plate roof is modestly interesting, it wouldn't be enough to make the lobby a real show stopper. What does the trick is the abstract sculpture running the length of the lobby.



Clearly visible from the rushing highway, the work is by prolific sculptor Abbott Pattison. Its abstract shapes transform what would otherwise be a plain glass and stone lobby into a quintessentially 1960s mode of expression, and a highlight to be watched for as one flies down LSD.

Chi-(na)town

Chicago's Chinatown is an awkwardly formed place. It can be difficult to find, for one thing. And once there, it's easy to visit and come away thinking that the whole of it is contained on its main street, Wentworth Avenue. Certainly, it has most of the showstopper/predictably Chinese-styled architecture:









There's a lot more to the area geographically, though. West of Wentworth, a fairly typical older Chicago neighborhood is all that's left of the original streets of the area, severely hacked away by several surrounding freeways. Architecturally, it's of little note, but pleasant enough.

Chinatown's business district spills out along Cermak as well, though the street's large size and busy traffic make it intimidating to cross and essentially make these blocks isolated and inert compared to bustling Wentworth.



North of Cermak, a strangely underdeveloped triangle of land framed by Archer, Wentworth and Cermak is even more isolated, despite being a necessary bridge between Wentworth and the nearby Chinatown Square mall.



The mall is a recent development, dating back to the 1980s. It thrives despite a somewhat fortress-like attitude toward its neighborhood. It seems to offer virtually no connection to the adjacent streets, but a large central plaza -- maybe too large -- invites visitors to cross Archer and come explore. And once you're in, it's a small city of its own, filled with bustling restaurants and shops of every stripe.









An entire new neighborhood has risen north of Archer in recent years, on former railroad territory. Of course, it wouldn't be Chicago if it didn't involve marching ranks of nigh-identical buildings, but there are some interesting and pleasant spaces among them, and the decorative tastes of the owners leaves no doubt as to what part of town you're in.







And finally, there's the lovely Ping Tom Memorial Park along the river. Surrounded by active and busy railroads on three sides (including one that regularly cuts off the only route in and out of the park), it's not exactly a perfect oasis, but it has lovely views of the South Branch and the downtown skyline in the distance, and its winding paths are almost long enough to get away from it all.







These photos and more can be seen large at my Flickr space.

St. Gertrude Church

St. Gertrude (9613 Schiller Boulevard, Franklin Park, west side) isn't all that striking from the outside. It has bold massing and a strange hipped A-frame structure that makes it resemble a giant tent, but everything on the outside essentially exists to service the spaces inside.



And what spaces they are!





With its Flagrantly Fifties styling and decor, St. Gertrude has become one of my favorite local churches.

It's not just decorative flash, either. The architects pull a pretty slick little trick with the side aisles. Though the walls are a solid mass descending from the ceiling, they suddenly stop about ten feet from the floor, leaving only slender tapered columns to hold up the towering height above. The openings allow the floor space to expand outward, where a solid wall of stained glass creates a beautiful space.



Because so much visual and actual weight is crushing down on those columns, you kind of expect something similar to be happening with the side aisles. I stared at that stained glass side wall for a very long time, trying to figure out what held up the roof. Turns out the thicker window mullions are structural -- there's nothing above the ceiling, and no other columns anywhere.

As if that wasn't enough, the balcony floats freely across the sanctuary, a bridge supported only at its ends, as seen in the sanctuary view at top.



The lovely stained glass was designed by Peter Recker for Conrad Schmit Studio. A cavalcade of Judgement Day images cascades down the rear wall of the sanctuary (and you can tell Recker is fighting against that grid of window mullions -- look how Jesus's head is located just off-center), but it's the sidewalls that I love best, where light is filtered through a dazzling array of abstract color patterns.



Recker also did the Stations of the Cross.





The curved wall behind the crucifix bears a startling resemblance to the focal point in the chapel of St. Joseph Hospital, and sure enough, it's by the same architecture firm, Belli & Belli, who were responsible for a lot of the most awesomely crazy Modernist buildings in Chicago and its suburbs.

Plenty of spaces beyond the sanctuary offer interest as well. The protruding wings contain foyer space and stairwells to the balcony. The stairs are floating masses of terrazzo, with stylized railings, rising alongside a wall flecked with a grid of small window openings. Elaborately worked iron gates stand nearby as well.



The east wing contains the only real aberration in the building; a bathroom has been rather clumsily and awkwardly shoehorned into the end of the wing, complete with a false ceiling that one can look down on from the stairs. On the balance, it's a minor complaint, though.

I love a lot of church buildings, but this is one of the few that keeps me going back again just to absorb its spaces and soak in its architectural glory.

Empty Midcentury on Broadway

Piser Weinstein Menorah Chapel, 5206 N. Broadway, aka Furth Chapels



It's not a dazzling building, but its jumble of massing is intriguing. Each function of the building seems to have its own articulation, even its own facade material. And it's hard to fully judge a Modernist building when the windows are boarded over.

The funeral home appears to have operated into 2002, before moving to a new location in Skokie. Since then it's been vacant and boarded up, with a developer planning ot turn the land into new residential development.



Given its former use, the odds of this little Midcentury piece surviving are pretty slim. As detailed in an article in Chicago Real Estate Daily, the economic slowdown is the only reason the building is still standing.



Doomed along with it is this vacant turn of the century apartment house with retail in the base.

I'm sure the would-be developers imagined a massive apartment/condo blockbuster building, similar to others that have gone up along other sections of Broadway in recent years. But with the scent of the money trail gone cold, couldn't some thought be given to finding a new use for this little slice of 1960s style? Much of the lot is empty land. A small outbuilding is the only structure on the northern half of this large city lot -- plenty of room for new and old to co-exist.

Queen of Heaven Mausoleum

As much as I love historicist styles, at some point, it becomes clear the jig is up and it's time to move on.



Here, for example, we have Queen of Heaven Mausoleum, begun in 1956, and first opened in spring of 1957. It's a French Gothic styled building. Well, French Gothic Revival. Okay, Neo-French Gothic Revival, since Gothic had already been "revived" as an architectural style about a hundred years earlier. When it was built, World War II was 11 years in the past, televisions were becoming widespread, and Sputnik and the Interstate Highway would be coming down the pike very shortly. Art Deco and Streamline had already come and mostly gone.

I mean, really. Who was building French castles in 1956?

So I wasn't expecting much when I ventured inside the place on a recent Sunday afternoon. Faux Gothic archways would surely get old after a little while, right?

Probably so, but that's not what I found.









Inside its historicist shell, Queen of Heaven contains a cross-section of contemporary artistic thought circa 1960, and it is glorious indeed. 35 different kinds of marble are used in the interior finishes, and its corridors are lined with a dazzling array of contemporary religious art and iconography. Stained glass, metalwork, wood carving, stone sculpture, paintings, and mosaic tile are integrated throughout the building. No one style dominates, but nearly all of it is touched by the stylized trends of the 1950s.



And there is a ton of it. Queen of Heaven, built in three stages from 1956 through 1964, is the largest Catholic mausoleum in the world, and it is vast. One contemporary account puts the three floors of corridors at over a mile in total length, and it's not hard to believe.





Much of the artwork (if not all) may be attached the Studios of Daprato Statuary Company, with offices in New York and Chicago. Daprato Studios ran an ad in the Chicago Tribune in 1961, proudly proclaiming their role in the vast undertaking. The Archdiocese also advertised the new facility on the same day. Later paintings were completed by Albert Henselmann and Italo George Botti.



Even the furniture gets in on the act. A series of lamps, mini-couches, armchairs, and end tables cover a miniature spectrum of design ideas. Note the dot-outlined flames on the lampshades above, for example, and the embossed building images on these chairs:











The building itself was designed in stages, with the Gothic central wing and its landmark tower coming first. Nothing in my research attributes the building to a particular firm, but it's a fair bet that Detroit architectural firm Harley, Ellington and Day was responsible, as they did the subsequent west and south wings. The central wing opened in spring of 1957, with room for 7,000 burials, 3 shrines, a main chapel and 4 supplemental chapels. Its $4,000,000 construction cost was covered entirely by advance burial purchases.

The central wing was followed in 1960 by the Queen of Angels wing to the south, designed by Harley, Ellington and Day in a slightly modernized Gothic style (HED was also responsible for the Neo-Formalist Resurrection Mausoleum in nearby Justice, IL.) The large exterior statues on the two side wings were designed by sculptor Ferenc Varga of Detroit, and executed by Gaetano and Alfred Roselli, Italian-born immigrants who worked on the Tribune Tower decades earlier.

A third wing, Queen of All Saints, was designed by recently renamed firm of Harley, Ellington, Cowin & Stirton and completed in 1964, bringing the total capacity of the building to 30,000 interments.

45 years later, it's only 3/4ths full, a testimony to its vast size.



The mausoleum is intended to function as two buildings in one; the dead are contained within their own structure, with its own ventilation system. Despite that, more than a whiff of embalming fluid pervades the air. I spent nearly two hours exploring, and by the time I left I was quite ready to breath fresh air.



But I left with regret. Queen of Heaven Mausoleum is a treasure trove of Midcentury art and design, some of it among the best and most creative I've seen anywhere. Some of the central pieces, just to cite one example, are these semi-stained glass bas relief sculptures. They appear in key points along the building, such as the main chapel, whose central window looms over the busy intersection of Wolf and Roosevelt. They seem to be executed in a hard painted plastic, with slits, cuts, and notches allowing strategic slits of light through. They are two-sided; the outside of the window gets a fully realized sculpture as well. Unlike many stained glassed designs, there is no front or back to these works. The sculptures are artwork in their own right, even when viewed under full light. In the dim light of the mausoleum, with the daylight streaming through them, they become something else, dark, backlit, haunting, foreboding, and magnificent... like the rest of the mausoleum.



These photos and more may be seen at my Flickr account.

Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead

Am I the only one who thinks that the name "Resurrection Health Care" is utterly hilarious?

Former Jewel Food Stores

In the 1930s, during the height of the Art Deco craze, Jewel Food Stores constructed a series of identical stores all across Chicagoland. Many of these buildings, with their distinct glazed white facades, survive today. I've found six to date, but I imagine there are many more.

I can't find the first word about these buildings online; it's only thanks to Jacob at Forgotten Chicago that I even know what they used to be. Even the exhaustive research at Pleasant Family Shopping barely mentions the 1930s style buildings. I can speculate that the white glazed tile appealed to the sense of modernity and hygiene, which was becoming a more common concern at the time.

The little storefront buildings are quite adaptable; they're serving all kinds of purposes today, from clothing and furniture to liquor sales. Several are home to independent ethnic grocers.


Bryn Mawr, west of the river


Devon Avenue


N. Broadway in Uptown


Lawrence Avenue, west of the Red Line


Devon Avenue, way out west by the Metra tracks


Cicero at 33rd Street

The industrial wonders of northwest Indiana

Whiting. Hammond. East Chicago. Calumet City. Pullman. Harvey. Dixmoor. Blue Island. Gary. As I slowly become more familiar with the southern reaches of Chicagoland, these names gain more and more resonance for me. Each speaks of strange contrasts, lands of tidy lawns and raw industry, urban decay and pastoral emptiness. It's a land slightly mythologized by the movie Blues Brothers, whose grungy titular characters rarely ventured north of the Loop. It is a region that has worked hard and sacrificed much over the decades, the city's blue collar underbelly, the engine that drove Chicago to its industrial peak, only to be abandoned and neglected when US industry began collapsing.



Despite the hard times, a lot of heavy industry remains here. The Port of Chicago operates here, receiving a steady trickle of Great Lakes freighters. And from Whiting, all the way into Michigan, a line of industrial sites makes Highway 912 one of the most amazing places on the planet.

The industrial sprawl once started much further north, within the Chicago city limits, at the site of the US Steel South Works, once the largest steel mill complex on the planet. That facility closed nearly two decades ago, and was leveled to the ground. With the subsequent demolition of the mills and factories along S. Torrence Avenue to the west, large-scale industry has mostly vanished from the Chicago City limits.

Despite the decline, even the most cursory overview of the industrial regions is a big undertaking. The action today, then, begins at the Chicago Skyway bridges, which soar to incredible heights to cross the Grand Calumet River.



Below the skyway bridges, a profusion of industrial sites loads ships and barges, as tugs and speedboats drift past. A trio of movable railroad bridges stands abandoned, their tracks long since torn up, too big and cumbersome to demolish.





After the Skyway bridges, one passes the looming State Line Generating Station, which sits just yards away from the Indiana/Illinois border.





Rolling on southward, you'll pass a profusion of casinos, gas stations, medium industrial sites (including the sometimes overpowering smell of Lever soap being manufactured). This land is essentially one continuous urban development, but the "town" of Whiting is one of several here that has its own distinct main street and central business district. Whiting also abuts an enormous refining complex owned by British Petroleum.







The BP plant sprawls all the way up to the first of the steel mills, the huge facility of Ispat Inland Steel, built on a peninsula made of landfill. Crushed between the two complexes is the tiny planned workers' village of Marktown, one of the most incredibly isolated residential neighborhoods you're ever likely to find, and well worth a post of its own.





If there's a center to all this insanity, it's the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, which runs right through the center of the Ispat Inland complex, and is crossed by a dizzying array of bridges and overpasses.



Highway 912, aka Cline Avenue, provides an elevated view of the Inland Ispat complex, bringing you nose-to-nose with some of their gargantuan buildings and flying high above their grounds.



Cline Avenue turns away from the lake as it continues south, but the industrial sprawl continues. As soon as Ispat Inland's reign ends, US Steel begins. US Steel is the reason Gary exists; they constructed the city as their own company town. Their mini-empire runs for miles along the lake, and consumes the vast majority of Gary's lakefront.

US Steel's Gary Works is frustratingly inaccessible. Multiple entry points are steadfastly guarded against such wayward rouges as photographers, explorers, and curiosity seekers.



Once you finally get past US Steel, the lakeshore of Gary is quite lovely, marking the beginning of the Indiana Dunes lakeshore park. Due to some Machiavellian bargaining back in the 1950s, part of the dunes was carved away to provide room for still more industry, another steel mill (likewise inaccessible) and a power plant at Michigan City that looms over some of the beaches.





It can be a shock to look back from east Gary's waterfront and suddenly realize how far you've come from Chicago, whose skyline is 30 miles distant and barely visible across the lake. And it's a bigger shock to realize the amount of industry you've passed along the way.

Reese and Gropius - tomorrow at CAF

"Gropius in Chicago: A Legacy on the Brink"

Come down to the Chicago Architecture Foundation tomorrow (Wednesday, August 26 at noon, free) for a lecture on the role that Walter Gropius had in shaping Chicago's endangered Michael Reese Hospital complex. Grahm Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition presents.

Separated at birth?

Compare this breezeway apartment building on 95th Street with this trio of 3-flats on 79th Street.





They have nearly the same decorative elements, just used differently!

Meanwhile, here's a distant cousin, up north on Western Avenue:



If you're like me, you've passed by it many times without being able to stop and appreciate its lovely geometry. The angled concrete panels work to conceal a joint in the building, where it changes roof heights. The curved entry and the angled edges both dive playfully into the ground.

LATE Ride 2009

Scenes from the 2009 Chicago L.A.T.E. Ride:













Many more at my Flickr account.

Be warned... this link may make you sick

SASAKI AND COLLINS PARKS AND LANDSCAPES DESTROYED

The City of Chicago has destroyed countless trees, shrubs, and landscapes within the Michael Reese complex. The pictures are stunning. The City should be ashamed.

Reader roundup

Some great articles in last week's and this week's Reader.

Regarding Michael Reese Hospital and the Olympics:
* Michael Reese Hospital: The First Sacrificial Lamb


Regarding the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago:
* An Odd Way to Honor Burnham - Lynn Becker takes on the process by which the centennial pavilion architects were selected (and, incidentally, slaps down some gibberish from Colin Rowe and his followers about how "there was no Chicago School of architecture".)

* The Big Aluminum Hot Potato - will the centennial pavilions ever actually be finished?

* Go Ahead, Make Little Plans - a challenge to the Last Four Miles proposal (a plan which, by the by, I support wholeheartedly. It's ridiculous that one can't bike to Rogers Park via the lakefront.)

MidCentury Suburbs Part 7: Modernize your garage door!

The garage door was yet another point of elaborate decoration for the MidCentury home. It provided a broad canvas for designers to decorate; in the 1950s and 1960s, the automobile was newly risen to its place of supreme importance, and its home was something to be celebrated -- as was the design innovation of the attached garage, a new luxury for most home buyers at the time.

Raynor Door, based not far from Chicago in Dixon, IL, was a major vendor of both doors and the patterns for them.

Two patterns were particularly prevalent, and can still be found by the dozens today:











But the designs ranged all over the place. Asymetrical patterns were common:





Another common theme involved a series of small, repeating patterns instead of one big one:






Such small patterns were often another reflection of the Old West influence on Chicago's MidCentury suburbia, as seen in this rope-like pattern:





Small patterns didn't have to cover the whole door; they could form a border pattern instead:



In the age of Kennedy's Camelot and the attendant New Formalism, you too can be a king!


With your very own caligraphy-styled monogram!


Or you can just be stunningly modern, classy, and geometrically smooth.





Or exuberantly modern...


You can shout your modernity to the world!




Or you can quietly wait for the world to notice it.


There is no end to the patterns. Still more may be seen at my Flickr account.

Quarry town

The fascination of a rock quarry isn't hard to grasp. Here in the unendingly flat Midwest, a quarry is a shocking interruption of the landscape. The walls are vertical cliffs, their relief impressive in their own right and doubly so in the middle of so much prairie land.

The artificial depths seem ominously unstable; despite the solid beds of rock that line their walls, it is hard to behold a quarry without feeling that somehow, Nature will strike back, bring the walls crumbling down, reclaim the pit, fill the vacuum. Land dikes separating quarry pits look precarious to begin with, even before they are pierced by Gothic arch-shaped openings to permit communication between pits. And water inevitably finds its way in, requiring constant pumping. The thought of water overwhelming the works of man is, I suspect, a primal fear on some level. Here it's not just a shadowy thought, but frank reality.



The quarry pit is a window into the Earth, showing us a slice of what lies buried under our feet. Rock strata that have not seen daylight in millions of years lay exposed to the world. Tunnels hint at darker depths still. The invasion of water gives one a visual grasp of the water table, the rivers moving below the earth's surface.



And finally, the sheer volume of material removed to create these pits beggars imagination.



All this effort goes to remove minerals and rocks from the earth. A city the size of Chicago uses a lot of rocks. They doesn't just go into those MidCentury buildings I'm so fond of; they're cut and crushed and used as aggregate for concrete, gravel ballast for railroads, rip-rap for the lakefront, and many other purposes.

Being really heavy, rock is best harvested locally, and to that end there's a surprising number of quarries to be found around Chicagoland.

Thorton Quarry
Thorton (the subject of all the above photographs) is the biggest and by far the most famous of Chicago's rock quarries. The reason is obvious: not only is it huge, but it's spanned by a massive and busy highway atop a two-hundred-foot high land dike.




Views of Thornton Quarry are also easy to come by from the surrounding public roads. Access is limited by fencing, of course, but through the links one can see deep into the quarry's depths.



Thorton consists of four main pits, collectively forming one of the largest quarries in the world. Three of them are readily visible from the various roads hemming the site in. The material removed from here is for aggregates -- the little bits of solid stuff that goes into concrete and various other materials.



The northernmost pit, shown here, is being converted to a stormwater holding facility, for when strong storms overwhelm the city's deep tunnel storage system.



Tours of the facility are offered twice a year, and they fill up months in advance.

* Birds eye view at bing.com
* Thorton Quarry at Wikipedia


McCook Quarry
One of several pits operated in Chicagoland by Vulcan Materials Company, this pit operates beyond the city's upper southwestern limits, covering some 650 acres. Sadly, very little of its depths are visible from public roads.





Speaking of pubic roads, McCook's operations have apparently destabilized one. Joliet Road crosses the quarry on a land dike, similar to the Tri-State's route across Thornton. But the road has been closed since the 1990s, fenced, barricaded and overgrown with weeds.



* McCook Quarry official web site


McCook is one of a string of quarries in the area; two more are directly northeast of it:

Reliable Materials Lyons Quarry
Somehow I missed this one on the ground, despite being only a mile away and on a very specific mission to visit quarries. I'll get it some day!

* Reliable Materials Lyons Quarry aerial view


Unknown quarry, La Grange


Like McCook, very little of this one is visible from public roads. This is about the best view one can get from outside the property, and you'd better be prepared to hoist your camera up high.

* Aerial view


A skim through Vulcan's list of Illinois facilities turns up quite a few additonal quarries in and around Chicagoland, and a Google search shows even more. Most are either much smaller operations, or else are far out in the countryside, away from the developed lands that help make Thorton so remarkable. A couple of the more notable and nearby ones are:

Elmhurst Chicago Stone Quarry



This former quarry now functions as a storm runoff holding facility for DuPage County.



I've seen it from an airplane, but I have yet to visit on the ground.

* Aerial view, showing the quarry flooded
* Elmhurst Quarry Flood Control Facility, with live images!


* Bolingbrook Quarry - aerial view
* Official site

* Laraway Quarry, Joliet - aerial view
* Offical site

* Romeo Stone Quarry - aerial view

MidCentury Suburbs Part 6: A catalog of housing types

The city of Chicago exploded into the 1950s and 1960s. Thousands and thousands of houses and apartments rose up on the ever-expanding urban frontier, in a remarkably unified ensemble of styles. There's endless variation in the architectural details, but a great deal of it happens within a small range of fundamental building types.

The Bungalow/Ranch


Chicago's famous "Bungalow Belt" began rising before the World Wars, but didn't stop when the World Wars were over. The Bungalow simply cast off its original Craftsman-styled details and traded them in for MidCentury ones. Red-brown brick, stone lintels and quoins, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired art glass, semi-octagonal bay windows, Spanish tile roofs, dormer windows and heavy eaves disappeared.



In their place came blond and orange brick, built-in planters, decorative wall panels of rough stone or elegant Roman brick, glass block, picture windows, geometrically designed front doors, patterned storm doors, and stylish door hardware.

These houses are compact and efficient, sitting tidily on a rectangular foundation, one story over a raised basement. The most classic style has a low-pitch roof with a hipped gable -- not quite the flat roof that High Modernism demanded, but a valiant attempt to minimize the roof's impact while maintaining the practical advantages of a pitched roof.

I'm honestly not even sure if "bungalow" is the right term for them. They certainly aren't ranch houses, however, and I've never seen the word "cottage" used to describe a Chicago house.







The Townhouse
Also known as the rowhouse, the townhouse does exist in MidCentury garb, but it's not an easy housing type to spot in the wild. They're so unusual, in fact, that I hardly have any in my archives, and the ones I do have look more like they came from the Northwest woods than the northwest suburbs.



Townhouses consist of individual housing units sharing common side walls, but with no units above or below, and each with its own entrance. MidCentury versions are usually either one or two stories high (older versions go even higher), and are commonly arranged perpendicular to the street, with two rows facing a common courtyard.





The 3 Flat
The 3 Flat is a Chicago classic: three (sometimes 2 or 4) apartments vertically stacked, accessed by a stairwell on one side. Though there are plenty of pre-War examples, it's the MidCentury version that really codified the style and made it Chicago's own.



The standard version -- and there's hardly any example that isn't the standard version -- is two stories over basement. The basement may be a third apartment, or just a basement (that's the 2-flat version; the 4-flat version pretty much disappeared after World War 2.) Huge picture windows for each unit are requisite, projecting an image of clean, bright, modern spaces.

The stairs most often entered through a shared doorway, often under a little porch roof. Occasional variants will have two doorways. Endless decorative variety surrounds the doorway. I've seen planters, curved stairs, ornate ironwork in the railings and porch columns, glass block patterns, and an assortment of storm doors. And of course the doors themselves were the canvas for some brilliantly creative carpenters. Solid angled walls sometimes surround the entry, in stone or brick, occasionally with light holes poked through them.



The stairway is most commonly illuminated by a large panel of glass block. Sometimes it's divided into strips. More rarely, colored blocks are used to create patterns. A handful feature sculpture panels in place of the glass block, favoring the outward appearance over natural light.











The 6-flat
Three-flats are generally long, narrow buildings, their short ends facing the street. For longer lots, the floor plan could be turned sideways and then mirrored, resulting in the 6-flat apartment building, two stacks of three apartments all sharing a common stairwell.



The 6-flat shares many decorative styles with the 3-flat. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the broad street-facing side walls of the 6-flat frequently become the canvas for decorative elements, such as stone panels and decorative lamps. The stairwell illumination panel became more creative as well -- colored glass block is more common on 6-flats, as are bottle glass and panels of translucent colored plastic.

6-flats were often paired with a mirror-image twin, both perpendicular to the street, with access from the street and alley via a pair of sidewalks.



3-flats often presented only a front facade to the street, with most of the building wrapped in cheaper Chicago common brick. 6-flats, with their entrances on the broad face, usually don't have that luxury; perhaps aided by the economy of scale, they often had much more extensive decoration than their smaller cousins.







The types pictured above are perhaps the most iconic Chicago style, but this flexible building type had several variants. A popular south side version features recessed balconies for each living unit, with the brick walls protruding from the body of the building to provide privacy, separation, and enclosure.





6-flats can have their broad or narrow faces against the street; the entry can be on or off the street in either configuration.







The X-flat
Just as the 6-flat is a doubled 3-flat, so could additional units could be strung together to match the length of any lot, to make a 9- or 12- or whatever-number-you-want-flat building. The example below strings together three 6-flats for a total of 18 units.



On narrow lots perpendicular to the street, a small L-leg at the end of the lot could also provide additional floor area, closing off the block and creating a sort of half-courtyard.



A longer L-leg could give the unbuilt portion of the lot enough presence to hold a street corner, as on these Belmont Avenue-area 9-flats.





As with other types, mirroring the building could result in a court-yard like setting, such as this pair of 9-flats on S. Cottage Grove.



From the mirrored-pair, L-shaped X-flat, it's a short step to connect the two buildings, resulting in the courtyard building.



The courtyard walkup
The courtyard apartment transcends architectural styles, being a common feature of every 20th Century Chicago landscape. In its MidCentury guise, it is essentially a series of 3- and 6-flats linked together by a connecting wing.
That wing could be a small extension of the corner apartments, or it could be a whole stack of 3 or 6 apartments with their own shared entrance.



They frequently feature balconies, which tend to be rare on their smaller counterparts.

The wings could be thickened up as well, essentially forming two 6-flats at the street.







The breezeway apartment
I have no proof, but I strongly suspect this style was imported lock stock and barrel from California and Florida. Where else would it be considered a good idea to have the hallways on the outside?





These are essentially single-loaded corridor buildings -- a hallway with rooms on one side only. Instead of enclosing the hallway, however, it's left open to the elements, doubling as a porch and public gathering space. It's a great idea in mild climates. In Chicago, however... well, I have to wonder how much salt they have to dump on those walkways in the winter.

The stairwells are more sheltered, typically open only at their entrances; sometimes they have one or more doors. Their massive stone or brick faces are the usual points of decoration for the building.







Again, mirroring this long, thin style results in an enclosed courtyard. In the instance shown here, free-floating catwalks connect the breezeways of both buildings.





Beyond these types, the next step up is the Four-Plus-One, covered in careful detail over at Forgotten Chicago. It's essentially a corridor/elevator building, floating over a covered parking area.

There are other types as well: split-level ranches, "flying-wing" roof single families, and taller elevator/corridor buildings. These types, however, tend not to share the common design vocabulary of the flats and bungalows, making them more distant cousins of the types listed here, and not as distinctively native to Chicago.