The team chosen to
lead the rehabilitation of The House of Tomorrow was announced this month by
Indiana Landmarks and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The House of
Tomorrow--America’s first all-glass residence, designed by Chicago architect
George Fred Keck for the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair
and named a National Treasure last year by the National Trust--currently
sits, dilapidated, atop a sand dune at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in
Beverly Shores.
The design team
working to rehabilitate America’s first glass house includes the following
Chicago-based firms: bKL Architecture; Bauer Latoza Studio; Wiss, Janney,
Elstner Associates, Inc.; Willoughby Engineering; and HJKessler Associates.
Last fall Indiana
Landmarks and the National Trust launched a $2.5-million campaign to restore
the house, and National Park Service and Indiana State Historic Preservation
staff will ensure the project meets preservation standards.
“In the midst of
the Great Depression, the House of Tomorrow offered 39 million World’s Fair
visitors an optimistic look into the future of residential architecture and
modern technology, with a focus on how advancements in science and
technology could improve daily life,” Indiana Landmarks and the National
Trust said in a statement released this week. The goal is “to restore the
House of Tomorrow while sharing Keck’s goal of making it a visionary
dwelling, this time for the twenty-first century.”
“In his design for
the House of Tomorrow, Keck underscored the fair’s theme by showing people a
new way to live in what the media called ‘America’s First Glass House,’” the
statement said. “The glass curtain-wall structure predates Mies van der
Rohe’s 1951 Farnsworth House in Illinois and Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass
House in Connecticut.”
“The large expanses
of glass introduced the concept of passive solar energy as a sustainable
heating technique for the first time,” the statement noted. “Four years
later, Keck developed Thermopane glass with the Libbey-Owens-Ford company.
In his long career--he died in 1980--he designed 300 passive solar houses,
most in the Chicago area.”
“Keck also
introduced new inventions and modern conveniences in the House of Tomorrow,
including an ‘iceless’ refrigerator, the first-ever General Electric
dishwasher, and an open floor plan--an innovation in 1933,” the statement
added. “To create the twelve glass sides, Keck designed a central hub of
posts connected to girders that radiated like the spokes of a wheel. A
central steel core contained mechanical equipment. The cantilevered girders
provide support for the concrete-slab second and third floors, along with
slender steel columns, allowing clear spans for open interior spaces.”
When the World’s
Fair closed in 1934, Chicago developer Robert Bartlett used barges and
trucks to ship the House of Tomorrow and other Century of Progress
structures to Beverly Shores. Five Century of Progress houses were sold and
remained in private hands until the land became part of the Indiana Dunes
National Lakeshore between 1966 and the early 1970s.
“All five were
listed in the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s, but by the
mid-1990s the homes were in alarmingly poor condition,” the statement said.
“Since there was no public money to restore the houses, Indiana Landmarks
proposed a solution that hadn’t been previously considered: long-term
leases.”
Indiana Landmarks
subsequently leased the Century of Progress houses from the National Park
Service, and over the last 15 years has subleased four of the five to
individuals who restored them in exchange for a long-term residency. The
restoration cost for each house--borne solely by the sub-lessees--has since
reached over $1 million. The House of Tomorrow, however, posed unusual
challenges and led Indiana Landmarks to tackle the rehabilitation itself.