CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Armed with tape measures and sketch pads, University of Illinois architecture students are documenting a historic modernist home in the Chicago suburbs.
A group of 11 students spent four days this fall measuring every inch of the Paul Schweikher House in Schaumburg, which architect Paul Schweikher built in 1937 as his home and studio. They are now producing detailed drawings of the home, which Schweikher called an “essay in brick, redwood and glass.” The students are part of architecture professor Paul Kapp’s course on recording historic buildings.
“You learn so much more about a building being there for an extended period of time and taking time to measure it and see how it was built,” said Carlie Wallin, a senior in architecture and the only undergraduate student in the course. “It also teaches us more about architecture that we can take to the studio, and how to apply better design practices.”
Seeing how Schweikher used bricks, beams and windows is helping Wallin think about how to design her studio project.
At the Schweikher House, she took notations and made drawings as two other members of her team measured the house’s exterior. Back in the classroom, she compiled all the drawings done by various students at the site into an overall floor plan and she has been working on adding detail to the drawing. The project helped the students learn how to record the information so it makes sense to the other people who will see their drawings and notes.
“Managing a set of drawings is a big part of an architecture practice,” Kapp said.
Along with field notes and photos, Wallin’s drawing and those produced by other students will be submitted to the National Park Service’s Historic American Building Survey for its national Charles E. Peterson Prize Competition for the best set of drawings produced by students. They will also be part of the Historic American Building Survey archive at the Library of Congress.
All of the buildings documented by Kapp’s students are on the National Register of Historic Places – a requirement of the National Park Service survey. His students have documented buildings across the state, “as grand as the Illinois Supreme Court and as humble as the Carnegie Library in Paxton,” Kapp said.
“It’s a great project. In the School of Architecture, we do this as a service to the state. Having this kind of outreach is important, especially with building owners who can’t afford a team of architects to come and meticulously measure everything,” he said.
Working on site making measurements, rather than learning about a historic building in the classroom, was what interested graduate student Andrew Nuding.
“That’s something that really attracted me to the course, to actually use a tape measure,” he said.
Nuding produced the image for the cover sheet of the report. While the other drawings for the report had to be very specific and accurate, his could be a little more creative.
“My job was to find the most attractive angle of the exterior of the building,” he said. “There’s not much verticality (in the drawing). To me, the low, intersecting planes seen in the selected view portrays a modernist composition in the prairie. It summed up the entire building.”
The design of the house was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style, Japanese forms and the 1930s International Style, which emphasized rectilinear forms, open interiors, lack of ornamentation, cantilevered construction and use of glass, steel and concrete construction materials.
“It really is ahead of its time in terms of modern architecture. It blended a lot of big ideas that were going on at that time,” Kapp said. “It’s truly an innovative building. In fact, it’s still very ahead of its time. It has some very green, sustainable features to it in terms of shading, sunlight and ventilation.”
The 2,500-square-foot house has a convection heating system and a flat roof with deep overhangs that provide shade in summer months.
Nuding was struck by how the building was designed for a rural landscape, its use of natural materials and its use of its environment to work with the mechanical systems.
“It actually uses the land itself to provide for things such as ventilation in the building. (The design) considered how sunlight enters the space, how it’s shaded. Almost every window can open to allow air to flow in a very specific way,” Nuding said. “That was the most fascinating part of it, to learn how really the building functions as a machine.
The project is sponsored by the Historic Preservation Education Foundation, which chose the Schweikher House for documentation. The foundation has an initiative to document significant modern architecture, Kapp said.