CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Erik Hemingway says his Urbana home, designed by the late architect John Replinger, is a well-kept secret. With its floor-to-ceiling windows across the back looking onto a golf course, a feeling of openness and spaciousness inside, and an interior courtyard, it’s an example of midcentury modern architectural style.
“It’s got those classic lines,” Hemingway said. “Even though it was designed 50 years ago, it has aged well. It has an international appeal. It is very solid.”
Hemingway, a University of Illinois architecture professor and a practicing designer, has an interest in modernist architecture. His rehabilitation work on his Urbana home and other modern buildings is part of a new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum. “Erik Hemingway Modernism” is part of “Speculative Visions of Pragmatic Architectures,” which opened Jan. 29 at the museum.
His part of the exhibition documents work on the Urbana home and two apartments in a Mies van der Rohe building in Chicago, including photographs of the Replinger house by Phillip Kalantzis-Cope. Hemingway’s research interest is looking at how architects such as Replinger and A. Quincy Jones were influenced by earlier masters of modernism, such as Mies van der Rohe and Richard Neutra.
Hemingway said Champaign-Urbana has a surprising number of modernist homes.
“There’s kind of a closet modernism in some neighborhoods,” he said.
Not all are in good condition, however. His Replinger home had a great deal of damage from moisture, with cracks on the walls and ceilings throughout the home. In addition to rehabilitating that home, he upgraded two apartments in the Mies van der Rohe building while “still respecting the bones of the building and the details of the apartments.”
Hemingway tried to do the renovations economically, with materials that can be purchased at big box stores, to show homeowners on budgets that they can afford to maintain a modernist home. He hopes his work and the museum exhibition will lead to more appreciation of modernist homes.
The other part of the “Speculative Visions of Pragmatic Architectures” exhibition shows work from the U. of I. School of Architecture’s Detail and Fabrication program. The program emphasizes the process of making, great attention to detail and hands-on experimentation with materials, said architecture professor Jeffery Poss, curator of the exhibition.
“We’re very much interested in the process of making, not just what it looks like at the end, but how you make it, the methodology,” he said. “You can apply that to any scale, if you know how to do it.”
There has been great interest in recent years in working with new materials and new technologies in architecture, Poss said.
The exhibition includes a concept of an adaptive building strategy for use in flooded areas, as well as furniture designed and made in the Detail and Fabrication lab. Two stools and a small side table represent both traditional and newer forms of making, Poss said. The stools’ wooden legs were made using traditional millwork techniques, while the seats and side table were made from a digitally created mold that was produced using a computer-controlled router and then used for casting concrete.
Building a piece of furniture is a good way for students to learn the entire design process from conception to finished product, Poss said.
Hugh Swiatek, fabrication coordinator at the School of Architecture, will demonstrate how designers are using advanced digital fabrication equipment to make various objects at an architecture workshop from 6 to 8 p.m. Feb. 4. The workshop, “Technology in Making: Use of Advanced Fabrication Equipment in Craft,” will be at 3 Art East Annex, Studio One, Architecture Annex, 1208 W. Peabody Drive, Urbana.
Poss will lead a gallery conversation about the Krannert Art Museum exhibition, along with Hemingway, Swiatek and Brian Vesely, lead designer at his make-lite design studio, at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 19 at the museum.
To reach Jeffery Poss, email poss@illinois.edu. To reach Erik Hemingway, email ehem@illinois.edu.
More information on the exhibition and related events is available online. For more information about Krannert Art Museum exhibitions, contact Julia Kelly at jkell@illinois.edu.
