Roy Solfisburg is an architect who works on big projects.
The sprawling Western Electric building in Lisle comes from his drawing board. So do the Sports Aquatic Center and the McGaw Memorial Hall renovation at Northwestern University; the Saenger Theatre restoration in Pensacola, Fla.; the senior-citizen center in Wheeling, Ill.; and the ambulatory care center of the Veterans Administration hospital complex in Chicago–just to name a few. A partner with the venerable firm of Holabird and Root, he thinks in terms of thousands of feet to be used by hundreds of people.
But when he goes home at night, the flip side of Solfisburg`s architectual personality emerges. He thinks small–small, as in single-family home. Solfisburg`s fascination with geometry, with blending beauty with comfort and an occasional touch of whimsy, of blending also the contemporary with the old have translated into plans for uniquely innovative single-family dwellings.
”When the client is myself and my family, I just have wonderful fun,”
he says.
He has built two homes for his family, one on the North Shore and the other, a vacation home, on a narrow strand of land–an island–on Florida`s Gulf Coast. He`s now working on a home for his brother.
Home on the North Shore is a long, white stucco structure that sits sideways on its lot. The house, designed and built in 1977, looks somewhat like a white butterfly, its two boxy wings held together by a ”body” of
windows and stairs. The dramatic, top-to-bottom windows are angled on each side of the front doorway and look out at a horseshoe-shaped formal English garden whose bright colors change with each season.
But because the butterfly faces the side of the yard and the end of the house quietly faces the street, there`s little indication to the passerby that this house is much different from any of the other older, traditional homes on the street. A person could easily drive by without taking any special note.
That`s not the case with the Florida house. It looms dramatically into view at the end of a hardpacked shell driveway–a big squarish box of a house with a steeply pitched roof and a softly rounded porch perched on legs
–resembling a giant treehouse floating toward the water.
Solfisburg`s Chicago-area house is classic contemporary–sleek, clean-cut, precise and sharply angled. The Florida house is whimsically romantic and geometrically dramatic. Its severe Gothic lines merge into the softness of Queen Anne-inspired curves of the gazebo. Solfisburg calls it a ”sculptural object”; the house, quite simply, is an attention-getter.
It was the wilderness setting of Captiva Island, a five-mile-long and 1,000-foot wide spit of land off the coast from Ft. Myers, that caught the imagination of Solfisburg, his wife, Edna, and their two children.
”It`s the place–it is so private . . . you can go up and down the East Coast (Florida) and not find anything like this. It`s very, very beautiful,” he said. ”The dolphins–we hear them in the morning; they wake us up. There is nature all around you. We sit on the porch and look out and there must be hundreds of kinds of birds out there. Spider lilies grow right up against the house. When you come up that drive, it`s like entering an enormous nature preserve.”
The house, finished at the end of 1983, is called Villa Tondo. It`s a play on words, Solfisburg said, after Villa Rotondo built by 16th Century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Also, tondo means artwork in a circle and this is Solfisburg`s ”sculptural object” built on a circular clearing.
There are striking similarities in the two houses, built six years apart; there also are striking differences.
In both homes, the windows are crucial to the design. The stunning, floor-to-ceiling windows in the North Shore home combine with totally white walls to create a feeling of airiness and freedom. The outdoors seems to come inside, and the walls are hung with an art collection that spans the pop-op of Andy Warhol to primitives from New Guinea. A 4-by-10-foot neon display hangs on the living room wall, blinking designs that never repeat themselves in yellow, blue and orange.
In contrast, the windows in the Florida home are two-foot squares that frame the lush landscape outdoors; although there is some artwork on the walls, the major art is framed by the windows. At night, the little windows give the house a glow from the outside that is pure romanticism.
”When we go out to eat, we always leave the lights on, just so we get that wonderful warm view when we come home,” Solfisburg said.
Solfisburg`s love of geometry is evident in both houses. ”Architecture has changed a great deal since 1977 (when the Chicago house was built)
. . . rather than compress the geometry, I wanted to pull it apart (in Florida).”
The North Shore house is tightly formed, a long rectangle compressed in the middle to form the butterfly effect. The house basically is divided into two sides. The Florida home, on the other hand, stretches. Its Gothic boxiness is connected, physically and esthetically, to the 21-foot-round screened
gazebo by a long, diagonal passageway that follows the shape of the shoreline. The outside of the diagonal is bright orange stucco, a vivid contrast to the almond-colored vinyl siding of the house.
”The diagonal is a fun thing,” Solfisburg said. ”It says, `I`m different than the rest of the house, I follow the water.` When the diagonal is mixed with the square of the house, it makes a triangle, and the triangle ties the house in with the round porch . . . the architecture of geometry.”
When the sun comes up in the morning, it floods through the six little square windows at the bottom of the diagonal passageway, creating a geometrical ”floor plan” of rectangular patches of light connecting the house with the porch.
Likewise, the North Shore home makes use of the diagonal, but the effect is very different. The ”wings of the butterfly” are connected to the center by diagonal glass walls that face the English garden.
”I used a diagonal in both houses, but in Florida, you see the water sparkling from those little windows and here, the walls are glass, very modern,” he said.
A soft, romantic part of the Florida house is the lattice work at the bottom. It`s Solfisburg`s way of dealing with the requirement that all houses in this area must be elevated nine feet to protect against the high waters that can be churned up by hurricanes and tropical storms.
It might be something of a busman`s holiday, designing huge buildings by day and then relishing the detail of a single-family home by night.
”But when you`re only doing these big things, it`s possible to lose insight. It`s easy to get into a corporate image. An architect needs to look down to smaller detail. I can try new ideas on the houses, and then use them on other projects,” he said.
”Florida is a high-design sort of house, a vacation house and this house (on the North Shore) lives so well, it`s been a constant source of enjoyment. It`s been fun, doing both of them.”
