They may not be as famous as their colleague and contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, but two of Lake County’s resident architects, Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869-1926) and David Adler (1882-1949), left a rich legacy, a legacy both of buildings and a commitment to beauty that still touches many lives.
“Especially in Lake County, it is enormous and enormously valuable,” said Susan Dart, speaking of the men’s contributions. Dart, a Lake Forest resident and writer who is married to Shaw’s grandson John T. McCutcheon Jr., should know. She spent months tracking down the architects’ work in an effort to record their achievements. In the update she wrote for the book “Lake Forest, Illinois, History and Reminiscences” (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, $10) by Edward Arpee, Dart listed 38 Lake Forest and Lake Bluff properties designed by Shaw between 1897 and 1925 and about 20 designed by Adler between 1913 and 1934.
Shaw lived at least part of the year at Ragdale, the Lake Forest summer house he designed for his family, now owned by the city and home to the Ragdale Foundation, an artists’ residence. He is best remembered for what many consider the country’s first planned shopping center: Market Square, also in Lake Forest.
And Adler, who once briefly worked for Shaw, left his residence in Libertyville, now functioning as the David Adler Cultural Center, as well as many grand estates built for members of such prominent Chicago families as the Armours, Palmers and Fields.
“Both Adler and Shaw were responsible for some of the most spectacular estates in (Lake County and the North Shore),” said Pauline Saliga, associate curator in the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Dan Sutherland, a Lake Forest architect who is working on the restoration of two Adler bathhouses to be used as studios at the David Adler Cultural Center, noted, “Adler probably had the wealthiest clients in the Midwest in the 1920s.”
While most of the houses Adler and Shaw designed are still in private hands, the public in Lake County often enjoys their work, unaware of the architects’ hand in their lives.
In Libertyville, for example, hundreds of people make use of Adler Park, a popular spot on Milwaukee Avenue. There they picnic, play softball and splash in the pool, mostly unaware that the natural beauty around them was carefully sculpted by Adler and his landscapers when it was part of his 240-acre estate.
After Adler’s death, the property was donated to the village by Adler’s sister, explained Dianna Monie, executive director of the cultural center.
In Lake Forest, nature lovers like to wander a prairie, home to some 70 species of prairie flowers and managed by the Lake Forest Open Lands Association. It once was part of Shaw’s beloved Ragdale. There every fall, a festive bonfire, complete with bagpipers, is held in a field. The event is now a fundraiser but previously was a Shaw family tradition that goes back uninterrrupted to before 1908, according to the book “Ragdale, A History and Guide” (Open Books, $10), written in part by Alice Hayes, Shaw’s granddaughter.
Meanwhile, in North Chicago, service organizations may use the restored first floor of Adler’s Dewey house for their meetings, according to Doug Shouse, staff assistant to the director of the North Chicago Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Patients at the center, Shouse said, also get to enjoy the atmosphere of the mansion, which serves as the backdrop to “Ravinia-style” open-air concerts held on the broad lawn.
The house, designed by Adler in 1916-17, came to be owned by the federal government in a dramatically ironic scenario played out only a year after the Deweys moved in. Charles Dewey, a financier and a cousin to Adm. George Dewey (renowned for his victory at Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War), patriotically entered the Navy during World War I. While he was at sea, Dewey’s wife, Suzette, cabled him with the bad news: Their dream home had been seized by President Woodrow Wilson under his war powers. Fortunately for the government, unfortunately for the Deweys, the property at the corner of Green Bay and Buckley Roads abuts the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.
Abbott Laboratories is among the many corporations that utilize Shaw’s Glen Rowan house, designed for Clifford H. Barnes in 1908 and now owned by Lake Forest College. Seminars are held in the roomy third-floor ballroom of the brick Georgian mansion as well as in its former master bedroom.
“It does introduce this house to a lot of people, and to Shaw,” said Valerie Carlson, Lake Forest College conference director.
The house, located on Sheridan Road, is also put to use for faculty and special student award dinners, and visiting speakers and dignitaries get to stay in the nine bedrooms as guests of the college, she added.
While Glen Rowan is large (it costs about $1,000 a month to heat and cool, and a new copper roof recently cost $53,000), Carlson noted that it’s not imposing.
“I remember when I first came to apply for the position (of conference director). I was pretty much taken by the house’s warmth and charm,” she said, adding enthusiastically, “I feel very possessive about it.”
Shaw’s work inspires proprietary feelings in other people as well. Gloria Davis, a docent at Ragdale, which opens its main floor and grounds to the public for once-a-month tours (the last tour of the year is Oct. 13), said of the house, “You can’t help but fall in love with it!”
Davis especially enjoys describing aspects of the home’s exterior and grounds-how, for instance, Shaw designed just about everything concerned with the house from its mailbox, door knocker and front porch bench to the outdoor theater, Ragdale Ring (now still partially intact but on private property no longer belonging to Ragdale). The Ring was built for Shaw’s wife, Frances, a playwright and poet, and, among many others, poet Carl Sandburg was entertained there.
Like the poets, writers, composers and artists who now populate the home and its adjacent “Barnhouse” year-round, Sandburg was inspired by the spirit of the place. He composed an original poem for the Shaws. It still hangs framed in the dining room.
“How can you not be affected when you look at these things?” Davis asked.
Like Ragdale, David Adler’s quirky home still inspires artistic enterprise. In its 25 rooms, which radiate from a farmhouse Adler began remodeling in 1923, adults and children can attend classes with titles and content that range from “Rockabye Babies” to “Chamber Music” and “Kids Kaleidoscope” to “Portraiture.”
Juxtapositions of what Monie, the executive director, calls the “delicate balance” between active use of the house and its restoration appear from room to room. Adler’s dining room, for instance, with its original furnishings (donated by Adler’s nephew, David Adler Boyd), is roped off to prevent access. In an adjacent room (like the rest of the house full of beautiful molding and woodwork), artistic gifts are for sale to the public. A lesson room contains a piano laden with music books and surrounded by photos of the imposing yet serenely classical houses Adler is still admired for.
How would Adler view this use of his home? “I think he’d be pleased, very pleased,” Monie said. And its use, she added, ties into the cultural center’s mission, which is “art being part of everyday life.”
The house itself has an appeal, Monie explained, that is timeless. “It gives you a peaceful sort of feeling. What was wonderful and beautiful all those years ago is still today. It is always going to be appreciated.”
That appreciation is what accounts for the almost daily phone calls from Adler fans to the center as well as for the curious people who walk into the home and are given impromptu tours if time and staffing allow.
It also accounts for the success of the occasional Adler housewalks the center has sponsored in the past and hopes to put together again, perhaps as early as next spring.
One of the houses featured on an Adler walk belongs to Janet and Tom Conomy. Not a grand estate but still full of impressive details almost impossible to replicate today, the Conomy home was designed by Adler for his mother.
The Conomys bought the house nine years ago. They knew very little about Adler when they bought it, Janet Conomy said. But the home’s beauty instantly captured the couple, and they’ve lovingly worked to bring out its grandeur, learning a great deal about Adler in the process.
Carpets were removed and paint stripped from composition floors revealing inlaid designs; original doors with glass insets were found in the basement and rehung; and a landscaper whose father once worked for Adler was located and offered input on the grounds.
“You see a little more the more time you spend,” Janet Conomy said of the house’s details.
The restful symmetry for which Adler is noted and his attention to setting are particularly evident from the home’s entrance. At the third-floor level is an elliptical window that mirrors the shape of the elliptical lawn around which the home’s driveway grandly sweeps. Large lilacs line the drive, and beneath them are placed gazebo-like sheds that frame the front door’s view of the carriage house.
“I think Adler had a wonderful sense of harmony and balance and a great eye for detail,” said Morris Weeden, who also lives in an Adler house.
Unlike the Conomys, the Weedens were very aware of Adler’s renown. They had lived down the street from the house they eventually bought, in another well-designed older home by a good architect. “But there is no comparision to Adler,” he added.
One of the things Weeden enjoys most about his home, which is quite modern in style and very different from other Adler designs, is its element of surprise. The house (built in 1927) appears from the street to be a traditional two-story. But inside you must go up a broad stairway from a reception area to reach the main level.
“When you hit the living room at the top of the stairs it’s quite spectacular,” Weeden said, noting that the house has a visible effect on people visiting it for the first time because its living room, with a 29-foot-high ceiling, is up among the trees.
Among the house’s other “little details that dominate your life” is one that gives particular pleasure, Weeden said. It is the sensitively placed living room windows, which capture the morning’s eastern light, relecting it back and forth across the room via strategically placed mirrors.
Michael Boardman, an assistant professor of mathematics at Lake Forest College, only recently found out that the on-campus faculty house he’s been living in was designed by Shaw. But he’s been well aware and appreciative of the home’s beauty and detail for some time, especially its sunrooms and woodwork.
And though the house (designed in 1917) is some 3,000 square feet, “it’s very easy to live in and care for,” he noted.
Lake Forest has four Shaw-designed faculty houses, which are rented to untenured junior faculty members. Their availablity is a drawing point in recruiting faculty. “I wanted to come to Lake Forest College, and this (the house) sealed it,” Boardman said.
Lake Forest College also is lucky to have a non-residential Shaw edifice, Durand Commons. According to “Lake Forest, Illinois, a Preservation Foundation Guide to National Register Properties,” it was inspired by Trinity College in Cambridge, England. Its long, bay-windowed facade has served as a backdrop to many television commercials as well as being featured in the 1982 movie “Class,” according to Mark Perlman, the college’s public affairs director.
Adler structures and especially Shaw buildings figure prominently on self-guided walks outlined by the Preservation Guide and on maps put out by the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society. Also books, such as “David Adler” by Richard Pratt (M. Evans and Co. Inc.), “Highland Park-An American Suburb at Its Best” (Highland Park Landmark Preservation Committee, $19.95), and “An Architectural Album: Chicago’s North Shore” (Junior League of Evanston, $35), offer glimpses of such magnificent places as the Lasker house in Lake Forest, an Adler-designed 55-room French Provincial chateau built in 1926 for $3.5 million.
From an armchair or from streetside, admirers can take in the type of details that make professionals wax rhapsodic about the two architects’ work.
Howard Decker of Decker, Legge, Kemp Architectural in Chicago, has been involved in the restoration of a number of Shaw and Adler buildings. “Adler,” he said, “had perfect pitch in architecture.” He looked to grand European and good historical domestic design for inspiration and exerted in his buildings “extraordinary control.”
Shaw’s work was-in the Arts and Crafts mode-about exploring traditional variations on building while considering local circumstances such as available materials. Decker defines Shaw’s work as “very muscular and robust.”
“I wouldn’t say one is more convincing than the other. Both bodies of work are quite compelling,” he said.
Decker, who has taught at many architectural schools, including the University of Illinois at Chicago, said architects “do and will and I certainly think they should” study the two masters’ work. While very few people build grand estates anymore, “the point is how to handle materials, how to handle details and how to put the pieces together to make a harmonious whole.”
Dan Sutherland of Sutherland Architectural in Lake Forest looked to how Adler sited cabanas on the Lasker estate when he tackled the move and consequent restoration of the Adler bathhouses at the David Adler Cultural Center. The two small twin buildings, due to be dedicated sometime this month are now situated to the back of Adler’s house, framing a vista through an alley of tall trees.
The bathhouses were almost destroyed when Libertyville’s parks department built its new pool. For many years they’d been neglected. It took a major commitment by the cultural center to save them, a commitment for which the center is still raising money.
“I hate to see anything Adler did destroyed,” said Sutherland, who is a member of the Friends of David Adler and who also played a role in saving from destruction Adler’s Kuppenheimer house, built in 1946 in Winnetka.
“All good architecture should be preserved,” said John Vinci, the Chicago architect responsible for the 1980s restoration of Market Square. The square’s owners, he said, wanted to take the square back to something with integrity. “My method is to figure out what was there first.”
Today the square, with its quaint semi-English, semi-Germanic look, is as lively as ever. Filled with unique and toney shops and anchored by a Marshall Field’s store (which moved into the original Tuscan-style bank building at the head of the park in 1931), the square attracts shoppers, strollers and those who just want to relax near the pretty fountain in its central rectangular park. Quite appropriately, the fountain contains a dedication to Shaw, and its statuary of a mother and child was crafted by Shaw’s daughter, Sylvia Shaw Judson, a prominent sculptor from Lake Forest.
“Market Square is one of the most beautifully proportioned and graceful public places on Earth,” Decker said.
The City of Lake Forest is well aware of its luck in having such a space, and using Market Square as an example “not to imitate but to draw on,” the city encourages a continuity in its newer downtown architecture, said Charles Crook, director of community development. For instance, a new bank being built abutting Market Square was designed with sensitivity toward its site, Crook said.
Market Square clearly still inspires architects, but it also affects people’s memories. Mary Taylor, vice president of the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, remembers that when she was a child, she was fascinated by the apartments above the shops, thinking it would be delightful to live in one and wake up to look out at a spot that always made her feel peaceful.
