Susanne Craig’s Chicago loft is living proof of the power of an architect. The newly completed space on the Northwest Side is saturated with solutions. In fact, it sprawls and soars more than 2,100 square feet with an airiness that belies the breadth and depth of its features and contents. And best of all, says Craig, “now everything I own is accessible.”
This is cryptic talk only to those who don’t know Craig, one of the most prolific collectors of outsider art in the city and a founding member of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. She has been accumulating artifacts, artworks and furnishings for more than 35 years. And things were getting uncomfortably tight at her last place, a three-story, six-bedroom Victorian rowhouse in Lincoln Park.
“I kept filling bedroom after bedroom and hadn’t seen the floor of a closet in 20 years,” says Craig. She knew it was time to act. “I realized that if anything ever happened to me and my children had to deal with all my stuff, they would never forgive me.”
An emotional house sale attended by longtime neighbors and friends settled her immediate problem, while Jeanne Gang, a Harvard-educated architect who had recently moved back home to Chicago and had rented space in Craig’s rowhouse, resolved her long-term concerns by finding her the perfect loft space.
“I had to work with someone who had a unique perspective, and Jeanne was intimate with my aesthetics and requirements,” says Craig. After a two-year stint in the Netherlands working for avant-garde architect Rem Koolhaas, Gang also had the kind of unconventional approach that Craig favored. Though she was then with the local firm Booth/Hansen & Associates, Gang accepted Craig as her first local solo project and now has her own firm, Studio Gang.
Craig was explicit: “I wanted an airy, open, light-filled place that reflected my taste, was flexible enough to accommodate my collections and had some connection to the outside.”
After spending 28 years in a conventional and confining rowhouse, she also hoped for architectural significance and a sweeping space. Tall orders–especially since the loft was more than 1,000 square feet smaller than Craig’s rowhouse. It took creativity and compromise in constantly shifting doses, says Craig. But, she adds, “the solutions we came up with were always better than the original plans.”
For starters, Gang organized the space around a series of voids that became its partitions. “This way, I didn’t have to encumber the place with walls,” she explains.
The voids included a structural shaft at the entrance to the loft that she used to define the main entry; a cavity she cut in the roof to create a light-giving atrium in the darkest reaches of the loft and carve out the kitchen; and a stairway in the back of the space that separates the living and dining area from a space that doubles as a study and guest room.
The living and dining area soars through the bulk of the loft, flanking enormous pane glass windows and organized still further by a massive floor-to-ceiling shelving system. It marries the architecture to Craig’s possessions, since “it provides a three-dimensional alternative to displaying her three-dimensional pieces,” says the architect. The structural shaft, atrium and stairway all fall in a straight line to become a boundary opposite those windows, and two sets of sliding curtains (one made of velvet, the other of metal mesh) radiate from the stairway to the loft’s far wall, shielding a small study and guest area from the public space.
Gang also made adroit use of the loft’s 14-foot ceilings. By building another level over the inner reaches of the loft behind the atrium, she increased the square footage of the space and carved out an expansive master suite over the kitchen, study and guest area below. Craig was also able to purchase the air rights over the loft’s exterior hallway, and Gang tacked this on to the bedroom area.
Thanks to this design, the second story wraps around the back of the atrium, which in turn lends the space its architectural cache. Craig likes to leave the atrium’s sliding glass roof open to experience the elements.
“It’s a liberating experience,” she says, “to have all this light-filled space that flows from one area to another.”
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RESOURCES
Architecture and design–Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang; installation–Robert Pollack, New York, N.Y.; all objects–collection of the owner; wash basin–Soup Can, Chicago.
