Broad, horizontal lines. Open, connected interiors. Daring cantilevers. And row upon row of banded, art-glass casement windows. These were the envelope-pushing elements that most dramatically said “Prairie” at the turn of the 20th Century. These also proved to be the elements most difficult to later maintain in Prairie-style homes.
“It’s a never-ending process,” says Milt Robinson, owner of the Willits House in Highland Park, Frank Lloyd Wright’s first true Prairie house. “There’s always some project we’re completing or beginning.”
Because their houses were largely experimental, Prairie architects often creatively applied existing building techniques or made up their own methods to achieve their designs.
“Sometimes the methods worked, sometimes they didn’t,” says John Eifler, a Chicago architect who has renovated, remodeled and/or added on to more than a dozen Prairie homes, including those in this story. “The Prairie architects were sometimes over-optimistic in their expectations of what a material could do.”
Adding to the problem, Prairie architects, in an effort to produce a democratic, accessible housing style, often were frugal. To keep costs down, some architects–Wright in particular–worked too close to tolerance, pouring concrete 3 inches deep instead of 4, using two-by-fours where two-by-sixes or two-by-eights would have better served or spanning with wood when more costly steel was needed. Also, to achieve their goal of merging nature with the structure, uninsulated Midwestern homes were built with hundreds of single-pane casement windows and multiple open-air decks.
As a result, engineering Prairie renovations, says Eifler, requires a mix of painstaking restoration work and forward-thinking updates.
“It’s not like being a dentist, just coming in and fixing a broken tooth,” Eifler explains. “These aren’t museums, they’re homes. When you work on them, you do your best to make them structurally sound but also more livable and easier to maintain moving forward.”
Despite all the work, owners of Chicago-area Prairie jewels say the results are worth the cost and effort–especially since modern methods and materials should extend their life and livability. “You really do go into a home like this with you’re eyes open,” says Tim Pearson, now seven years into a 10-year plan to restore and expand Wright’s 1913 Balch House in Oak Park. “It’s a lot of work, but what you end up with is so much more than what you started with.”
Re-interpreting classics
A century after many of these homes were built, Eifler has been busy shoring up drooping rooflines by inserting steel I-beams, “sistering,” or adding new to old, ceiling supports and correcting foundational problems. Along the way, he’s formed opinions on best stucco and art-glass restoration methods and figured out a way to apply glass storms to the inside of casement windows, reducing heat loss.
At the Willits House in Highland Park, restoration projects have included everything from jacking up the house and pouring a new foundation to building new terraces and replacing art glass. To make the house more energy efficient, insulation was added to the walls and storm windows were fitted on the inside of casement windows, cutting heating bills 30 percent.
Similar restoration work–from inserting an I-beam to resupport drooping porches to a complete restucco–was done to the Balch House in Oak Park. As well, a large modern kitchen and family room were added at the back.
“We agonized for a while about whether we should add on,” says owner Char Pearson. “But as we thought about it, we realized Wright altered houses that he designed to make them more comfortable and livable. So why should we stick with a 1910 kitchen when that’s not how people live anymore?”
Tom and Terri Zuzag, owners of Walter Burley Griffin’s 1902 Emery House in Elmhurst, added a larger, more functional kitchen, two-car garage and reconfigured a study and leaky semi-enclosed porch to make a family room. Key restorations included insertion of steel I-beams and glue-laminated beams to support the sagging ceiling, as well as rebuilding the terrace.
The goal, owners say, is to preserve the integrity of the Prairie design while making the house more livable.
“These are not just carbon copies of the past,” Tom Zuzag says. “Throughout the restoration, you make choices that stamp your own character on the result, so you don’t only preserve the original design, you also extend and improve it with your interpretation of how to adapt the home for modern life.”
Keeping in character
Many issues that Eifler wrangles with when restoring Prairie houses are due to their exaggerated horizontal lines. “The horizontal line is very unforgiving. Any deflection or flaw is easily detected,” he says.
But 21st Century technology has made fixing flaws easier. That’s certainly been the case at the Bersbach House in Wilmette, designed by John S. Van Bergen and now the home of Randall Randazzo and Kimberlee Kepper (the name of the original architect of the Prairie-style Bersbach home has been added to this sentence). Ten low, flat roof planes covering the main residence and the now-attached coach house had to be replaced. Modern roofing materials such as EPDM and modified bitumen are a big improvement over the asphalt sheets and mopped tar that were used in 1914. As well, inserting now-more-affordable steel has further helped strengthen roofs.
Inside Prairie homes, the open, connecting space that was Wright’s genius often comes with all sorts of ceiling support issues. To fix this, ceilings and walls are opened to insert steel I-beams, metal brackets and glue-laminated beams that can support huge horizontal spans without bowing, Eifler says.
Outside, terraces built on brick-pier foundations have had to be replaced with reinforced concrete foundation. “Brick pier foundations were a standard detail in wooden porches but were insufficient support for the stucco-covered terrace wall Prairie architects always placed above,” Eifler says.
And while Wright liked planning homes with a Roman-looking concrete plinth at the base, when he actually built those homes, the plinth became a cosmetic feature. “He wanted to give the appearance that the house was sitting on a plinth, but that was very difficult to do with a stone foundation,” Eifler explains. “What you ended up with was wood that started right at ground level, with the concrete plinth in front.” Moisture would get in, damaging the base of wood-stud walls. To fix this at several homes, Eifler has jacked up exterior walls, poured concrete and added flashing and wolmanized framing to keep moisture out.
A few repairs are more difficult today than they would have been a hundred years ago. Old-growth oak used in built-ins and wood banding was common and affordable in 1900. Not so today. “Finding old-growth wood to match original pieces when repairing built-ins and banding has become an expensive and time-consuming process,” says Milt Robinson, at Willits House.
And stucco, once a mix of limestone, sand and just a bit of Portland cement that took a long time to cure, but resulted in a breathable surface able to shift with a house’s subtle movements, was for decades a lost art. “People wrongly reasoned that adding more cement to the mix would make it stronger,” Eifler explains. “They also started using mixes that dried faster but didn’t bind well and started applying coatings and paint.” As a result, surfaces cracked easily.
Eifler says the challenge of adding on to or expanding Prairie houses is the fun part of the renovating process.
Additions at Balch, Emery and Bersbach residences celebrate the best elements of Prairie design: orientation to maximize views toward yards and sun, open connected space and beautiful built-ins–but are very contemporary. “I’ve always looked at Prairie homes as structures to learn from and preserve for the future,” Eifler says. “But these are still living homes that need to be functional for today.”
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Of the earth, for the people
Prairie houses, built largely from 1902 to 1915, were the bold efforts of a handful of young, Midwestern architects to create a democratic American architecture. Long and low, like the Prairie from which they sprang, these homes emphasized the horizontal on the outside and open, flowing spaces within.
Kin to the English Arts and Crafts aesthetic, Prairie interiors were designed with simple, clean lines and natural materials such as wood, stucco and glass with lots of built-in cabinetry and cubbies. On the exterior, elements such as flat roofs with broad overhanging eaves, multiple porches, dramatic cantilevers and hundreds of casement windows set in bands produced sweeping, organic designs that complemented their surroundings and invited nature inside.
The boldest Prairie School practitioner, Frank Lloyd Wright, developed a unit system of measurement that unified Prairie homes. Each geometric unit–or module–had a length equivalent to some architectural element in the home. Together, the units formed a grid that then informed the horizontal and vertical dimensioning of the house.
— Monica Kass Rogers
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Creating a show of support
Lots of people know that the 1902 Ward Willits House in Highland Park was Frank Lloyd Wright’s first true Prairie-style house.
Far fewer can tell you that risk-taking Wright initially tried to support the soaring span of living room ceiling by hanging it from steel “sky” hooks attached to roof trusses, a creative effort that failed, causing the roof to collapse. (To Wright’s credit, the sky hooks had worked in the Bradley House he built in Kankakee the year before.)
His follow-up solution? One of the first-ever residential uses for Inland Steel I-beams, still today’s best method for shoring up Prairie house ceilings. Interestingly enough, noted Praire architect Walter Burley Griffin saw the Willits roof collapse and learned from the experience, says Chicago architect John Eifler.
Hard at work on the famed Emery House in Elmhurst in 1902, Griffin abandoned the sky hook idea and chose to support the roof by using what was basically the same design for covered bridge trusses–also rare in a residential setting.
— Monica Kass Rogers
