The entry is pronounced by glazed double doors and a generous sidelight that offer the guest/visitor a vista to the far southern brick wall of the living room, and into the south-facing courtyard. Brick and horizontal redwood board and batten walls align the southern edge of this formal processional. Moving along the stem of the ‘T’ between carport and house, one is drawn to the covered void of an open east facing breezeway portal. It seems to float on a plinth of brick pavers that seamlessly extend outside in, and inside out. The house is anchored to the land by three simple brick wall planes and the massive brick chimney elements of two fireplaces and the stack of the basement boiler. With the site sitting just to the east of Meacham Road, Schweikher’s basic layout strategy is a ‘T’-shaped plan placed at the terminus of long driveway perpendicular to the road, running to the northwest corner of the property. Inspired more by the dynamic diagrams of Mies’ unbuilt brick houses than Wright’s slavish respect for the modular grid of his evolving Usonian thinking, the Schweikher house is unique for its time-mid-century Modern before such a term existed. The design for his own residence was driven by Schweikher’s unique sense of scale and proportion, structural pragmatism, and passion for detail. On his trip to Japan, he was exposed first hand to traditional wood houses. Schweikher was intrigued by the potential of rural living on a site endowed with a generous horizon and gentle creek yet close enough to commuter rail service to bustling Chicago. The land was acquired prior to the trip as part of the architect’s fees for his work in transforming a large barn on the nearby Kern farmstead into a residence for M.L. and M.A. The actual site for the house was on the edge of a farm in what was then the town of Roselle (later to become part of Schaumburg). Ready to step out from the world of beaux-arts style of Yale, his Matcham Traveling Fellowship experiences of 1929–30 and the mentorship of David Adler’s masterful neo styles, the Schaumburg experiment was conceived at sea as Paul and his wife, Dorothy, returned from their first visit to Japan in 1937. Located on a farm field on the rural edge of Chicago’s urban energy, the house staked its own distinctive position in the world of Prairie School evolution, international modernism, and Wright’s yet-to-be-defined/built Usonian invention. The result: he created a sophisticatedly organic integration of eastern and western cultural sensibilities. The Schweikher home and studio (built in 1938) is a prescient work by a young architect who was just finding his voice.
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