City State of Mind | Studio Dwell, Chicago
When Mark Peters, AIA, of Chicago-based Studio Dwell gets a new client, he sends them a five-page questionnaire. The questions go in-depth about the spaces the client would like to have (“Should the primary suite include a separate dressing room? An exterior terrace?”), but also ask about lifestyle (“Do you read for pleasure? Are you handy at doing repairs or projects around the house?”)
“We like Modern architecture and clean lines, but when we’re designing, we really think about how people use the spaces. In my head, I’m walking through the different spaces and thinking about how they would get furnished and how to make sure that they’re comfortable,” says Mark, whose six-person firm is devoted to elegant residential work. “The comment that we most get from clients is that their homes are very livable.”
For the last 35 years, Studio Dwell has been carrying the torch for Modernist architecture in Chicago, the birthplace of the modern city. The buildings are composed of carefully detailed, classically orthogonal volumes with a strong sense of materiality. The firm designs multifamily developments and custom homes, which are mostly urban infill projects. “In the city, we’re always dealing with privacy issues and having enough light,” says Mark.
A staunch urbanite, Mark didn’t start out that way. He grew up in the tiny town of Hartford, Wisconsin, in the 1960s, raised by practical people (his father was a housepainter and his mother was a real estate agent). His exposure to Modern architecture was via movies and TV, and occasional visits to the big city, Milwaukee. “I loved the idea that you could create this artistic thing that people could actually inhabit,” he says, speaking with characteristically long Wisconsin vowels. “I couldn’t wait to get out of the small town.”
Launch Pad
His ticket out was an undergraduate degree in architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which has the state’s only architecture school. Afterward, he moved to Chicago, planning to get his master’s at the University of Illinois Chicago. While he was establishing residency to qualify for in-state tuition, he took a job at Hartshorne Plunkard Architects and continued to work there part-time while attending graduate school, complementing his formal education with hands-on experience. In the late ’80s, Postmodernist provocateur Stanley Tigerman was the director of the architecture school at UIC and would bring in Peter Eisenman and other big names to teach courses. “Theory was definitely the hot thing, which didn’t match up with what I was thinking about,” says Mark. “But it was great to see and be taught by these interesting architects from around the country.”
Meanwhile, the architecture that was actually getting built in Chicago was much more conservative. After graduating, Mark worked for Pappageorge Haymes, which did mostly residential work, for a few years. He enjoyed working with clients and helping them figure out the possibilities of a site, but felt that the designs, which emphasized traditional ornamentation, played it a little too safe. Fortunately, Mark connected with a developer who wanted to differentiate himself, and launched his own firm in 2004. Recalls Mark: “The developer discovered that there was this public desire for condominiums with clean lines and floor-to-ceiling glass, for openness and natural light, that hadn’t been tapped into yet. And we were right on the cusp of that.”
The Windy City
Another of the clients who bought into Mark’s vision early on had a complicated project in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. The custom residence, called Bucktown Three, started out as the renovation of a traditional pitched-roof house and an addition on an adjoining lot.
It was useful to keep the original house because it had shallower setbacks that could be grandfathered in. The design team reclad it, gave it a contemporary flat roof, and integrated it with the new addition to create a harmonious whole. The original renovation/addition was three-quarters completed when the owner purchased the lot on the other side as well. The architects took the sudden change in stride, adding a new wing and an additional outdoor space.
For the cladding, they chose brick, a traditional material found all over town, but updated it by using white brick and pairing it with white mortar. “I like brick because it’s timely and substantive,” says Mark. “We do matching mortar because the façade reads differently at different distances, When you’re farther away, it looks all white, and then as you get closer, you begin to see some of the detail. The building changes as you approach it.”
Bucktown Three has a two-story living room that looks out to the yard through a glass wall. Whenever possible, the studio tries to provide access to the outdoors and visually extend the indoor spaces outside. This connection is often accomplished by designing an L-shaped floor plan that wraps around a yard. In a typical Chicago house, explains Mark, only the family room at the back is able to access the yard. In this “L” configuration, the short side holds back the street and the long side overlooks the yard.
House Etch, featured in a 2019 issue of Residential Design, is a good example. Located in the Lakeview neighborhood, the house is designed with a side yard that includes a deck with an outdoor kitchen, a hot tub, a lawn, and a basketball court.
From the outside, the house is a study in contrasting materials. The clients have a connection to Midcentury Modern architecture in Latin America, and wanted their home to have a strong material identity. The public part of the program is clad in cast-in-place concrete, and the private areas are wrapped in softer, stained cedar. “The conceit is that the wood was used to create the form work for the concrete,” says Mark.
The house’s crisp lines are accentuated by the coping and sills of prefinished metal strips, which match the aluminum window framing, establishing an organizing grid for the house. The windows continue right up to the coping, creating vertical slots in the elevations; the ceiling is set back from the glass. “What’s nice is that you read this other additional layer that changes from day to night and with the lighting,” says Mark. “I like the layering as you look through the windows and through the building.”
On the inside, the spaces are luminous with natural light. There’s a transparent, double-height living room, and the ceiling appears to float over the ground floor, thanks to all the glazing, including a continuous row of clerestory windows. “This is one of my favorite projects,” says Mark. “It really is challenging to do simplicity.”
Large and Small
To see how Studio Dwell handles the challenge of a small lot, refer to House 1909. The lot is atypically small for Chicago (it’s 22-by-80 feet, versus the standard size of 25-by-125 feet). “We had zero room for landscaping in the yard,” notes Mark. “So we took the landscaping and put some on the garage roof, but mostly on the penthouse level.”
The penthouse is set back on both sides to provide room for greenery on front and back terraces. The garage has a sloped roof so that the homeowners can walk up the slope and enjoy the roof deck on top of the garage—the back patio is just up a flight of stairs. Inside the 3,000-square-foot house, a small but critical two-story space brings light in through a window above. “We like to carve these spaces out when we can,” says Mark. The glass-walled living room on the main level responds to the client’s request for a house that felt like a fishbowl.
On the other end of the spectrum, one of Studio Dwell’s largest urban infill homes, Wolcott Residence, just finished construction. The 8,500-square-foot house is on a double lot, and from the street, a dark cube, clad in German black brick, hovers dramatically in front of a transparent two-story space. “I like the juxtaposition of the heavy cube floating inside a glass frame,” says Mark. The cube contains an office and a reading loft. The reading nook is opaque on the exterior, but on the inside, it is serenely lit by skylights and overlooks a two-story living room.
It’s no surprise that on their questionnaire, the clients specifically requested a reading area, and answered yes to the question about reading for pleasure. “We try to design so that when you walk into your house, you take note of the architecture,” says Mark. “We want you to be able to take a pause and forget about your day.”
–
House on the Park by Studio Dwell was featured in Residential Design Vol. 6, 2024.