Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism by Gary Gand
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I grew up in a suburb where the kinds of houses described in this book provided welcome variation from the dominant ranches, colonials and split levels. (Indeed, I grew up visiting one of the houses featured in the book.)
These buildings grasped at the actual promise of suburban living that, through lack of imagination, was thoroughly obscured where I typically commonly spent my childhood days. They were invariably set on heavily wooded lots. Their flat roofs and wide expanses of glass facing the trees meant they did indeed blended nicely with the landscape, as their designers intended. That mattered even at the time, since in my suburb woods were the primary respite from youthful ennui. That the houses’ interior flows and furnishings often reflected the same refinement of taste as their architecture was less apparent to me at the time, but it still must have affected how these homes felt to move around in. In any case, they were one of the ways that the 20th Century artistic avant-garde infiltrated my corner of cultural conformity, though that only became meaningful many years later.
It’s a tragedy of residential architecture that what we knew as the “contemporary” style fell out of fashion as the main upgrade path for subdivision living. When all is said and done I don’t think the ubiquitous faux chateaux and their turrets are any worse than the upper-middle-class homes of my youth. It’s just that the only apparent upgrade today is to a full-on McMansion. The modernists houses were truly an aesthetic alternative to commodity construction. McMansions are simply more of the same, just more aggressive in their ostentation.
The case for that older 20th Century vision of gracious living is always helped when the photography is provided by Julius Shulman. The luminosity in his photography is literal, and his ability to communicate the graciousness of modernist houses, starting in the 1930s, did a lot to sell them to a wider audience. Thanks to multiple books in recent years, he is getting full credit for bringing that vision to life.
Shulman was 95 when he worked on the photos in this book, which was a labor of love by Chicagoland devotees of the modernist residential style. It goes without saying that the book is lovely; you want to see more of the houses or even live in one yourself. The writing is a bit choppy, but still informative, and that’s good enough given the visual richness of the work.