Chicagoland Dream Houses: How a Mid-Century Architecture Competition Reimagined the American Home

Siobhan Moroney, associate professor of politics and chair of American Studies at Lake Forest College, has written a fascinating account of a little-known event in Illinois history: the 1945 Chicagoland Prize Homes Competition. Sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, the paper used the competition to increase circulation and advertisements, as well as to provide practical and attractive houses that could serve as models to meet the housing shortages that following World War II. The competition received front-page news coverage, an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, and more than two hundred thousand people toured the model houses. Still, it remains relatively unknown in comparison to, for instance, the 1922 Tribune Tower Competition. While Moroney argues that “it is perhaps the most successful competition for middle-class house design of the century,” the value of her work lies not with the importance of the competition but in the insights it offers us into homebuilding, marketing, and domestic space in postwar Chicago (p. 4).The book emerged from a course at Lake Forest College, American Spaces, that considered “house designs and family relationships” (p. ix). Moroney, with the early support of the Mellon Foundation, explored the competition in the pages of the Chicago Tribune and related publications. Analyzing drawings, floor plans, and photographs (many of which appear as illustrations in this book), Moroney explores how this domestic space was envisioned. She also tracked down dozens of current and former residents of prize houses by knocking on doors and doing social media searches. Many of those she interviewed did not realize the idiosyncratic history of their family homes. From them, Moroney learned how families used the houses and reshaped them over time.This book is not about typical postwar housing in the Chicago area. Most of that housing, whether in outlying neighborhoods within the city or in suburban areas, was not designed by architects. Indeed, Moroney is not an architectural historian; her focus is less on design than marketing and use of housing. She positions her research between that of historians like Thomas Hubka and Joseph C. Bigott on common house building (almost all without architects) and the work of architectural historians like Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino on custom-designed houses for wealthy clients. The prize houses were architect-designed but not custom-built. Her discussion of this middle area is carefully crafted and thoughtful. I only wish she made more comparisons of the competition designs with both common and custom-built houses, especially in relation to her discussion of floor plans and the use of interior space.The book is organized into nine chapters with an introduction and conclusion. The first four chapters explore the origins and unfolding of the Chicagoland Prize Homes Competition between 1945 and 1947. Moroney discusses antecedents to the competition, including a 1926 small house competition run by the Chicago Tribune. The same newspaper organized the 1945 competition, fielded a professional judging panel, and highlighted winning designs in its pages. The newspaper also published a volume with prize-winning floor plans and commissioned watercolors of the designs for a well-attended show at the Art Institute.Moroney chronicles the construction of prize-winning houses beginning in 1946. While seven were constructed on vacant suburban lots in Lombard, Blue Island, Wheaton, Palatine, and Highland Park (with another in Kankakee), ten houses were built together in West Rogers Park on Chicago's far North Side. The newspaper worked with landscapers and interior decorators; they furnished the display houses from retailers like Sears and Montgomery Ward. Once completed and furnished, the paper and WGN (the radio station it owned) ran highly publicized open houses. Two hundred thousand people toured the finished homes.Chapters 5 and 6 turn from construction and marketing to consideration of the connections between house design and domestic life. Moroney is particularly interested in exploring what “modern” meant for designers and the families who ultimately lived in the houses. The prize competition identified “three different family groups” that designs should follow (p. 21). All were for families composed of a father, mother, and children (either one or two). The square footage of the homes ranged from 1,100 to 1,400 square feet. These were not inexpensive homes, falling well above the median for the metropolitan area.Moroney explores floor plans and other materials to understand how they reflected the expectations, as well as the everyday lives, of the families who might live in the houses. She notes that the competition reflected the racial segregation in Chicago during the postwar period. But Moroney does not pursue the implications of prize houses designed with only white affluent families in mind.In the last two chapters, the author focuses on the Jewish families who purchased the ten prize houses in the Deer Park subdivision in West Rogers Park. Moroney tracked down as many of the residents of these model houses as she could. In dozens of interviews, Moroney provides a fascinating look at how the homes were used and changed over time. She provides a rich micro-history that combines an examination of the built environment with the ways the interior spaces have been used over time.These final chapters are the most compelling in the book. Moroney uses the 1945 Chicagoland Prize Homes Competition to better understand housing choices that Chicagoans, especially white residents with some means, had in the postwar region.