Chicago has a tremendous Architectural heritage, famous throughout the world. Due in large part to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 which decimated virtually every structure in a four square mile area of the city, nearly all of the long-term construction has been built of brick and stone, and as such, has weathered the years better than the bulk of the housing stock in most cities. Chicago went through several boom periods of building since the Great Fire, leaving behind a legacy that is as durable and dependable, an identity shared by the city and its people. Chicago is a city that has built itself around and for its workers. In many cities, the innovative architecture associated with the area was found in middle and upper class housing, and passed down to more modest homes over time. In Chicago, innovation came from and was built for and by the workers of the city. Indeed, the city of Big Shoulders has produced some of the finest types and styles of American Architecture, and many classic Chicago homes are available for purchase today. Below are some of the various types of classic Chicago building types and architectural styles, and a link to find a classic Chicago home of your own, whatever your preferred style.

Chicago Bungalow

While there are many different bungalow styles in America and throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, there is a distinctly styled bungalow design most common in the metro region simply defined as the Chicago Bungalow. The Chicago Bungalow is most typically a one and half-storied home constructed of brick, with a decorative face-brick on all street-facing sides and a more utilitarian brick on other sides. Bungalow fronts often incorporate limestone accents and concrete stairs and supports. Sometimes, these homes have frame construction with a brick veneer, but this is less common. Unlike other bungalow styles, the roof line is usually parallel to the street rather than perpendicular to it, often with a dormer. Brick bungalows are the single most common housing style in Chicago and many of the near west suburbs. “The Bungalow Belt” is the term used to describe a wide section of the metro area where many of the nearly 100,000 bungalows were built. It is located several miles west of downtown Chicago, and includes large areas of the suburbs to the immediate west of the city.

Bungalows were the new workers cottages of the early 20th century, particularly between the late-1900s to the early 1940s. Their efficient design created spacious homes for Chicagoans and typified the mid-western lifestyle and work ethic. In practice, they have come to not only typify the Midwestern style, but also served as reference point for other Midwestern originated architectural styles such as Prairie and Arts and Crafts style, or West Coast styles such as Craftsman homes. In many regards, they were the first truly modern houses of the working class, containing centralized heat, indoor plumbing and electricity.

Bungalows featured full basements and large attics for storage. Their first floor was often the family’s only living area. Front entrances were often tucked to the side of the front, or on occasion were completely absent, offering only a side entrance for the public. A typical layout would include a living room, dining room and kitchen on one side of the first floor, while a series of bedrooms and a bathroom occupied the other side. Many homes also feature a rear porch, many of which were often converted into a covered sun-room or in other ways incorporated into the indoor living space of the home. Interiors usually featured Arts and Crafts style woodwork trim, paneled doors, built in cabinetry, hutches and bookshelves, and often decorative art, stained or leaded glasses in front room windows.

Today, the effort to preserve and restore the archetypal Chicago style home is well under way. The Historic Chicago Bungalow Association is a non-profit group that enacts and monitors the Historic Bungalow Initiative, a plan devised in 1990 by Mayor Richard Daly to help preserve this distinctly American house. By registering one’s bungalow with the Initiative, homeowners and homebuyers can tap into a multitude of financial incentives, including loans and grants, technical resources, building plans, and a variety of how-to seminars and trade shows.

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Cottage Homes

The earliest homes in Chicago developed from a traditional European “hall-and-parlor” style. Homes were typically only two rooms with a cast-iron stove for heating and occupied an area of less than 15 feet by less than 25 feet. During the primary settlement of Chicago from 1830 to 1870, this was the dominant housing stock. Over time, as families and the population grew, additions were often added to accommodate more living area.

In the Chicago area, a new housing stock began to appear in the mid-to-late 19th century. The Cottage style was a rectangular home with a larger footprint than the hall-and-parlor styled farmhouses previously dominating the residential building style. Whether one or two stories, these homes typically divided the home into sections, a tradition continued in later building styles like the Bungalow or American Foursquare. Often the public spaces (living room, dining room, kitchen) occupied one side of the home, and the private spaces (bedrooms and eventually bathrooms) occupied the other side of the home. Two story homes often divided homes into public spaces on the first floor and private spaces on the second floor.

The first style of cottages built throughout Chicago and Northern Illinois were frame stick construction. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, brick became the dominant construction material. By the 1910s and 1920s, indoor plumbing, gas and electricity were common amenities found in many Chicago cottages. While bungalows and other styles of architecture eventually came to dominate the housing stock of the Chicago area, there still exist a great number of brick, and a smaller number of frame cottages throughout Northern Illinois and the Chicago Metro area.

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Greystone

Also known as: Graystones

Just as the Brownstone is a style that embodies and typifies New York City architecture, for approximately 30 years beginning in the 1890s, Chicago architecture was commonly embodied by the “greystone” or “graystone” building type. This building style was often a brick structure on all sides with a sculpted or “rusticated” limestone façade. Sometimes, the entire front was built from cut pieces of limestone with no brick in the front. On rare occasions, frame construction was employed with only a limestone façade.

Greystones were used in both single family and multi-family housing types, with 2 to 4 units in most cases. The typical Greystone was designed to maximize the use of land in a typical city lot, and therefore were often 20 feet wide by 80 to 110 feet in length. Typically, each floor of a greystone was between 1200 and 1800 square feet. Single-family “shoebox” greystones were modest homes built for single families. Greystones mansions were often elaborate affairs with every modern amenity. Multi-units are quire common in greystones as well, particularly brick two-flats with limestone façades.

Greystone builders and architects at first borrowed heavily from Romanesque style architecture utilizing large limestone pediments and Gothic features, pediments, curved windows, archways over doors and windows, elaborate parapet or façade roof systems and cornices. Most often these homes were built from brick, or occasionally sandstone, with a severe limestone façade. This style was dominant until approximately 1903 to 1905, when a more Neo-Classical style began to infiltrate the typical greystone. Smoother facades and columns created a simple, classic style. Bay windows were often used in the front of the building, creating a three-sided bay that traveled from top to bottom of the front of the buildings.

Seeing the success the Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative has had in revitalizing the interest and preservation of the most dominant Chicago housing type has had, the city has recently launched the Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative hopes to accomplish similar feats for Greystones. Focusing on the greystone-rich North Lawndale on the city’s West side, the initiative has goals of providing much-needed financial aid and incentive for those looking to purchase or improve one of Chicago’s classic greystones.

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American Foursquare

Also known as: Prairie Box

The American Foursquare is a style well suited to urban life. It is a distinctly American styled home whose simple and straight-forward symmetrical design yielded roomy interior space that made use of every inch on confined city lots. In many respects, the Foursquare is almost what typifies the “All-American Home”, and was a simple design in large part reacting from the overly-ornate Victorian and other Revival architectural styles that were popular in the mid to late-19th century.

The design style was particularly popular with mail-order homes and was a big seller for Sears and Roebucks and other catalog companies and home-build kit companies such as Sterling Homes, Bennet, Aladdin and Gordon Van Tine. Stylistically, the American Foursquare shared similar aesthetic and design ideas with Prairie style homes and architecture, and their construction heyday overlapped, from the late-1890s to the mid-1930s.

The American Foursquare style home was popular throughout the Midwest. Many of them were constructed across Illinois and many areas of Chicago, Cicero, Oak Park, and Forest Park all have fine examples of American Foursquares that have endured through today. Below are some design and architectural elements that helped to define the style:

Square or slightly rectangular box shape
Two and half floors, with four rooms on the first and second floor in a symmetrical box layout. Larger homes might have more rooms, but they were still symmetrical in layout. Foursquares typically were built over full basements.
Attic dormer centered in the front of the home with a monitor roof, one which mimics the lines of the main roof.
Shallow, low-hip roofs, often with Prairie style deep overhangs.
Covered front porch that extends across the entire face of the home. Front doors were often centered on the porch to emphasize the symmetry of the style.

American Foursquares were common in nearly every construction material, and examples can be seen in brick, stone, concrete blocks, stucco and siding. American Foursquares also allowed easy integration of other architectural styles, so the addition of bay windows, shutters, and symmetrical towers could make a Foursquare appear to be a Queen Anne, or the use of exposed roof rafters and structural wood members combined with built-in cabinets and hand-crafted woodwork could emphasize the Craftsman style.

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Brick Flats and Brick Walk-Ups

Also known as: Brick Two-Flats, Three-Flats and Four-Flats

Chicago multi-family buildings were basically influenced by the dominant architectural style of the single family homes of the same era. Building styles overlapped by decades, but one can trace the style of the multi-unit homes through the history of Chicago by observing the dominant styles through the ages. Often, it appeared just as taller versions of the same style, from cottage to brick cottages, to greystones to brick walk-ups.

Brick flats, or two-, three-, or four-flats were dominant during the same time frame as the Chicago brick Bungalow, from the late 1900s to the early 1940s, and indeed, they are essentially one bungalow built atop another. From the details of the face brick fronts with limestone accents, to the details and woodwork within. Just as with bungalows, interiors were commonly separated in sides of public and private rooms. Interior details were typically representative of the Arts and Crafts styled interiors of bungalows, often featuring rich woodwork, including functional built-in cabinetry, bookshelves and pantries and even decorative elements such as leaded and stained glass.

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Courtyard Buildings

Chicago’s Courtyard Buildings came into their own in the late 19th century. Prior to this, the majority of the multi-family were built to house at most 1 to 4 families. Many of these were built in the early and middle 1870s primarily in response to the massive housing shortage following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Consequently, many of them were of brick construction. The Courtyard Building was essentially a graceful pairing or grouping of these brick flats, with a centralized courtyard at its center.

The courtyard occupied an important place in the life of the building’s residents. In the densely populated city, courtyards provided a smaller sense of community, and a safe are for residents to interact socially, for relaxation and for children to play in. In many of these buildings, the use of wide open spaces and landscaping helped to provide a peaceful oasis to escape the work week.

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Prairie Style

Also known as: Prairie School

Prairie style originated in Chicago and represents one of the few indigenous styles of American residential architecture. Primarily the work of a group of visionary Chicago architects taught, employed or influenced by the Chicago architect, Louis Sullivan (though he himself was not really a participant in this style), the style became to be known as the “Prairie school”. Frank Lloyd Wright is widely considered the master of the Prairie style. The style emphasizes horizontal lines, low pitched or flattened roofs, open plans, natural materials, contrasting wall materials, solid construction and decorative elements emphasizing both simplicity and craftsmanship. An emphasis on the building’s interaction and role in the surrounding environment was a basic tenement of the Prairie School. The Prairie school aesthetic and use of Arts and Crafts décor and carpentry was a perfect fit for a generation brought up during the Arts and Crafts movement. The style primarily existed from 1900 to 1920 and while widespread during its day, it was a short-lived style of architecture. In large part, its popularity in and outside of Chicago was made possible by the publication of pattern books detailing style elements that could easily be used and copied by architects, builders and craftsmen far and wide.

Prairie homes are typically homes with low-pitched hipped roofs. The eaves of the roof often overhung well past the building walls. Most typically, they were two-story homes, but often employed wide porches, carports, or areas of single-story construction with their own hipped roofs to emphasize flatness. Horizontal lines are a focused theme on many homes. Windows are typically grouped together in tight vertical patterns to form a large horizontal feature. Massive square, rectangular, or pitched piers of masonry, brick or wood are common element in many Prairie homes.

Prairie style homes are found throughout the Midwest, and the style is intermingled, influenced by, and influencing on many other Chicago housing types, particularly the American Foursquare, the Bungalow and the multi-unit brick flats.

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