Why? Why! That’s what Frank Lloyd Wright fans, architecture aficionados, and lovers of history and artistry are asking themselves after it was announced that a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in Illinois may be headed for demolition.
“The new owners of a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed cottage in north suburban Glencoe have formally requested permission to tear down the 106-year-old home,” said the Chicago Tribune.
The home in question is a Sherman Booth Cottage, “a flat-roofed, one-story frame house” built by Wright in 1913. “It served as a temporary home for Booth, who developed the architect’s Ravine Bluffs neighborhood in Glencoe, including Booth’s permanent home.”
Preservations are outraged, naturally, that someone would actually want to raze the home, and saving it from the wrecking ball may be challenging. Chicago-based advocacy group Landmarks Illinois put the property on its list of on Landmarks Illinois’ 2019 Most Endangered Historic Places on May 1, a week before escrow closed on the home. But, as the Tribune reports, being “architecturally and culturally significant” may not be enough to protect it. “Glencoe has two types of landmark status—honorary and certified,” they said. “The Booth cottage is an honorary landmark. The village can review demolition plans for such a landmark but it does not have the legal power to prevent demolition.”
The Village of Glencoe has announced that the demolition permit application was incomplete; Because of the home’s honorary landmark status, it is expected that there will be a180-day demolition delay period once the permit application is finished by the home’s current owners.
Dwell describes the three-bedroom, 1,750-square-foot home as “modest”—a point that actually may work in favor of preservation, experts say, because the cottage style “anticipated Wright’s later, low-cost Usonian houses,” said the Tribune. Dwell further reports that, “In hopes of saving the cottage, the Conservancy prepared in-house studies on how to restore the building on-site, and they shared their findings with the owner once the sale was complete. The Conservancy and other advocacy groups have also floated the idea of sensitively relocating the home as well.”
If the owner’s plans move forward as requested, it will be the first Wright home to be demolished since 2004, when the Carr House in Michigan was torn down.
