“The Charnley-Persky House: Architectural History and the Society”

AboutEditorial by SAH president Keith Morgan announcing Seymour H. Persky's 1995 gift funding the Society of Architectural Historians' purchase of the James Charnley House (1365 North Astor Street, Chicago) as its new headquarters, renamed the Charnley-Persky House. Reviews the 1891 design's disputed authorship between Adler & Sullivan's Louis Sullivan and junior draftsman Frank Lloyd Wright, situates the house's massing and ornament against Sullivan's Wainwright Building and the Ryerson and Getty tombs, and against Wright's own contemporaneous domestic work, with reference to Henry-Russell Hitchcock's earlier scholarship. Covers the Charnley family's timber-industry wealth, Sullivan's own adjacent house at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, later ownership by the Waller family, the 1976 Astor Street Historic District designation, and the building's 1989 restoration by architect John Eiffler for the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Foundation.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199509%2954%3A3%3C276%3ATCHAHA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6