Route 2, Stop 2

Description by Conor Libit

Name: The Welch house

Address: 111 East Hillside, Barrington

3 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms

Architect: Harry Weese

Built: 1952

Text: Built for Dr. William Welch who was married to Weese’s younger sister Jane, this house needed to provide a comfortable family environment as well as an office with waiting rooms. The hillside site offered the natural solution to put working spaces and a two car garage below, and the living areas on the upper garden level. The house has a main entrance on each level and the bedrooms and the living room each open onto a large paved terrace. To this the Weese added new kinds of structural interplay. Open riser stairs supported by white steel rods, these lightweight but strong rods create geometric lines that are repeated in white wood “outriggers” and window patterns.  Exterior siding consists of vertical groove boards painted driftwood gray. The ground floor has radiant heated slate floors. Ceilings were constructed of the classic exposed beams with sub beams carrying prefabricated sandwich panels of cement and insulation. This house encapsulates a subset of the modernism movement known as “Bauhaus” which came to the US through prominent architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. The Bauhaus movement is at its base described as having “simple geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate decorations”.

Can't Miss: 

• The street facing windows are tall but narrow windows whereas the southern windows are large and inviting. 

• The outriggers that cover the patios and continue the angular lines of the roof. 

Harry Weese Bio

By Barbara L. Benson

HARRY MOHR WEESE was a mid-westerner. Born in Evanston in 1915 he was raised in Kenilworth, attending the progressive Joseph Sears School and then New Trier High School. Early, knowing that he wanted to be an artist or an architect, upon graduating from New Trier, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating  with a BA in Architecture. 

In 1936, he started architecture classes at Yale where his classmates included I.M. Pei and Eero Saarinen. Influenced by the Depression, Weese focused his studies in favor of modernist styles rather than expensive historical revival styles.   In 1937 Weese toured northern Europe on a bicycle, fostering his appreciation for the modernist movement.

 Offered a fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art through Eero Saarinen whose father Eliel oversaw the school, he studied city planning, pottery and textiles while learning more about Modernist principles. There, emerging Modernist designers such as Ralph Rapson, Florence Knoll and Charles Eames, were his fellow classmates.

Graduating in 1940, he formed a partnership in Chicago with classmate Benjamin Baldwin, (whose sister Kitty he would later marry). Subsequently, he joined the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), taking leave to serve as an engineering officer in the Navy during World War 11.

He rejoined SOM after the war, and then founded his own design firm, Harry Weese and Associates in 1947. His first commissions were residential but he was soon receiving major civic commissions.  His design for the Washington Metro System in Washington, DC brought him acclaim as the foremost designer of rail systems in the US.  Commissions to oversee rail projects in Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas and Buffalo followed. He was named a Fellow of the AIA in 1961 and subsequently received the Arnold W, Brunner Memorial Prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964.

In the mid-1940s, Weese brought his modernist aesthetic to the Northwest suburbs when he purchased land in Barrington Hills overlooking Hawthorn Lake. He also acquired several lots around Barrington’s Water Tower for his relatives. This enclave of Weese houses still exists.