Students Document the Historic Schweikher House
Led by Associate Professor Paul Kapp, the team will visit the suburban site to record the building following a process established for documenting historic buildings by the National Park Service. At semester’s end, the students will submit their final package of measured drawings, field notes, photographs, and other materials to the National Park Service’s HABS as their entry into the Charles E. Peterson Prize Competition and for inclusion in the HABS archive at the Library of Congress, the nation’s largest collection of historic architectural, engineering, and landscape documentation.
The brick, wood, and glass house was designed by Paul Schweikher in 1937 and built the following year as his residence and studio. Influenced by Japanese vernacular forms, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie designs, and 1930s European International Style models, Schweikher developed a unique structure blending modernism with attention to natural materials and engagement with the then-rural site. The Schweikher House is the only structure currently listed in the National Register of Historic Places in Schaumburg, a large and populous postwar Chicago suburb. The house is currently owned by the Village of Schaumburg and operated by the Schweikher House Preservation Trust.
The Historic Preservation Education Foundation (HPEF), a nonprofit foundation dedicated to enhancing public awareness and understanding of historic buildings and sites and encouraging their appropriate preservation, is sponsoring the project. In 2013, HPEF sponsored a similar project to document the 1949 Charles and Ray Eames House in Pacific Palisades in collaboration with the University of Southern California Heritage Conservation program and other partners.