In the fall of 2016, graduate students in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Architecture’s ARCH 518-Recording Historic Buildings seminar are preparing drawings and other historic documentation on the historic Paul Schweikher House in Schaumburg, Illinois for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). Led by Associate Professor Paul Kapp and supported by the Historic Preservation Education Foundation, the team is visiting 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 Historic American Building Survey (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.
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, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Eames Foundation.
University of Illinois students document the historic Schweikher House with HPEF support.
