Architects, Architecture Firms, & Building Designers Near Chicago

The Lyndale Garage was designed as both a replacement for a dilapidated stick-frame garage and an open-air addition to a single-family home on Chicago’s northwest side. Located on a standard city lot, the new two-car garage was conceived of as a podium for a new “exterior room” for the owners to host small social gatherings for friends and family. The rooftop deck was designed to facilitate casual lounging, small outdoor dinner parties and barbeques. Given its close proximity to adjacent roof decks and the elevated full southern sun exposure, an aesthetic design element – a custom CNC-milled trellis – was developed to serve as a privacy screen, solar shading mechanism, and ornamental wall texture. The patterning of the trellis was engineered to satisfy optimal manufacturing criteria while maintaining owner-required functional use parameters and amplifying the use of light and shadow as ephemeral materials to create an intimate and dynamic environment.

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Triangle House is a project for a young family seeking to add an addition onto their irregularly shaped home to accommodate their growing family. The client aspires to preserve the quirky aesthetic of the existing structure and provide an addition that is sensitive to the scale and materiality of the surrounding neighborhood. The addition consists of two bedrooms, a full bathroom with wet room and sauna, a sitting area and a private walkout garden. New skylights and clerestory windows are situated on the addition’s façade to bring daylight deep into the interior of the home. The project also consists of the replacement of the street-facing east façade in which DAAM explored the materiality of brick through perforations and projections to create a dynamic interplay of light and shadow.

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Saurman Architecture was approached by a family in the Forest Glen neighborhood of Chicago to create a new second story addition from a floor plan originally developed by Atelier Aurelie Merle. The addition required an administrative adjustment for zoning approval, and consideration for design that would create an independent identity for the addition, without offending the design of the original house. Inspired by the mid-century modern aesthetics of the original split-level house, the team decided to play on the existing hip roof design by creating a shed roof form that pitches at an angle diagonally across the addition. This allowed a reduced scale on the elevation facing the street, and opened up the primary suite to a large corner window view. The space of the primary suite is uniquely vaulted across a diagonal from the entry point of the room, to the opposite corner, which is also cantilevered into the rear yard. The original house is painted a bright color, with the addition painted a muted color. This draws one’s eye away from the new addition from the street. The cantilevered corner of the primary suite is rendered in a warm wood tone, contrasting with the muted colors of the addition, and drawing the eye away from the existing house from the rear yard.

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