Architecture was booming in Chicago in 1927: art deco monuments like the Palmolive Building, the Medinah Athletic Club (now the InterContinental Chicago hotel), and the Pittsfield Building were going up downtown, while in Grant Park, the city’s “front yard,” Kate Sturges Buckingham was honoring the memory of her brother Clarence with a modest 133-jet fountain. And in Old Town, a couple of art-school dropouts were carving a wheezy Victorian mansion into artists’ studios. That may not sound like the stuff of architectural record, but the 17 intricately detailed apartments Sol Kogen and Edgar Miller created were unlike anything Chicago had seen before, and they’re unlike anything it’s seen since.
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Kogen and Miller met in 1917 at the School of the Art Institute; both quit soon after. Kogen moved to Paris and Miller apprenticed with artist and craftsman Alfonso Ianelli for four years and made a living on commissioned work, including murals, sculptures, and stained glass windows. The two men reconnected after Kogen returned to Chicago in 1927, intent on rehabbing old buildings for use as studios the way he’d seen artists do in France. He bought the three-story house at 155 W. Carl Street (now Burton Place) and enlisted the help of Miller, who’s credited with most of the design and contracting work. They recruited like-minded local artists and craftsmen, including muralists John Warner Norton, Edgar Britton, and Edward Millman and Mexican immigrant Jesus Torres, who got to live in the studios as they worked on them.
Miller moved from unit to unit as work progressed at the complex, and his spirit is embodied in the peculiar details of each: a plaster-walled staircase with brightly colored treads, heavy wood paneling carved with a chevron pattern, a portrait of a weasel in stained glass. (Miller grew up in Idaho and had an abiding love of nature.) Many of the fixtures, including desks, benches, and even toilet paper holders, are built in. You probably wouldn’t build anything like it today—the stairs were steep, the showers and kitchens tiny.
“It was the cosiest place I’ve ever lived,” writes Karalyn Monteil, who’s run through some 15 apartments in Paris since. “I still dream of buying an apartment there one day, and I have always told my friends and family: when I die, I want my ashes sprinkled in the little goldfish pond at Burton Place.”v
