ARCHITECTURE
Jeff Bone, Peter Landon and Catherine Baker,
Long before the term “public interest architecture” became a buzzword in design circles, Chicago architect Peter Landon was one of its leading practitioners, bringing creativity and a humancentered approach to the challenging world of affordable housing.
Landon, 69, and his partners at the firm of Landon Bone Baker-Jeff Bone, 57, and Catherine Baker, 51—are recognized as Chicagoans of the Year in architecture for carefully-crafted, contemporary buildings that respect and uplift their surroundings as well as their inhabitants.
Among the firm’s most prominent works are colorful, streetshaping apartment buildings that line Cottage Grove Avenue in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood, near the site of the future Obama Presidential Center.
The architects also designed a handsome cluster of mixedincome apartments at 459 W. Division St., where part of the the troubled Cabrini-Green public housing project once stood.
The nine-story main building of the Division Street complex has a playful concrete exterior instead of the usual brick that tries to “fit in.” And rather than fortress-like masonry walls, the building’s ground floor is lined with glass, drawing natural light into its spacious common rooms.
“We assume the best of the neighborhood, not the worst of the neighborhood, when we design,” Baker said during an interview at the firm’s offices, a former flower distributorship at 1625 W. Carroll Ave.
After working for Chicago architect Ben Weese, from whom he learned the virtues of a straightforward use of materials and a spare but elegant simplicity, Landon began his own firm in 1987. His partnership with Bone and Baker, which has now 22 employees, was formed in 2002.
The firm’s clients tend to be nonprofit housing developers or for-profit developers who build for a variety of income groups. Its buildings, Landon explained, are often located in turbulent, gentrifying neighborhoods where longtime residents are being forced out and there’s a need to make buildings bigger so there will be enough room for lower income people to remain.
Budgets for such projects tend to be tight, forcing the architects to find clever ways to endow their buildings with touches that can make the difference between impersonal housing and a place that feels like home.
In the early 1990s, for example, when Landon renovated a government-subsidized Uptown high-rise at 850 W. Eastwood Ave., he designed a luminous mural of glass mosaic tile in the vestibule of the 16-story tower. The mural expressed the identities of people from more than 30 countries living in the building, yet it never would have made it through the bureaucracy if Landon’s budget had listed it as “art.”
Instead, he called it “tile,” and the mural sailed through. A comparable use of tile enlivens the 459 W. Division St. building.
The firm’s task, Bone said, is to “translate the culture and mission [of its clients] into a building that becomes theirs.”
In many ways, Landon Bone Baker is an affordable housing laboratory, exploring designs for everything from tiny homes for the elderly to housing for single mothers to rehabs like the awardwinning remake of the Archer Court public housing project at 23rd Street and Archer Avenue in Chinatown. The architects estimate that they have rehabbed more than 5,000 housing units since Landon began the firm.
Landon Bone Baker’s next big project is Pierce House, the soonto-open Humboldt Park headquarters of La Casa Norte, a nonprofit social services group that aids homeless people. The five-story building, which confounds the image of a homeless shelter with its sleek glass walls and terraced profile, will include the nonprofit’s offices and apartments for formerly homeless youth and families.
On the eve of next year’s 100th anniversary of the German Bauhaus, the short-lived but influential school that sought to merge good design and good works, Landon Bone Baker is keeping the flame of socially-conscious architecture alive.