Walter Netsch House: The 1974 Old Town Landmark Built Around Field Theory

From Hudson Avenue in Chicago’s Old Town, the Walter Netsch House is a near-blank brick box with a handful of windows. Inside, rooms spiral upward around a tall central space, lit by dozens of windows and long runs of skylights. The SOM architect built it in 1974 for himself and his wife, the Illinois politician Dawn Clark Netsch, and in May 2023 the city made it an official landmark, protecting the interior as well as the outside, which Chicago rarely does.

The Architect and His Field Theory

Walter Netsch was born in Chicago in 1920, studied architecture at MIT and, after wartime service with the Army Corps of Engineers, joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1947, becoming a partner within a few years. In his thirties he was given design responsibility for the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, whose spiky aluminum-and-glass Cadet Chapel became his best-known building.

His lasting idea was what he called field theory: generating a building from squares rotated and overlapped against each other, so that rooms, roofs and circulation all grow out of one geometric system. He used it at institutional scale on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus and at Wells College Library in Aurora, New York. His own house let him try it at the scale of daily life, with no committee to answer to.

Inside the Walter Netsch House

Dwell has described the plan as a corkscrew. From the entrance, spaces climb in a spiral of platforms and half-levels around the tall center, and the rotated geometry produces ceilings of many heights. Netsch placed skylights along the roof ridges and set windows to frame particular views, including the steeple of St. Michael’s Church nearby, so that light falls on specific spots at certain times of the day and year. When the Netsches lived there, no interior doors closed off the spaces.

The materials were deliberately modest: concrete block walls, brick cladding, oak floors and exposed wood ceilings. The contrast between the plain street face and the complex interior was the point. In a neighborhood known for its 19th-century houses, Netsch kept the outside quiet and put the experiment indoors.

Dawn Clark Netsch: The House’s Other Famous Resident

Dawn Clark Netsch was one of Illinois’s most prominent politicians. A Northwestern law graduate in 1952, when very few women studied law, she became the first woman on Northwestern’s law faculty and later co-wrote a widely used textbook on state and local government. She was a delegate to the 1969–70 Illinois Constitutional Convention, served in the Illinois Senate from 1973, and in 1990 was elected Illinois Comptroller.

In 1994 she became the first woman nominated by a major party for governor of Illinois. Her campaign is remembered for an ad showing her sinking shots at a pool table, a real pastime, and for a frank proposal to raise the income tax to fund schools. She lost to Jim Edgar.

The 2014 Sale and the SOM Renovation

After Dawn’s death, her estate sold the house in December 2014 for $1.65 million to a couple who wanted to keep it as Netsch designed it. They brought in SOM’s interiors group, the firm where Netsch had spent three decades, for a careful update. The kitchen got new counters, cabinets, appliances and lighting; the bathrooms were refreshed, with one expanded into what had been a darkroom; the stairs got new wood treads; a lift added in the Netsches’ later years was removed; and sliding doors were added for privacy at the main bathroom and the study. The plan, window arrangement and sightlines were left alone.

Why the Interior Is Protected

The house sits inside the Old Town Triangle district, designated in 1977, but when the district was created it was too new to be counted among the Victorian-era buildings the city was trying to protect. That changed in 2023. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks gave it a preliminary recommendation in January, covering both the exterior and the interior, and the City Council approved the designation in May. Interior landmarking is unusual in Chicago, and here it protects exactly what makes the house matter: the spiraling spaces and the light.

For another architect-led home that has drawn preservation attention, see Edward Norton’s Malibu landmark.

Sources

• Block Club Chicago (May 25, 2023) and Urbanize Chicago: City Council approval and interior landmark status.
• Block Club Chicago (January 2023) and WTTW: the preliminary recommendation.
• Crain’s Chicago Business (April 2015): the $1.65 million sale, windows and skylights.
• Dwell and SOM: layout, materials and the renovation.
• Docomomo US: the house and field theory.
• Women’s Bar Association of Illinois: Dawn Clark Netsch’s career.