WKA Urban Residences I

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Wheeler Kearns Architects Urban Residences

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Founded in 1987, we have over thirty years of experience with visioning and master-planning, renovation, adaptive reuse, and new construction projects for residential, institutional, commercial, and community-driven organizations. Our work spans from alternative affordable housing models to multi-family mid-rise structures; from community food pantries to innovative visual and performing arts venues. We are drawn to complex design problems and constraints that challenge us to create unique, responsive, and inspiring solutions.

In our practice, every architect proactively trains across multiple project types ensuring that the breadth of experience and institutional knowledge built over time enriches each project. We build our teams to include individuals with a range of experiences and knowledge to avoid any preconceived notions about your project and ensure fresh ideas and continuous innovation.

We are a diverse group of thinkers and designers who equally share in the roles of designer, technician and manager. Each project architect is fully immersed in your project, from the very first conversation through move-in and evaluating the success of your space after it is occupied. We have been fortunate to cultivate long-lasting relationships with many of our clients.

Through office-wide studio pin-ups and internal reviews, all staff members contribute ideas and feedback to every project to provide the best ideas and highest quality work. This philosophy offers a wider spectrum of possibility and has led to unanticipated solutions, like transforming a shuttered lumberyard into an innovative 21st-century school. Or discovering that the 70-foot tower of an abandoned food-manufacturing plant can be a viable and exciting gallery and performance space. Our approach ensures that the best ideas will be explored for each unique project.

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Wheeler Kearns is a collective practice of architects.

We work with people who seek to enrich their lives in spaces that embody their purpose, energy, and vision.

We want to see your challenge through your eyes. Doing this guides us to what we call the “emotional center,” the heart around which your entire project revolves. We return to that central idea as we craft concepts, help you make decisions, and refine our responses to those choices.

The result is a space that responds uniquely to your mission. When a client contacts us years after a project is complete to let us know they’re “just sitting here experiencing beyond-expectations contentment,” we know we’ve gotten it right.

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When a space we design resonates with your deepest intention, it has a lasting and powerful impact. As we work with you, we devote all our energies to understanding your core purpose, the transformation you seek, your mission.

Wheeler Kearns Architects was named AIA Chicago Firm of the Year in 1996 and 2016. Our office is located in the Fisher Building at 343 S. Dearborn St., Suite 200, Chicago, IL 60604.

DePaul Residence

Year Completed 2004 Location Chicago, IL

Located in the Depaul neighborhood of Chicago, the design of this three-story single family house explores the relationship of indoor and outdoor spaces. The house is conceived as two independent brick volumes connected by a central glass-enclosed stairwell. Along with the convenience of the central scissors stairs, the subdivided volumes’ intimate scale belie the 5,500sf overall size of the house.

In contrast to the repetitive punched openings of the understated facade, the rear volume’s two-story window wall opens exuberantly to a raised patio.

Encircled by terraced seating and landscaping that cloak an existing three-car garage, the patio extends the informal living spaces of the kitchen and family room to the outdoors.

The textures of the moulded clay brick, cleft bluestone, hand seamed zinc cladding, and scraped wood floors counter the machined quality of the neatly tailored steel window walls, flush elm cabinetry, and stainless steel counters.

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Photography Steve Hall - Hedrich Blessing

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Year Completed 2007 Location Chicago, IL Photography Steve Hall - Hedrich Blessing

Urban Residence

A broad, introverted, opaque volume of private spaces floats above a fully transparent, extroverted space at grade that extends, below the canopy of the volume above, into the garden. This house is a warm, intimate home for a family of four that can quickly transform into a place of assembly as needed and has an integral connection between interior and exterior experiences.

A collaborative design process led to architectural and structural innovations. These innovations include vertically post-tensioned concrete thermal mass with forty foot cantilevers; pultruded fiberglass wide-flanges, filled with closed cell spray foam insulation, sheathed in aerated autoclaved concrete and pigmented cement stucco; thermally broken floor to ceiling glass curtain wall and sliding door system.

Light and air courts, terminating in a series of reflecting pools, perforate the volume and extend vertically through the house to distribute reflected light, and activate the interior with rain and snow; further reinforcing the blurred boundaries of interior and exterior space.

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Eugenie Residence

Year Completed 2009 Location Chicago, IL Photography

The project transforms a historic 2,000-squarefoot, two-story brick and wood frame single family residence into a minimalist home for a bachelor art collector. The home—originally built in the 1870’s—is located in a landmark district of Chicago where regulations restrict any exterior changes visible from the street. The owner sought a compact, simple, light-ﬁlled home so introducing daylight to the center of the house had to be done without impacting the existing street facade.

The new open space is deﬁned and vertically connected by a central two-story volume that is naturally lit from a series of skylights above. The central volume contains the home’s service spaces and is carved to reveal a stair whose landing extends to form the kitchen counter.

The removal of a 1980’s 400-square-foot two-story addition in the rear yard extends living space into the garden and provides natural light and views deep within the house. Large floor-to-ceiling glass doors now stand in the first floor’s rear wall and provide a visual connection to the garden from all public spaces on the first floor.

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Monica Rosello Toni Soluri

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Year Completed 2011 Location Chicago, IL Photography

Lake Shore Drive Residence

Overlooking a park with Lake Michigan to the east, this prominent corner site is bounded on the south and west by residential buildings, and the north by a wooded lot with mature trees.

The building’s form consists of two solid masses hosting the private spaces, and a void that hosts the public spaces. The solid masses mainly consist of a sculptural volume springing from the site, into the tree canopies, and towards the lake beyond. The home is clad in Kansas limestone and the surrounding tree canopies provide an additional layer of intimacy and enclosure for the private spaces.

A double-height, glass-encased void links the site and sculptural volume together. The height of the void relates to the height of the surrounding tree trunks, visually allowing for maximum prospect, and opening the public portion of the house to views of the neighborhood and the park.

Sustainable measures were a high priority for the owner. An east-west orientation, a stairwell that doubles as stack ventilation, and an “outsulated” exterior wall assembly integrated into the limestone cladding all contribute to the passive heating and cooling system. Active strategies include the use of solar thermal panels, rainwater harvesting, and geothermal wells.

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Steve Hall - Hedrich Blessing

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Year Completed 2012 Location Chicago, IL Photography Steve Hall - Hedrich Blessing

Orchard Willow Residence

Located on a unique Chicago lot, this house creates a new urban living experience that directly connects interior and exterior living spaces.

The home bookends a block of repetitive single family residential lots to the north. To its south is an elementary school whose parking lot and playground form a 75-foot separation from the school building. The site affords a side yard open to an enviable long southern exposure that provides a broad prominence along the street.

The home and its surrounding landscape insist that exposure to nature and desired privacy can co-exist in a dense urban neighborhood. To achieve this a large open pavilion occupies the first floor. The above floors, smaller and enclosed, turn inward to allow for privacy and interact with nature in a more composed way.

A board-formed concrete wall poured just above eye level encircles the property. With the first floor set down at grade, the textural wall provides complete visual privacy within the garden, allowing the wooden framed interior living space to be enclosed with glass. Large sliding doors and a continuous stone floor connect the interior and exterior as a single room.

Above the wooden pavilion, a narrow, copper clad volume floats on a clerestory band of windows, bringing light deep into the broad living space below. Within the bedrooms, deeply recessed balconies are carved out of the copper enclosure to form light courts that shade the glazing, provide privacy, and create direct views away from the neighboring school to the distant Chicago skyline and sunset.

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