A Formal House in a Formal Setting

By Harold T. Wolff

For any architect who planned a house for one of the Longwood Drive hillside sites, the inevitable question was how to fuse the location and the design. One architect might choose to set off the building by placing it atop a commanding eminence, such as was done with the Irish Castle. Architect John Todd Hetherington composed the Driscoll House on terrace levels so that the residence would appear to ascend with the site. In the case of the Frank M. Anderson House, 10400 S. Longwood Dr., the grounds are used to introduce us to the building.

The residence was erected in 1924 for Frank M. Anderson, owner of the Sall Mountain Asbestos Manufacturing Company, but very shortly thereafter it was sold to John McKinlay, president of Marshall Field & Company. Subsequently it was the home of Joseph V. LaMantia, owner of a large produce business, before finally becoming the official residence of the presidents of Chicago State University.

The architect was Oscar L. McMurry (1860-1948), whose career combined a talent for architecture with a lifelong commitment to teaching. Educated at the University of Michigan and at Cornell, McMurry had already been a school principal and had studied architecture in Paris before completing his college studies at Columbia University in New York in 1901, earning a Bachelor of Science degree with a specialty in manual training. He then became head of the industrial arts department at Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University), a post he held until he retired in 1929.

On the side, McMurry designed houses and here and there a store or a library. He was responsible for a number of the large Tudor dwellings on Seeley Avenue behind the Anderson House, two of which he erected for himself. McMurry did not confine himself to any particular style, and his work includes Colonial Revival, Tudor and Italian Renaissance dwellings.

The Anderson House is an extremely formal Italian Renaissance house set in a rather formal landscape. The central block of the house is flanked by two set-back wings, and the entire composition is covered by a low hipped roof. The ground-floor window groupings are topped by triangular pediments, while the second-floor windows are unpedimented but framed with wide borders. The main entrance porch is inset behind two columns, and is surmounted by a dentilled arched pediment.

The grounds are intended to enhance the building, and are laid out with symmetrical drives which pass beyond the building. The vegetation on the lawn is rather sparse, and consists chiefly of a few shrubs just in front of the house itself, though there is a single large tree further down the slope. The shrubbery near the house is arranged in the same sort of symmetrical pattern that characterizes the house itself, and enhances the formality of the composition.

The great charm of the Italian Renaissance style is its simplicity, and chronologically it had an appeal for wealthy home builders who were impressed by the clean lines of Prairie-style residences but wanted something a little more enduring in appearance. The Anderson House is a classic showcase of this appeal, with its clean stately lines and uncomplicated hipped roof. It is left to the broad massing of the residence to establish the house's grandeur.