An interesting history of design changes—the Vernon S. Watson residence of Oak Park, Illinois

Current view of the Vernon S. Watson residence (east elevation)
643 N. Fair Oaks Ave. Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.A.
Photograph by versluis, 2013


View looking northwest—this architectural rendering of the Watson house was made in c.1906 (1)


The initial elevation and section drawings of the Vernon S. Watson House, Oak Park, Illinois, 1904 (2)

These series of images shown above, which pictorialize the Watson House in Oak Park, Illinois, are interesting when you compare the original preliminary drawings to the actual built structure. Architectural historian, Richard Guy Wilson gives a general description of Watson’s house:

Watson’s own house exemplifies a type of house design, the so-called “four-square” that became the ideogram of the Prairie School. The origins of this essentially boxy and rectilinear form lay in the middle-class houses illustrated almost continuously in house pattern books from the mid-1800s onward. Frequently cubical or square in both plan and mass, the “four-square” was the standard housing stock used—and repeated ad infinitum—across the United States. (3)

Wilson further adds:

In this case, Watson imparted a horizontal emphasis to the form with the low hipped roof, the high clapboard basement, the heavy stringcourses [horizontal bands], and the banking of the windows on the south and east elevations. The entrance is on center, [south side entrance] and the rectilinear character is emphasized through trim and broad flat surfaces. (4)

1. Vernon S. Watson residence. 1906. Art Institute of Chicago / Chicago Architectural Sketch Club Collection, Chicago., n.d. Web.
2. Watson, Vernon S. Elevation and Sections of the Vernon Watson House, Oak Park, Illinois. 1904. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. “Prairie School Works in the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.” The Prairie School: Design Vision for the Midwest. By Richard Guy Wilson. Art Institute of Chicago: Museum Studies, 1995. 101. Print.
3. Wilson, Richard Guy. “Prairie School Works in the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.” The Prairie School: Design Vision for the Midwest. Ed. Michael Sittenfeld. First ed. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995. 100. Print.
4. Ibid. 102.