World’s Fair Home Discovered in Wilmette

A family of developers who unwittingly bought a Wilmette house that played a role in the modernist housing vision on display at Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933 are looking for somebody to move the steel-framed house.

“We didn’t know the house had anything historical about it when we bought it,” said Max Kruszewski, an executive in his father’s Wilmette firm, MJK Homes. “Now we want to see if somebody can take it and preserve it.”

On Dec. 5, MJK paid $915,000 for the site on Chestnut Avenue, two-fifths of an acre that was offered as vacant land by its sellers, whose family had owned the house for several decades.

Only after the house sold did someone contact village officials, who in turn told the Kruszewskis, Max and his father, Andrew, that the squarish house may have been the World’s Fair prototype for steel-framed houses.

Architectural historian Lisa Schrenk, author of “Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair,” identified a house in Palos Heights that no longer stands as the actual exposition house and the Wilmette house as one of several versions that were built around the time the fair. But after this article originally published, Schrenk was presented evidence from noted Chicago preservation architect John Eifler, who has studied the matter, and now Schrenk is convinced the Wilmette house is likely the one from the fair.

Read more at Crain’s Chicago Business