“As a product of Sullivan’s search for an original architectural style, the Charnley house is thus a modern house and indeed is very likely the first modern house anywhere in the world by virtue of its nearly complete elimination of historical detail and its anticipation of the geometric simplicity of Wright’s mature architecture and of European modern architecture of the 1920s and 1930s.” (Paul Sprague in The Charnley House, Richard Longstreth, editor, 2004)
Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright are major figures in American architecture whose work is widely recognized both nationally and internationally. The Charnley-Persky House, which has long been seen as a pivotal work of modern architecture, stands as evidence of the extraordinary power of Sullivan and Wright’s creativity in collaboration.
With the Charnley House, Sullivan rejected the historical details common to Victorian architecture in favor of abstract forms that later became the hallmarks of modern architecture. Today, the Charnley-Persky House is among the very few of Sullivan’s residential works that survive intact, and the only surviving one in Chicago built during the period that Wright worked in the Adler and Sullivan office. The Charnley-Persky House is located at 1365 North Astor Street in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago, within the Astor Street Historic District. The neighborhood developed in the late 1880s, largely through the efforts of Potter Palmer, who built an imposing “castle” on Lake Shore Drive, designed by Cobb & Frost. He purchased large tracts of land in the area and built dozens of houses which were sold to Chicago’s wealthy class. The neighborhood has retained its stature as Chicago’s premier neighborhood to the present day. Learn about the architecture of other homes on Astor Street through our tour notes.
The exterior of Charnley House is a virtually unadorned brick and limestone facade that commands its corner location. In an era of residential design where turrets, gables, and other architectural features were intended to draw the eyes upward, the façade of the Charnley House emphasizes the horizontality of the design.
The dramatic interior of the house is dominated by an atrium that soars from the first-floor hall to a skylight two floors above. The skylight provides an abundance of natural light into what would otherwise be a very dark space and opens the entire interior of the house, making it an unusually open, flowing space. The house is symmetrical in plan, with one room located on either side of the central atrium on each floor. The ornament found throughout the interior and exterior of the building reflects both Sullivan’s love of sinuous plant forms intertwined with underlying geometric forms and Wright’s variations of these themes.
Explore the three floors of the Charnley-Persky House through a 360-degree virtual tour.