14 CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Architecture

The NeighborlyModernistUp-and-coming architectZoka Zola shows us aroundher own award-winninghouse and her latest project,the Zero Energy homeBy Dennis Rodkin

O n a corner of Ohio Street inUkrainian Village, there’s aclassic Chicago building, three

stories of red brick with a stiff whiteturret jutting skyward. You see ver-sions of it on countless streets in thecity, but nowhere does it look quite asmuch like a building with a boner.

That’s because directly across thestreet is a decidedly softer shape, aformal opposite as inwardly directedas its neighbor’s turret is upwardthrusting. The two make a cute cou-ple—though he is about a hundredyears older than she is. (Typical.)

The newcomer is a beautiful,eccentric house with a minimaliststyle that serves as a corrective to allthose big, showy, pretend-classicalbuildings being built all over theplace—some on this very block. It hasmostly sheer exterior walls punctuat-ed with several supersize windowsand bands of smaller ones; a second-floor terrace is the feature that givesit its fetching female quality. Thefront of the building, on Ohio, hasjust one frill: a line running up themiddle, where the whole westernpart of the facade is set back onebrick’s width from the eastern part.“That bit of ornamentation isn’tabsolutely necessary, but without itthe whole wall would have been flim-sy and flat,” says architect Zoka Zola,who designed the house and lives init with her husband and son. “It’s likea seam in the fabric that does notstrengthen the garment but makes itfeel stronger. I did not want thehouse to have any theater, to be fussy,but it needed this seam.”

Ornamentation is rare anywhere in

the house. The kitchen has simpleoak cabinets, with stainless steelappliances and steel countertops,chosen by Zola to keep the variety ofsurfaces to a minimum; only in thelibrary are there any signs of clutter.The bathrooms are serene white-andgray-tiled retreats. The master bath’ssole flourish is a clever visual ruse:you know that the Sears Tower ismany blocks to the southeast, butwhen you walk in, there it is framedin what appears to be a window fac-ing west. It turns out to be a mirror.“I gave people something to thinkabout when they are sitting there,”Zola says, indicating the toilet.

On the upper level of the house is alittle bump-out, a projection fromthe brick structure that allows roomfor the stairs without stealing floorspace from the bedrooms. It’s no

more than four feet by eight feet, andit’s about eight feet tall—just theright size for a tree house. And that’sexactly how this little spot feels, witha bench where you can sit and lookout over the treetops and the neigh-boring houses at an enormous sec-tion of the near west side.

The house was completed in 2002,five years after Zola and her hus-band, Peter Pfanner, came toChicago so he could run Motorola’scell-phone design studio. It wonArchitecture magazine’s Home of theYear award in 2003. With its five lev-els and the many stairs that connectthem, the house fits in among thevertical styles that let the builders ofnew city homes stock a slim struc-ture with media rooms, familyrooms, and rooftop decks. But forZola the topography of the house

evokes her childhood home, the cityof Rijeka, on Croatia’s Adriatic coast.

“The whole country there is hilly,”she says. “You find yourself continu-ously on a slope. That is my spatialtraining, unlike somebody who grewup in Chicago, which is flat as a mir-ror. Chicago’s flatness may be why itwas here that modern architecturebegan with the ingenious simplifica-tion of how to do an office buildingas a stack of pancakes. But when Idesign, I think more in 3-D becauseit is how we lived in Croatia.”

The name Zoka Zola is somethingof an invention—Zola’s given name isZoranna Zola Skorup. In childhoodher sister called her Zoka, which sheadopted as her first name after shemoved to London as a grad studentand found that everyone mispro-

[snip] Fine art goes the way of politics. “Thearts market has become increasingly like otherasset markets,” according to a recent RANDCorporation news release summarizing its report“A Portrait of the Visual Arts: Meeting theChallenges of a New Era.” “The value of an

artist’s work is determined not, as was tradition-ally the case, by the consensus of experts, butincreasingly by a small number of affluent buyerswho are drawn to purchase works for their poten-tial investment value.” —Harold Henderson |hhenderson@chicagoreader.comOur Town

PAU

L L .

MER

IDET

H

Zoka Zola’s home and office, 1737 W. Ohio

continued on page 16

CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION ONE 15

16 CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Our Town

nounced Zoranna. “They said Zo-RAAA-na, which gives me the shiv-ers,” she says. “It should be ZO-ra-na,accent on the first syllable and then avery even tone.”

As a girl Zola first wanted to be amathematician, then a physicist. “Ithought physics is the closest to find-ing answers to the question ‘What isthis all about?’” she says. “Then Icame across architecture and art,and I realized in a powerful way thatthese same things one can askthrough art.” She studied architec-ture at university in Zagreb, and inher third year fired up her audacityand “wrote to three or four stars ofarchitecture to say I wanted to workfor them.” One of two who botheredto write back was Paolo Portoghesi,the Italian postmodernist. “This manwrote this letter vaguely inviting meto Rome, so I took a train there andhe offered me a job for 70,000 lira amonth,” Zola says. “Do you knowhow much that was in 1983? About$35 a month! But I took it.”

After finishing college back inZagreb, she enrolled at theArchitectural Association in London.In the next decade she worked forseveral leading European architectsand professors before opening a firmof her own in 1990 in London, whereshe met her husband, who’s original-ly from Australia. After they movedto Chicago she worked for DeStefano& Partners, then opened her ownoffice a few years ago.

Zola has been walking methrough our second tour of herhouse, the only building of herscompleted in this country so far. I’veseen how the gigantic single-panewindows in her office make the treesoutside seem like part of the furni-ture; how both family bedrooms(there’s a third for guests) have sky-lights directly above the beds, “sowe can look at the stars as we lie inbed,” Zola says; and how the livingroom and that sexy void of a terraceopen onto one another as one greatopen-air space. But what I reallywant to ask is whether the house’srelationship to its neighbor acrossthe street is just in my imagination.

“It’s like a male-female couple, yes,”Zola says. “That is Chicago and thisis a new Chicago. This is a response.”

D etractors of the severe exteriorof Zola’s house might not see it

this way, but it’s actually a veryneighborly structure. It’s just 18 feetwide, and as Pfanner points out, itsits a few feet from the outer edge ofthe property on its north side,allowing for an extrawide sidewalk.“From Croatia, Zoka is used to thetradition of shared public space andplazas,” he says. The couple hasrefrained from fencing the smallyard on the east and south sides ofthe house, and neighbors often useit as a shortcut. And a big windowover the front door swings open at alanding off the library, letting peopleinside chat with people on the sidewalk eight feet below.

As the house was going up threeyears ago, another couple inUkrainian Village was working on ashort list of architects who mightdesign their dream home: an urbanhouse that would be super energy

efficient, as near to off the grid asit’s possible to be in the city. J.W.Glass, a programming consultant,and his partner, Laura Bedolla, whoworks in the offices of a tradingfirm, had combed the city for aninexpensive lot on the south side ofan east-west street, a siting meantto maximize sun exposure. Theyfound one for under $100,000 inWesthaven Park, the west-sidedevelopment where the CHA’sHenry Horner Homes and Rockwell

Gardens were coming down. Glass and Bedolla really liked the

house on Ohio. When they met withher they found they liked herapproach as well. “We said we want-ed a small, urban, efficient, perhapseven modern house, and all thosewords are to an architect like nectarto a hummingbird,” Glass says. Butthey didn’t want to spend muchmore than $500,000, a midrangefigure in today’s market, Glass says.Zola was game for that challenge

too. The couple wanted passive solardesign, a way of shaping and posi-tioning a structure to give it as muchsun as possible in winter and asmuch shade in summer. They alsowanted geothermal wells, which runwater 100 to 150 feet below theground to cool it for air-condition-ing in summer and preheat it inwinter to reduce the furnace’s work-load. Zola hipped them to some-thing else: insulated concrete

[snip] From the New Deal to the Screw YouDeal. Edward Alden, Washington bureauchief of London’s Financial Times, offers apolite summary of recent history: “With theNew Deal in the 1930s, helping those whocould not help themselves became a mission

that spawned a vast expansion of govern-ment’s role. After a generation of determinedeffort the conservative movement has suc-ceeded in squelching that mission. In theaftermath of Katrina, its success appears tohave come at high cost.” —HH

continued from page 14

PAU

L L.

MER

IDET

H

The office from above, the living area, the kitchen

continued on page 19

CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION ONE 17

In the print edition of the Reader this page is occupied by a Chris Ware comic. At his request, we do not make his work available online.

walls—essentially sandwiches withconcrete for the bread and thickinsulation for the filling—hold heatwell. These walls became an integralpart of Zola’s design, which shedubbed Zero Energy house. She alsomade it mostly one room deep inorder to allow for full penetration ofthe sun’s heat and light.

Glass and Bedolla’s house will be

Zola’s second completed building inthis country, but it’s been delayed afew times as the couple prices all thegreen-friendly features. In the mean-time Zola’s waiting for a new client,landscaper Christy Webber, to moveforward on another project shedesigned, a mixed-use building inWest Town with a striking asymmet-rical facade and lots of glass and

Our TownBoutique of the Week

W hen Lindsey Boland, who designs clothesunder the label Superficial Inc., moved toChicago from New York two years ago, shelooked for the sort of store where she’d been

selling her stuff in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Portland, andOttawa—a boutique specializing in up-and-coming designerswho work on a small scale. Finding none, she set aboutmaking her own: Habit, at 1951 W. Division, a small-label-only shop with a focus on local designers, opened twoweeks ago. Boland’s sister, Deirdre, a freelance art directorand graphic designer, decorated the white-walled, slightlyindustrial space almost like a gallery, “very clean but withdark, soft elements,” like the curvy curio cabinet with theoriginal flaking finish, rescued from their great-grandmoth-er’s basement. Most of Habit’s wares fall somewherebetween fashion and craft, and many are relatively easy onthe wallet. Some of the work is extremely personal, like thepeaches-and-cream lambskin dress by Alicja Tatina, a grad-

uate of the School of the Art Institute’s fashion design pro-gram. “There’ll be one person who fits in this dress perfect-ly,” says Boland. Other items currently on the racks: a flirtyskirt made from Irish hand-loomed wool by SAIC studentAbigail Glaum-Lathbury, pinned up with hidden vintage but-tons; reconstructed men’s T-shirts and suit coats with aslightly apocalyptic vibe by Brooklyn-based Sinner Saint,which sometimes dresses Jon Spencer; a perfectly tough,slightly distressed peacock green leather peplum jacket byColumbia College graduate Anna Ehrler; soft, springy shrugscrocheted in an open-weave pattern resembling bricks bysouth-sider DI-O; and canvas handbags from locals HMC andDrag N’ Fly. Boland’s only criterion for what she carries isquality. “It has to be well made,” she says. “I don’t want any-thing that’ll fall apart.” Other than that, she’s left the aes-thetic pretty open: “Whether kooky or elegant, I want somedesign element that makes it different from what you see inmass production.” —Liz Armstrong

JIM

NEW

BERR

Y

HabitLindsey Boland

COU

RTES

Y ZO

KA Z

OLA

A rendering of the Glass & Bedolla House, aka the Zero Energy home, to be built at 2305 W. Adams

continued from page 16

continued on page 20

CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION ONE 19

Our Town

open interior walkways. While she waits, Zola and her staff

of three work in her office, the largestspace in the house. It’s an idiosyn-cratic room, set at the half-basementlevel with 22-foot-high ceilings, acatwalk across one side to the house’sback door, and an enormous street-side window pretty much daringpassersby to peer in. I asked herabout the catwalk. “I am used tothat; as a child I walked along edgesand ridges and stones like that,” shesays. “When we were building here Ipaced back and forth there and Iworried, What is this I am building?”

She says, “It turned out better thanI was fearing.” v

20 CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION ONE

continued from page 19

CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION ONE 21