Since the death of Chicago architect George Fred Keck (1895-1980), a number of exhibition catalogues and studies of his work (and the work of Keck & Keck) have appeared. All of these books have justly dwelt long and approvingly upon the high points of Keck's career: the House of Tomorrow at the Century of Progress in 1933, the Crystal House for the same exhibition in 1934, the Bruning house in Wilmette, the Cahn house in Lake Forest, the Kecks' own apartment house in Hyde Park, a large group of passive solar houses sprinkled across the upper midwest, and a series of low- and moderate-income housing developments for the Chicago Housing Authority and other sponsors in Chicago.
I am always a little disappointed that these studies never provide much depth in dealing with George Fred Keck's early residential work, of which Beverly/Morgan Park has a fine example.
The residence at 9225 S. Pleasant Ave. was designed by George Fred Keck in 1935 for Morris A. Mueller. The Mueller house illustrates the kind of house for which Keck clients (as opposed to world's fairs) were willing to pay at this intermediate stage in the architect's career.
George Fred Keck was born in Watertown, Wisconsin, the oldest of five sons. He spent a year in the civil engineering program at the University of Wisconsin, then switched to the architecture program at the University of Illinois, interrupted by his enlistment in the United States Coastal Artillery during World War I.
After spending part of 1918 in France, he returned to Champaign to complete his architectural engineering degree. He apprenticed to several architectural firms in New York City and Chicago, obtaining his architectural license in 1920 and marrying in 1921. In 1926 he opened his own firm, joined by his brother William in 1931. Among those employed by the firm were the African-American architect Robert Bruce Tague, (who served as chief draftsman), Ralph Rapson and Stanley Tigerman. Although never employed by the firm, Bertrand Goldberg was, by his own account, "tutored" by Keck in the mid-1930s. Through his association with the Austrian designer Marianne Willisch, George Fred Keck came into contact with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and other exponents of modern architecture in Europe who had fled Hitler and come to Chicago to form the New Bauhaus, whose architecture department Keck was to head and where he taught half-time from 1939 to 1944.
At the point at which he was commissioned to design Beverly/Morgan Park's Mueller house, George Fred Keck was already well steeped in modern architectural design. But while the charm of the Mueller house derives from the simplicity of its lines, and while it is much more modern in spirit than the Tudor mansions to be found among Keck's earliest work, it is not at all a representative of the International Style to which Keck's most advanced work of this period belongs.
Indeed, the house at first appears to have the gabled-box form of a neocolonial Cape Cod, a resemblance heightened by its white-painted brickwork and the chimney presented by the street side. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that, apart from a central south-facing gable, all of the second-floor rooms are illuminated by slate-sided box dormers, certainly not characteristic of the neocolonial style.
Moreover, on the ground floor, the windows tend to cluster in groups, often flanked by narrow ornamental shutters, and occur particularly at the corners of the house which is more in keeping with International Style conventions. Bands of windows are also to be found in the long east-west walls and in some of the second-floor gables. But, apart from a single course of headers (bricks with their short side out) beneath the second-floor windows, ornamentation is entirely lacking.
Because his initials appear on the drawings, Robert Bruce Tague is known to have worked on this house. Tague's designs have been characterized as "crisp, thin, delicate, slick and more elegant," and he is known to have struggled to keep the Keck designs from being too "far out" and to have tried to contain them to an International Style purist vocabulary, according to an interview he gave in 1983. The Mueller house may therefore document the interaction between George Fred Keck and his principal draftsman. If so, the product of their association has produced a charming residence which is both a product of its time and yet timeless.