In the 1960s, architect Walter Netsch, a design partner at Chicago’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), pioneered a design system known as field theory. The method, born from the architect’s work on the U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel (1963), employs both large and small scales of a geometric figure, often a rotated square, to develop a structure’s plan.
The theory informed Netsch’s work throughout the following decades, including the Behavioral Sciences Building at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Miami University Art Museum, and Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. He also brought the method home with him, employing field theory to design his own house in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago in the early 1970s. Netsch and his wife, Northwestern law professor and Illinois state politician Dawn Clark Netsch, were prolific art collectors, amassing a collection of work by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, and others. Over time, the house became a showcase for both art and design.
“He was such an outsized personality,” says Brian Lee, a consulting partner at SOM who visited the Netsch residence before Netsch died in 2008 and his wife in 2013.
“[Netsch] was big and very opinionated, but all about design, and not only design of projects but design of a life. When I got to see the house I started to put two and two together: the person and the place where he spent his personal life.”
For years, Will Forrest, a principal at McKinsey & Co., and Mark Smithe, part of the family that runs the Walter E. Smithe furniture company, would pass the house regularly and marvel at its exterior. But Forrest liked their apartment in a converted factory, and made a deal with Smithe to only move if it was into something “architecturally pure.”
When they heard that the home would be coming on the market, they figured out who the broker was and finally saw the interiors in 2014.
“As soon as we did, we mutually decided that this was exactly what we were looking for,” Forrest says. “We didn’t look at any other homes. This was the first one, and we were immediately smitten.”
Netsch had initially designed a higher-tech house that he couldn’t afford to build, according to Lee.
“He had to kind of regroup,” Lee says. “He was thinking about the house in terms of the fluidity of the spaces that would be organized around core elements of a kitchen and a small bath. The complexity and the geometry generated interesting spaces and opportunities.” The design became a two-story concrete block house with brick on three sides; the interior, Lee says, “a spiral of levels that you encounter when you open the front door, rising up and also leading down.”
Window placement was precise and deliberate, offering privacy from the outside but dramatic views—a nearby church’s steeple, Hancock Tower—and moments of light on the interiors, as well as skylights that Lee says were adventurous for the time. Spaces were connected by ramps and angled stairways, and two platforms at the top of the core sections, jutting upward like skyscrapers, held sculptural works and were only accessible by ladder.
“There’s a whole series of quirky spaces that came out of the geometry that he believed added interest and intimacy to the project,” Lee says.
The house, with an elevator eventually added, also allowed the couple to age in place.
When Forrest and Smithe moved into the home, they took time to live in the space and evaluate what changes they might want to make. After nine months, they decided to focus on interior updates to refresh a few spaces, with virtually nothing to be done to the architecture.
The couple approached SOM. “The rough idea of going to SOM was, having seen some of the buildings that Netsch had designed, they were very intricate and theory-based designs,” Forrest says. “We weren’t sure that a regular architecture firm would understand field theory... they may not have been as sensitive to why things were the way they were and how to implement any changes that were necessary to deal with the fact that the house was 40 years old.”
Lee and the team at SOM were moved by Forrest and Smithe’s genuine love for the home. The couple wanted to adjust some of the more utilitarian areas—the kitchen, the bathrooms, their closets—but keep almost everything else the same, while putting a spotlight on the architectural features rather than artwork. To Forrest, the architecture was a piece of art in itself.
The space, without the adornment of art, surprised and inspired Lee.
“I think that’s what happened to Will and Mark,” he says. “They saw the architectural quality of the big walls around the edges, the quality of light from the carefully placed windows and from the skylight above, and the serenity of the space.”
The walls got a fresh coat of paint in Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace, and the kitchen became home to new appliances, cabinetry, and countertops. The half bath upstairs got a refresh, and the master bathroom downstairs was updated but kept its configuration, down to the shape and size of its sunken shower. Lee and his team enlarged the master bedroom closets, removed bookshelves to reveal more wall space, and took out the elevator.
When the house was built, Netsch was somehow able to get away with minimal handrails, Lee says, chuckling. “He put furniture or potted plants, or artifacts like candelabra or candlesticks, or a piece of sculpture on the edges of those overhangs and platforms.” For the renovation, SOM designed a series of handrails that didn’t compete with the architecture—and that felt like they’d always been there.
Forrest and Smithe also wanted to reference the Netsches’ commitment to artmaking. They commissioned a work by Luftwerk, artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero’s collaboration that explores light and color through installations, to be projected onto the monumental wall in the living area.
“It was a way of honoring his use case for the wall, which was to showcase art,” Forrest explains.
The renovation was completed in 2017, and furnishings throughout are sparse on purpose. “My husband and I have a running, not-funny joke that I can’t be comfortable unless it’s beautiful, and he [feels it’s] not beautiful unless it’s comfortable,” says Forrest. “Largely, there’s just a few places where we can actually meet in the middle, which is why we don’t have a ton of furniture, even though he’s the owner of a furniture company.” They had help from SOM in designing some pieces, like the sofa in the living room and side tables in the master bedroom, and chose other items that would complement the architecture.
Even after five years, Forrest says, there is never a day they don’t marvel at the home. “The light is always changing and moving, you’re constantly finding new ways to appreciate it,” he says. “The whole house was designed to put light into surprising places at interesting times of the day or different times of the season.”
Forrest adds that he feels the home is even more special for its interiors than exterior, even though, as Lee says, it holds court on its corner. “It works exceptionally well as a residence for living in and we would never have thought that, in terms of movement and ease and entertaining and being in the house.”
It works in part, Lee says, because the home’s new owners recognized the authenticity of the structure and pushed for the preservation of its spirit. “Here is another set of people who can live in the house, but they’re really almost caretakers or stewards of that architecture,” he says.