Century of Progress Homes

Century of Progress Homes is a compact district of five houses built for Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress World's Fair, now set along Lake Front Drive in Beverly Shores. If you like architecture, take time to compare them: the point is seeing five sharply different pitches for modern living in one short stretch. On an ordinary visit, you see the exteriors and roadside interpretation. These are private homes, so stay in public areas and don't approach doors, yards or decks.

The Florida Tropical House is easy to pick out by its pink exterior and roof terrace. Wieboldt-Rostone puts the experiment into its artificial-stone cladding, while Armco-Ferro used prefabricated steel panels coated in porcelain enamel. Their very different surfaces make this more interesting than five versions of the same historic house.

Cypress Log Cabin makes the case for cypress wood and a familiar cabin shape. The House of Tomorrow takes the opposite route, turning glass and steel into a futuristic home. Interpretive signs along the road help connect each design to the idea it was built to demonstrate.

George Fred Keck designed this twelve-sided glass house around a central hub, with a steel core and supports radiating outward like wheel spokes. The open plan, central air conditioning, early dishwasher and refrigerator, and even an airplane hangar were meant to suggest what home life might become. The glass also made a practical problem obvious: direct sun overwhelmed the early cooling system. What the house taught its designers about solar heat fed into Keck's later work on passive-solar homes.

The houses began as part of an eleven-home display at the 1933 fair. Beverly Shores developer Robert Bartlett moved them to the Indiana lakeshore to help sell his resort community. Four came across Lake Michigan by barge in 1935; the Cypress Log Cabin was taken apart and hauled by truck. That unusual move is why these fair experiments now sit together as a neighborhood rather than a row of exhibits in Chicago.

From the public lakeshore, frame the pink Florida Tropical House with the glass-walled House of Tomorrow behind it. The beach foreground and two very different facades tell more of the district's story than a tight shot of one house alone.