“The man who bought a modernist house designed by architect Larry Booth to prevent its demolition has completed a rehab and is putting it on the market.
“Built in the late 1970s with a glass-and-brick exterior and a mostly white interior, the five-bedroom Lincoln Park house is priced at $3.25 million, according to a ‘coming soon’ listing posted by Sarah Ziehr, a Redfin agent.
“When the children of the home’s original owners put it up for auction in June 2020, it had no protection from demolition. Its triangular lot at Cleveland, Lincoln and Dickens avenues could hold a five-story building with four to 10 residential units, Blair Thrush Lele, an Engel & Völkers agent and member of the family selling it, told Crain’s then.
“Bernard Bergeron, a software designer, paid a little under $1.66 million for the house. ‘It would be pretty sad to demolish this,’ Bergeron told Crain’s in August 2020. ‘This was really a house of the future’ when it was completed.
“Replacing the house with a five-story building ‘would be wrong,” he said.
“When Booth originally designed the house more than 45 years ago, he was one of the Chicago 7 architects, a group of postmodernists who promoted an aesthetic departure from the austere look popularized by Mies van der Rohe.
“After buying the house in 2020, Bergeron told Crain’s that he hadn’t known much about Booth’s work but that he ‘fell in love when I walked in. The light, the flow of the house, everything was so carefully thought out.’ He did not expressly say he planned to live in the house after the rehab.” (Rodkin, Crain’s Chicago Business, 3/31/22)