Re:Building, Volume 20

The surprise demolition of the Historic Richard Bock house in River Forest, Illinois, last year prompted Tim Loftus and myself to take a couple of days off work to try and document as much as we could of the house, by taking some videotape footage, a few dozen photographs and some physical samples of the building.

I only suspected a demolition was imminent about a week ahead of time when I happened to drive by and notice the fire department cutting holes in the roof and doing some practice on the building. When I contacted Village hall, they would not give me any answers and said they had no information about a demolition.

No effort was made to inform any of the historical institutions so that they could make a record of the structure or document it in any way.

Tim and I had to take some stealth photography of the interior during the demolishers' lunch break. We also did some archaeology while the building was being demolished. It took two days to demolish and haul the debris from the site. My wife, Avey spent most of a day at the site with us, and took some of the video.

Essentially, what we discovered was, that all you can see from the street, and most of what was inside is not the original construction, but an accumulation of many later additional and changes, mostly made by the Bocks themselves.

Our most interesting and exciting discovery is that the original structure underneath is a pure Prairie School structure - all stained board-and-batten with a flat roof. The brick wall is not original - it is a single course of brick veneer - beneath it is a board and batten wall all the way down to the ground. The two niches that are seen on the south side of the building, we had thought were for windows that had been closed in. they were not. What we found, enclosed in a wall was that, underneath were heavy concrete bases about 2 feet high, probably to support sculptures in the outside niches.

Though is looks like a Wright or Drummond designed structure, documentary evidence from Bock's autobiography indirectly states that is not by Wright. Tim will be spending the next few day doing documentary research, I'll be doing more physical research.

The original structure is ca. 1904 to 1910 era. The first additions and changes were made before World War 1 - many changes made later.

We still have all the pieces we took from the building which are right now stored in Tim's garage. We've not had to time to make our notes and drawings yet, even thought almost a year has passed. When we do have time, the 2-plus hours of video and dozens of photos we took will help us to recount our impressions.

From the video, it might seem like we were having a good time, and we were, even though the situation was kind of depressing. It is always good to be with friends.

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