Lakeside House Studies, Lakeside, Michigan, Aerial Perspective

Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman continuously experi- mented with the domestic form, with projects ranging from postmodern houses based on concepts of humor and allusion, to multifamily and low-income housing. His early work in the 1970s often employed simple modern structures coupled with playful, representational elements, like his car-shaped garage building of 1976.

Tigerman’s work in the 1980s and 1990s became more complex and socially invested, as seen in works like his own home, Lakeside, at once a barn and basilica, as well as his building for a demonstration housing project in Berlin. As part of an ambitious, international redevelopment of an area bombed during World War II, Tigerman’s six-unit building recalls vernacular housing types and neoclassical German architecture and was “cleaved” in two halves by a vertical, modernist winter garden, a symbolic gesture at this West Berlin neighborhood adjacent to the soon-to-fall Berlin Wall.