Concrete Block Houses 2: Modern Times, 1930-1940

By Michael Bridgeman

This year our Specialty Tour visits Crestwood, a unique cooperative neighborhood established in the 1930s and developed over three decades. You can get a taste of what you’ll see in this month’s blog post below, part two of our exploration of concrete block houses. Click here for more information and tickets for this one-day tour on September 28.

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Smooth face building blocks [1]

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, concrete blocks became widely popular for all kinds of construction, from garages to churches, manufacturing plants to residences. My earlier post, Concrete Block Houses 1: The First Wave, 1900-1930, focused on houses large and small in the Madison area. This post looks at concrete block houses designed in the 1930s, with samples from Monona’s Frost Woods, Madison and Shorewood Hills.

By 1930, concrete blocks themselves had changed. Rockface block, which had been ubiquitous for nearly 30 years, was displaced by smooth face block. Sleek surfaces were “modern” and imitating traditional masonry was no longer fashionable. Production had changed, too, as lightweight aggregates were introduced that made blocks that were still strong but easier to manipulate. The most successful of the early lightweight, hollow blocks used cinders from coal combustion. F.J. Straub patented the cinder block in 1917 and licensed production through the 1930s, producing 70 million blocks a year by 1926. [a] Cinder blocks of various composition are widely used today.

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Smooth face blocks were promoted principally for structural use. The expectation was that all but the most utilitarian buildings would be veneered with brick, stone, or stucco. The 1925 Straub catalog shows dozens of residential examples, from large houses to bungalows. Only one (shown above) has concrete block as uncovered facing, where “the careful arrangement of light and dark blocks gives the much desired appearance of a toned surface, ... a source of gratification to owners.” [c] All of the houses shown in the catalog are in revival styles except for a handful of Craftsman bungalows.

Charles Wright and Ednah Shepard Thomas house

International Style and the Beattys

The new International Style emphasized straight lines, flat roofs, uniform wall surfaces, and asymmetrical window arrangements. It was starker than the modernistic Art Deco designs that had become widespread in the 1920s. The style was born in Europe during the 1920s, arrived in America in 1928, [d] and was first seen in Wisconsin in 1931 at the Charles Wright and Ednah Shepard Thomas house at 5903 Winnequah Rd. in Monona. It has a structural skeleton of concrete blocks and was initially covered in “cement waterproof paint;” it is now coated in stucco. [e] The Thomas house was designed by Hamilton Beatty and his wife Gwenydd Beatty, who built their own modern house nearby. [f] Hamilton Beatty was a strong proponent of the style while working with his wife, and less so after 1935 when he started his business partnership with Alan Strang. Their collective residential works, most of which use conventional frame construction, are concentrated in Monona’s Frost Woods neighborhood.

A notable concrete block house by the Beattys stands at 3718 Nakoma Rd. in Madison. Dating to 1935, it was built for William and Mable Day is clad mostly in exposed block, combined with small areas of clapboard siding. A tall vertical window lights the interior staircase. The house originally had a large open deck over the garage that connected to the dining room and kitchen; two enclosed levels above the garage were added later. The modern house was not warmly received. Diane Filipowicz writes:

...the scandalous appearance of the International Style flat-roofed Day house, unapproved by the Madison Realty Company, at the northeast edge of the “story-book like” Nakoma, reaffirmed the [development] Company’s (and the residents’) resolve to prevent such unsightly accidents in the future. [g]

Filipowicz further describes the attitudes of different neighborhoods toward modern design: “Unlike the near-west ‘country club’ development of Nakoma, the most conservative of Madison’s developing suburbs of the period, the Shorewood Hills and Frost Woods developments in particular invited progressivism.” [h]

Crestwood

There was another neighborhood that welcomed modern design soon after the residents of Nakoma bemoaned an “unsightly” modern house of concrete block. The organizers of the new Crestwood development gladly accepted flat-roofed, International Style houses, along with other modern and traditional styles. Crestwood was a unique undertaking on what was then the western edge of Madison. The Wisconsin Cooperative Housing Association was incorporated in 1936, and by 1938 the first houses were occupied. The Association required that house designs stay within modest construction budgets and imposed no style restrictions. The result, after about 30 years of building, is an invigorating mix of sizes, types, and styles of houses, including Madison’s largest concentration of concrete block International Style residences.

Among the earliest houses in Crestwood is the Edwin and Ruth Kunze residence at 5726 Cedar Place (1938). It has many of the elements of International Style design with its flat roof and asymmetrically arranged windows, including one corner window on the second floor. Each concrete block is easily recognizable under the paint, though the mortar is more deeply raked between every third row of block, setting up a subtle horizontal rhythm to the otherwise uniform wall surfaces. The John and Santa Bordner house at 5746 Bittersweet Place (1939) was designed by Norman Kandl, a Hungarian-born architect who was named supervising architect of Crestwood in 1936. One of the best International Style houses in the neighborhood, it looks much as it did when built. The house is constructed of Waylite, one of several trademarked concrete blocks that used aggregates or manufacturing processes to make blocks that were lightweight and strong. [i] At the Bordner house the concrete block is more heavily coated than at the Kunze house, making the block pattern barely discernable.

Shorewood Hills

The Joseph W. and Marion Gale House in Shorewood Hills is perhaps the grandest of the local International Style houses. [j] Located at 2520 Topping Rd. (1935-36) this large house (about 3,900 square feet) sits on a hill that rises gently above street level with a yard that is more open than the wooded lots in Monona. The concrete blocks are larger than standard size and stacked one on top of the other and the well-defined mortar joints create a regular grid on all elevations. The Gale House has a flat roof, corner windows, and a deck over the garage that express the International Style. The nine columns that frame the narrow windows across the first story are a bit unusual for a style which values function over flourishes.

As intriguing as International Style houses with exposed concrete block may be, it is important to remember that neither the style nor the material were widely seen in the Madison area. Beyond those sampled above, International Style houses are generally found elsewhere on the west side and in Shorewood Hills. They may be clad in brick, stucco or clapboards. Only a handful use exposed blocks.

Post-Script

It may seem disingenuous to skip past the 1920s without mentioning Frank Lloyd Wright’s development of textile blocks. As important as Wright was (and still is) to Wisconsin, none of his textile block houses were built here. His four distinctive textile block residences were built in southern California in 1923. These posts intentionally stay close to home, believing that looking locally, while sometimes limiting, can help us better appreciate what is near at hand and spark further exploration.

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Notes

[a] Pamela H. Simpson, Cheap, Quick and Easy: Imitative Architectural Materials 1870-1930 (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), p.27-28. Coal cinders were among the aggregates introduced, leading to “cinder block” becoming a generic description.

[b] Straub cinder building blocks: a consideration of the architectural and structural availability... (National Cinder Concrete Products Association, 1925), p.147. Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/straubcinderbuil00nati/page/n3/mode/2up

[c] Straub cinder building blocks, p.15.

[d] The Lovell “Health” House in Los Angeles, built between 1927 and 1929, if often cited as the first International Style house in the United States. The style gets its name from a 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

[e] “New dwelling style,” Wisconsin State Journal, Oct. 25, 1931, p. 6. It is not clear from the photograph that accompanies the article if the pattern of individual blocks was visible at the time the house was built.

[f] Diane H. Filipowicz, “Beatty and Strang, 1930-41: The Problem of Modernism in American Architectural Practice” (master’s thesis, Cornell University, 1985) p.12-16. Hamilton Beatty and Gwenydd Chewett met as students at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 1928-29. They listed themselves as “designers” on their projects from 1931 to 1935.

[g] Filipowicz, p.71-76. The Day house was designed by the Beattys with Alan Strang signing the building permit as architect; he and Hamilton Beatty became business partners in 1935. Their subsequent work “generally evolved away from the classic severity of the International Style.”

[h] Filipowicz, p.69.

[i] Simpson, p.27-28.

[j] The nomination for the Shorewood Hills National Register Historic District credits the design to Milwaukee architect F. Brielmeier. I found no architect by that name in my search, though a number of Brielmaiers are prominent over several generations as architects, designers and artists.

Image Credits

[1] Straub cinder building blocks: a consideration of the architectural and structural availability... (National Cinder Concrete Products Association, 1925), p.175. Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/straubcinderbuil00nati/page/n3/mode/2up

[2] Straub cinder building blocks, p.185

[3] Straub cinder building blocks, p. 15.

[4] Wisconsin Historical Society Architecture & History Index. AHI #36294. Undated.

Other photographs by Michael Bridgeman.

Madison Trust