File:Glessner House, Prairie Avenue and 18th Street, Near South Side, Chicago, IL - 52908293094.jpg

English: Built in 1886-1887, this Richardsonian Romanesque Revival-style mansion was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson for John J. Glessner, a machinery manufacturing industrialist, and his family, whom owned the Warder, Bushnell & Glessner Company, which later became the International Harvester Company. The house was owned and occupied by the Glessner family until 1936, during which time it witnessed the transformation of the surrounding neighborhood from a desirable and wealthy residential enclave full of some of Chicago’s wealthiest families into an industrialized district full of new factories and warehouses sprouting up among the decaying, subdivided, and crumbling victorian mansions, now home to a much less affluent population, a radical change from the state of the neighborhood when the house was constructed. After the death of Glessner in 1936, the mansion was deeded to the American Institute of Architects, whom refused the offer to care for the large and aging house. The house was then donated in 1937 to the Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). In 1945, the university rented the house to the Lithographic Technical Foundation, which installed large printing presses inside the house, and occupied the structure for over two decades. In 1963, the house was vacated by the Lithographic Technical Foundation, which moved its operations to Pittsburgh, and was narrowly saved from demolition when it was purchased from the Illinois Institute of Technology by a group of historic preservation advocates known as the Chicago Architecture Foundation in 1966. The house was subsequently restored and reopened as a museum in 1971.

The house was the last and most significant residential commission of Richardson’s career, with Richardson dying during the house’s construction at the age of 48. The house is notable for its solid and largely opaque facades facing the surrounding streets, creating a fortress-like quality, which contrasts with its translucent and more open facades facing the central courtyard. The precedent for this arrangement can be found in ancient Roman villas and Chinese Siheyuan houses, which often featured opaque facades towards the public rights-of-way next to them with small, minimal openings, with most of the spatial connection to exterior space being found in the central courtyards of these dwellings, with rooms being far more open to the courtyards than to the exterior, quite a departure from traditional European-American architecture. The exteiror of the house also takes precedent from Medieval architecture, especially the Romanesque movement of the early-to-mid-middle ages, which featured heavy masonry walls that required small window openings by necessity, though by the time the Glessner house and other Richardsonian Romanesque Revival-style buildings were designed with more modern structural methods, the utility of small window openings for structural support was no longer a requirement, instead, being utilized to create a sense of privacy and substantiality for a building.

The house features a rusticated sandstone exterior and wraps around a courtyard in the center that is open to the south side of the house, with the exterior facade facing the courtyard being clad in red brick with rusticated stone trim. The house features a side-gable roof with gable parapets, which is clad in red slate, with hipped dormers, multiple stone and brick chimneys, box gutters with copper downspouts, and conical roofs atop the towers. The exterior facade features small window openings with one-over-one double-hung windows, many of which on the second floor feature stone pillars with decorative capitals between the individual windows when arranged in groups, and some of which are so narrow as to be more readily classified as arrow slit openings, rather than as full-width window openings. The front door is demarcated by an arched transom beneath large voussoirs, and is flanked by ground-floor windows with a grid of nine openings on the exterior, which screen the wider and taller window bays behind them, with a carriageway on the south side of the Prairie Avenue facade that features a garage door. On the 18th Street facade, there is a recessed entry porch with a door turned perpendicular to the street, which opens to the street through a large archway beneath several large voussoirs, above which is a balcony with a small rectilinear opening, to the west of which is an attached rear carriage house with a double wooden carriage door, a small entrance door, and a rooftop cupola. The facades facing the courtyard feature larger window openings with stone sills and lintels, three semi-circular towers with conical roofs, with the courtyard feautring a large grassy lawn and paved walkways, which is enclosed on the south side by a brick wall that originally comprised the side facade of an adjacent house. Inside, the house features original woodwork, coffered ceilings, wooden floors, doors, fireplaces, wooden paneling, staircases, balustrades, plaster, and tile. The house has been furnished with period-appropriate items, as well as wallpaper, drapes, carpets and rugs, and were meticulously restored in the late 20th Century. Many antiques and works of art, significant items in their own right, were donated to the museum by the descendants of John J. Glessner to be returned to their original places within the house.

The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and as a Chicago Landmark in 1970, and is a contributing structure in the Prairie Avenue District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. In 1976, the house was listed as a National Historic Landmark, owing to its major historical and architectural significance. In 1994, the nonprofit Glessner House Museum was established as an independent organization to serve as stewards of the house and manage the operations of the museum. The fully restored house today serves as a historic house museum, allowing visitors to experience one of the most significant surviving 19th Century mansions not only in Chicago or Illinois, but in the United States.