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Twentieth-century urban renewal had a great track record of producing freeways, less so desirable places to live. But near the University of Chicago, on the South Side of the city, one plan from the late 1950s by architects I. M. Pei and Harry Weese embraced its context, generating midcentury-modern town houses still celebrated for their congenial and efficient urban family life.

“Part of the romance of being here,” says tech entrepreneur Sue Khim, who moved into one of the town houses with her family in September of 2024, “is that our kids play in an alleyway and almost every single family here has kids.” Today as when they were built, the roughly 150 town houses in Hyde Park by Pei and Weese feature airy, open staircases, lushly planted courtyards, and tactile buff brick with limestone trim. Arranged in horizontal bars a block long, the town houses include rear entrances that face each other across green spaces, creating semienclosed courtyards that feel cloistered and communal and are now strewn with lawn furniture, grills, and, in one case, an entire small playground.

Zooming out, the network of courtyards and quiet streets in Hyde Park is prime tricycle track, and the prestigious schools and cultural amenities of the university (as well as the tight-knit social networks therein) have long made the area a sought-after destination for people committed to raising city kids.

At present, there’s not much to suggest to a passerby the complicated part of American history from which the town houses were born. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, Hyde Park was experiencing an extremely typical species of 20th-century urban evolution. As affluent white residents moved to newly established suburbs, and less advantaged, mostly Black families moved in, the area suffered from increasing economic decline and structural neglect.

Leaders from the University of Chicago and city officials created a targeted renewal plan to demolish 20 percent of buildings across 900 acres in the Hyde Park and Kenwood neighborhoods, with 100 acres designated and cleared for new housing, parks, schools, a fire station, and a shopping center. It was one of the largest such urban redevelopment plans in America in terms of area, and despite the controversies over demolition and displacement—some 4,000 families were pushed out as a result—given the generally heedless use of bulldozers in struggling cities across the country, the intervention here was relatively light, leaving much existing infrastructure intact and renovating properties judged salvageable.

Weese had been hired as the consulting architect and engineer for the plan. The developer Webb and Knapp eventually took the reins, and Pei was its house architect. These were the first row houses built in Chicago in 50 years, but Webb and Knapp rebranded them as town houses, a term preferred by the developer’s president, Bill Zeckendorf, to differentiate them from “Baltimore slums or Philadelphia crowded districts,” as Weese said. The town houses, scattered over a few dozen blocks, are scaled to the street, avoiding the bunker mentality present in the city’s best known and least successful works of urban renewal, its brutally austere and cheap Corbu public housing high-rises, located only a few miles away before their wholesale demolition in the first years of the new millennium. Dispersed among premodern courtyard apartment complexes, two- and three-flats, and single-family homes, the town houses’ sheer faces and masonry-framed windows provide another textural experience, but not a new domineering logic.

Instead, the rigor and precision of the Pei-Weese town houses are seen on the inside. “This is the most efficient, economical use of space for a single-family town house,” says Sue. The house is just 20 by 41 feet, stacked across three levels connected by a wood-screened open stair that’s the house’s primary formal feature, lit by a frosted skylight.

Sue and her husband, Silas Hundt, also a tech entrepreneur, bought this house from its original owners before ever seeing it in person. They were relocating from San Francisco, where contending with legacy admissions for kindergarten seemed like a good reason to decamp for Chicago, where Sue grew up. The couple hired Vinci Hamp Architects’ Alex Krikhaar for a renovation that would retain their town house’s midcentury modern identity while better accommodating the couple (who both work mostly from home), their two small children, ages two and five, and Sue’s parents, who live with them for a few months of the year.

Krikhaar’s renovation removed a wall between the kitchen and dining room, a common move in these town houses. It also added a wall to the primary bedroom upstairs, creating a walk-in closet with enough room for Sue’s Peloton bike. Similarly, the downstairs half bath was expanded into a full bathroom and the closet into a walk-in, turning the adjacent bedroom into a semipermanent suite for Sue’s parents. The result is a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house. “Tiny bedrooms with lots of storage make it feel spacious because half the battle is that kids have so much stuff,” she says.

Sue furnished the house with a few midcentury modernist classics to reaffirm its vintage, like an Eames chair and console in the living room, which is informally divided from Sue’s home office by a Room & Board Reese sofa. Krikhaar optimized the dining area by installing two custom white oak banquettes, cantilevered from the walls. A Vitsœ modular shelving system stacks plates and bowls, and a hidden pull-out drawer spirits away the rice cooker, a suggestion from Sue’s mom, who trained as an architect.

Wendy Doniger, an emeritus professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, sacrificed the wall closing off her town house’s kitchen shortly after she arrived in 1978 on the altar of scholarly discourse. Hosting a dinner party that included Pulitzer Prize–winning author Saul Bellow, she found herself sequestered over searing steaks that were drowning out her guests’ irreplaceable bon mots in the next room. “I said, ‘To hell with this!’ The next day I called a builder friend of mine and they bashed out the wall,” she says. A single mom attracted to the town houses because of the lack of domestic busywork they required, she let her son stay home from school to see the drywall fly. She hasn’t changed much since.

“You have to approach these projects with the original architects’ intentions in the back of your mind, working within the language they set up.”
—Alex Krikhaar, architect

“I. M. Pei and Harry Weese very clearly used every square foot of these town houses,” says Krikhaar. There’s a half-height storage closet tucked into the stair landing at Sue’s house; diapers up front, more excursionary supplies (like camping gear) in the back. Even the lighting fixtures are space efficient: narrow ceiling-mounted track lighting by WAC and Contech.

Pei and Weese’s design also works within the quirks of Chicago’s building codes to save space. Three-level homes here usually require two staircases, unless the bottom level is a basement. So Weese and Pei put the front door up a few steps from the sidewalk, creating an entry vestibule between the main (second) floor and the ground floor, masquerading as a basement, so there’s no second staircase. Sue, for one, has more space to hide away her kids’ toys.

Friends from Silas’s college days at the University of Chicago bought into the neighborhood before he and Sue did. Molly Turner and Alex Meyer lived in a Pei-Weese town house from 2020 to 2025. Last spring, they moved into a larger townhome nearby, part of a different development designed solely by Weese during the same era, with a bigger entry courtyard and back patio and richer red brick that diffuses some of the formal austerity of the Pei-Weese units. This was likely the only move they would have undertaken, says Molly. “We weren’t looking,” she says. The new house is “two-hundred steps away, as our five-year-old measured. We can’t see a car from our home. It feels very private and quiet.”

The modernism here, it seems, is like a good kindergarten teacher: warm, resourceful, and efficient. It’s the inverse of the open-plan spaces fetishized by the likes of Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, who envisioned a way of living that’s completely unmanageable for two working adults stomping between their home offices and the kitchen with preschool-age kids underfoot and Sue’s parents downstairs. “These homes amplify the best parts of the neighborhood,” says Molly, “because they have these quieter nooks and dense family connective tissue.”

Project Credits:

Renovation Architect: Vinci Hamp Architects

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