- Nathan Kirkman
- Schweikher House
Fourteen years ago, when the Village of Schaumburg rescued the storied Schweikher house from destruction by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, I toured the house and met its diminutive occupant, artist Martyl Langsdorf. She and her husband, nuclear physicist Alexander Langsdorf, Jr., had purchased the home in 1953 from its designer, architect Robert Paul Schweikher.
Schweikher was a modernist who worked for, or with, the likes of David Adler, Fred Keck, and Philip Maher. He’d built the redwood and brick house, an early blend of Prairie School and International style, for himself in 1938, but was leaving to head up the architecture department at Yale. (He subsequently held the same job at what is now Carnegie Mellon.)