One of Chicago’s great architecture and preservation supporters has been kind enough to attend many of my public lectures over the years and become a good friend. He asked me to present a lecture to the Lake Geneva Conservancy this September for their annual benefit, and as a prelude gave Felicity and I a tour of Lake Geneva this past week. The lecture ruminates on the past and future of heritage conservation, and Lake Geneva presents excellent examples of the various facets of the history of preserving buildings.

We began at Black Point, the Seipp-Peterson house, built in 1888 by Adolph Cudell for the brewer Conrad Seipp as a summer vacation home. Its preservation over the past decade represents a fairly recent phenomenon dating to the early 1990s, namely the NIMBY house museum backlash, where nearby property owners, guarding their privacy, object to public tours of houses. Black Point responded, as Oak Park did in 1996, by limiting the tours and the accessibility – like the Seipps and Petersons, you must arrive by boat. Despite the limitations, the backlash has been strong. Continue Reading

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