Born Modern
In Chicago, architect Geoffrey Goldberg and arts administrator Lynne Remington turned an early 20th-century triplex into a home suitable for their midcentury possessions and 21st-century lifestyle.
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The picturesque streets of Chicago’s Lincoln Park are packed with quaint row houses that have been painstakingly restored to early 20th-century perfection. But at least one of them—a three-story, bay-windowed example with a decidedly Edwardian demeanor—is not what it seems. Behind its unassuming facade, walls and floors have been eliminated, windows reworked and materials manipulated to forge a thoroughly contemporary home that both pays homage to and updates midcentury modernism.
Truth be told, the home’s owners, architect Geoffrey Goldberg and Lynne Remington, executive director of the Art Dealers Association of Chicago, are to the modernist manner born. She’s the daughter of a Stanford University medical academic and former nurse and grew up in a 1950s California ranch filled with prized Scandinavian furniture. He’s the son of celebrated Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg, who garnered worldwide attention for his design of the postwar, mixed-use residential development Marina City, iconic for its corncob-shaped twin towers.
When the couple married, only a home that would reflect their innate aesthetic would do. They first bought a modernist townhouse by Harry Weese (another illustrious Chicago architect, and a family friend, who is nationally known for his design of Washington, D.C.’s Metro stations). But by the time their son was six, the family was flat out of space. Young Nathan needed more room to roam, and his parents needed more floor space to accommodate the treasures they’d collected and inherited, rarities that included many of the sleek “experiments” Bertrand Goldberg had designed in the ’40s. “They were languishing in storage,” Geoffrey remembers.
Like many architects, Geoffrey Goldberg longed to design his own home. Unlike most, he didn’t want to start from scratch and impose his vision on a street. “You become an intruder in a neighborhood. I’d rather find a way to realize my vision privately,” he says thoughtfully. He got his chance when Remington spotted a “For Sale” sign on a desirable street; a few days later, the house was theirs.
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