Features
The 25 – Stuart Cohen FAIA and Julie Hacker FAIA
Preservation proponents Stuart Cohen and Julie Hacker have been giving a voice to traditional residential architecture for the nearly four decades they have been in practice in their Chicago-based firm.
Hacker, a past preservation commissioner who rewrote the design and solar guidelines for historic houses in her hometown of Evanston, Illinois, as a member the city’s preservation commission, and Cohen, the current vice chairman of the commission, have played significant roles in saving historic structures throughout Chicago’s suburbs and providing guidance on their thoughtful renovation.
“We are committed to keeping the integrity of the original structure,” Hacker says. “If the integrity of the structure has been destroyed with bad remodels and bad additions, it is a challenge to reinvent what might have been taken out, to make something whole and have it look believable.”
In 1974, Cohen’s writings introduced the term and concept of “contextualism,” or building in a way that is compatible with a structure’s physical and cultural surroundings, into the field of architecture and preservation, and he was one of the first to oppose the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards directive that additions and modifications to landmark structures be visually different and distinguishable from the original building.
Their work remodeling historic homes as well as designing new traditional ones, documented in the 2009 tome Transforming the Traditional: The Work of Cohen & Hacker Architects, has become a model for architects around the country.
In 2018, Stuart received the ICAA Arthur Ross Award for Writing and Theory. The duo, who coedited the ICAA’s Classicist No. 16, received the 2019 Society of Architectural Historians Award for Excellence in Design, Academics, and Scholarship. They continue to school a new generation of architects.
