Follow the lakeshore southeast from Chicago and you’ll soon arrive at a landscape that feels more Martian than Midwestern. This is the Indiana Dunes National Park, a fifteen-mile stretch of coastline full of rugged beaches, boggy forests, and those titular dunes, some nearly two hundred feet tall. Despite its popularity with weekend recreationalists, this sliver of the Lake Michigan frontage can be an uncompromising place to actually live: sweltering in the summer, frigid in the winter, and blustery all year-round. In short, it’s no place for a glass house, particularly not a twelve-sided one built nearly a hundred years ago.
Yet somehow the House of Tomorrow has endured here, a relic of Depression-era ingenuity left to wither in the sun. An early work of solar architecture pioneer George Fred Keck, the diaphanous dwelling was the most eccentric of a slew of experimental homes first presented at the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition, held in Grant Park. Wildly popular, five were relocated to the dunes as part of an ill-fated real estate development…
