Constable: House of future turns 50

She wasn't sure what the thing was, but Judy Broggi knew she wanted to live in it. The house-hunting Broggi, department coordinator for prints and drawings at The Art Institute of Chicago, snapped photos of the odd structure nestled into a typical Rolling Meadows subdivision and sent them to her husband, Dan.

“It's too much, right? It's too kooky, right?” she offered, not sure if her husband could grasp the full potential from a few images.

“I knew exactly what it was,” Dan Broggi, an architect, remembers telling his wife, “That's a hyperbolic paraboloid.”

So they bought it.

“I instantly became excited and terrified at the same time,” says Dan Broggi, a project architect with Bancroft Architects & Engineers in Elk Grove Village. Builders “were a lot braver back then,” he says.

Built 50 years ago, their house looks like the future we imagined in 1967, when spaceships were rocketing toward the moon and the push-button, flying-car, robotic-maid life depicted in the TV cartoon “The Jetsons” seemed just around the corner. Mathematicians might say, “A hyperbolic paraboloid is a quadric surface whose sections by planes parallel to one coordinate plane are hyperbolas, while those sections by planes parallel to the other two are parabolas, if proper orientation of the coordinate axes is assumed.” But other folks say, “That house has a saddle-shaped roof with peaks that rise like the bow of a ship, while other parts gently slope toward the ground.” Ceiling height inside ranges from 16 feet to 6 feet.

“It's like a big Pringle chip,” says Dan Broggi, 55, who wanted a structural engineering to inspect the house and make sure it was sound before they bought it. Discovering that the house was built by a structural engineer named Joe Meyer, Broggi phoned Joseph A. Meyer and Associates in Barrington.

“As I was describing the house, he (Meyer) said, 'Wait a minute. I built that house,'” Broggi says.

“I had a lot of fun building it,” says Meyer, who is 84, still working and has fond memories of his design. “I thought it would become popular.”

The futuristic look never caught on, and only a few hyperbolic paraboloid houses exist in the country. The most famous might be a house in Lawrence, Kansas, where the lowest spot on the roof was a lure for skateboarders until the owners got the home on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

You can't really appreciate the Rolling Meadows house until you grab the doorknob in the center of the front door and step inside a room where the cedar planks in the ceiling gently curve into windows 16 feet in the air. Meyer hand-stained that ceiling while flat on his back atop scaffolding.

“Isn't it awesome? We love it,” Judy Broggi says.

“In the morning, the light comes through the windows and makes the ceiling glow,” Dan Broggi gushes. “It's worth a lot to people who appreciate it.”

That comment makes Meyer laughingly note, “It is architects who go for a stupid little house like that.”

But all three point out that there is a bit of genius in the design.

“There's no joist, no I-beam. The whole roof is about 2 inches thick,” Dan Broggi says. Snow apparently slides right off. There are no gutters and the Broggis are updating drainage in the spots where rain runs off.

“Because of the geometric shape, it's rigid,” Meyer says. “The walls don't support anything.”

An old Swedish carpenter and a young man from Kentucky built supporting walls while constructing the roof, which was held together by glue until they used a newfangled pneumatic nail gun to finish it. The carpenters panicked when Meyer ordered them to take out those supports. “They called and said, 'Joe, it's coming down!'” Meyer remembers, whose calculations said that the roof could support itself. “I expected a drop of about 2 inches, and that is what it did.”

The Broggis, who have remodeled the interior, updated the bathrooms and redone the plumbing and electrical, left a gap in the basement ceiling to show a portion of two 70-foot bolts.

“These bolts run all the way through the house to the other side,” Dan Broggi says. “They keep the house from spreading.”

Meyer bought his first home for $11,500 - one of Kimball Hill's two-bedroom ranch homes that accompanied the postwar boom that built Rolling Meadows. As part of his compensation for helping build commercial buildings and a theater for Kimball Hill, Meyer was given a lot, which backs onto Salt Creek, for the hyperbolic paraboloid house he built for roughly $40,000.

Dan Broggi was a child living in Queens when a hyperbolic paraboloid building sprouted in the New York borough. “It felt like the modern world was coming in,” Dan Broggi says. “That started my interest in becoming an architect.”

The midcentury style fits Judy Broggi, who restored the “harvest gold” and “olive green” colors that were popular at the time and filled the walls behind their basement boomerang-shaped bar with toys, dolls, glasses, a cookie jar and other items from that era.

“We'll have a couple of drinks and play some songs on the record player,” says Dan Broggi. “It has sort of a Jetsons feel.”

The couple's daughter, Pilar, 23, is a student at the University of Illinois and also appreciates having a room that doesn't conform to the norm, her parents says. Every Halloween, trick-or-treaters at the door stare at the open interior and curved ceiling and tell Dan and Judy Broggi how cool their house is.

Meyer, whose father, Max, was a structural engineer, graduated from Northwestern University in 1958 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. He lived in the house with his wife, daughter Eileen and son Terry until he divorced. Now, Meyer and his second wife, Sharon Vogle, live in Fox River Grove and boast 15 grandkids between them. The Broggis are the third owners of the house and have become friends with Meyer, who appreciates their refurbishing efforts.

“When they showed up, I was so happy,” Meyer says. “I was afraid it would be torn down, which would break my heart.”