John W. Moutoussamy House
361 East 89th Place
About the House
Noteworthy Chicago architect John Warren Moutoussamy designed this International Style house in 1954 as a modern home for himself and his family Situated on a double-wide lot on the south side of East 89th Pl., this International Style house was originally built as a long, flat-roofed rectangle situated along the west side of the lot. In the early 1960s, however, a garage addition was added to the front of the house at the east side of the lot, doubling the house’s 89th Place frontage. This addition also altered the footprint of the house to the shape of an “L” and created a rear courtyard hidden from street and sidewalk. This garage addition was added during John Moutoussamy’s residence in the house.
The one-story building is geometric in overall form and rectilinear in most details, with plainly-detailed buff glazed brick walls set in a common bond, a material often used by Mies van der Rohe. The exterior walls of the building are very smooth and planar in appearance and are punctuated only by window and door openings. On the exterior applied decoration is non-existent; the design of the house relies on geometric forms, precise proportions and refined details. Windows are large, fixed casements which are slightly recessed and situated atop wide horizontal louvers and capped with narrow horizontal panels. A two-car overhead rolling garage door occupies the east half of the main facade and a single picture window occupies the other half and is slightly offset. The west elevation hosts only two picture windows with louvers, the northern of which is paired with a glazed entry door. The entrance door is approached via a concrete sidewalk along the west elevation. Elevations which face the rear courtyard are punctuated by picture windows similar to those at the primary facades, two at the east courtyard elevation and one at the south. A picture window is also located on the south facade of the long leg of the “L”.
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About John W. Moutoussamy
(1922-1995)
John Warren Moutoussamy, FAIA (1922-1995) designed the house at 361 East 89th Place in 1954 as a home for his wife and three children. Moutoussamy was born in 1922 and studied at Chicago’s Tilden Technical and Englewood High Schools. During World War II he served in the Army which opened the door to higher education through the GI Bill, and after the war he enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) to study architecture under Mies van der Rohe.
In 1951 Moutoussamy went to work for the Chicago firm Schmidt, Garden and Erickson under the direction of modernist Paul D. McCurry (who also taught Moutoussamy at Tilden Technical High School). In 1956 he moved on to a new Chicago firm: PACE Associates headed by Charles Gethner. During Moutoussamy’s time at PACE the firm was involved in planning the modernist campus at IIT and preliminary studies for the Chicago Federal Center in partnership with Mies van der Rohe. In 1965 Moutoussamy left PACE to start his own practice to design a large-scale urban-renewal housing development known as the Lawless Gardens (3550 S Rhodes Ave.). He received the commission from a consortium of African American professionals including Dr. Theodore K. Lawless, publisher John H. Johnson and dentist Dr. William J. Walker. The complex was partially subsidized from the National Housing Act to support construction of middle-income housing. The remaining financing needed to come from banks, and because Moutoussamy was black they declined to support the project. Moutoussamy was required to team up with a more established firm. He chose to form a team with Dubin, Dubin and Black (DDB) because he had worked with John Black of that firm while at PACE. At the beginning Moutoussamy was merely an associate of (DDB) with a separate office where he was the lead designer for Lawless Gardens. At some point during construction Moutoussamy was asked to join the firm as partner, the first African American to attain partner at a large Chicago architecture firm.
Completed in 1969, Lawless Gardens consists of two 24-story apartment buildings and 54 low-rise town homes. Architectural historian Carl Condit described the design challenges of Lawless Gardens: “This large body of construction, with its relatively stringent limitations on cost and hence on design flexibility, brought to the fore the architectural firm of Dubin, Dubin, Black and Moutoussamy, who steadily improved the quality of planning until it stood not far below the average of unsubsidized work such as Marina City.” In 1970 the Lawless Gardens design was awarded by the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Dubin, Dubin, Black & Moutoussamy practiced from 1965 to 1978, and after John Black’s retirement the firm continued as Dubin, Dubin & Moutoussamy until Moutoussamy’s passing in 1995. In his three decades at the firm, Moutoussamy’s work remained true to his training under Mies van der Rohe and staunchly modernist even as the style began to fall out of fashion in the 1980s. Moutoussamy’s best-known work from this period is the Johnson Publishing Company, a late-modern corporate headquarters at 820 S. Michigan Ave. completed in 1971 (a designated Chicago Landmark).
Moutoussamy also designed a number of institutional buildings in Chicago for both public and private clients. Public institutions include three City Colleges: Harry S. Truman (1145 W Wilson Ave., 1976), Olive-Harvey (10001 S Woodlawn Ave., 1981) and Richard J. Daley College (7500 S Pulaski Rd., 1981), as well as the Carver Military Academy (13100 S Doty Ave., 1973) the Bessie Coleman Library (731 E 63rd St., 1993), and the Woodlawn Neighborhood Health Center (6337 S. Woodlawn Ave., 1972) for the City of Chicago. Private institutions also commissioned Moutoussamy, including the National Headquarters of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority (5656 S. Stony Island Ave., 1983), and the Headquarters of the Chicago Urban League (4510 Michigan Ave., 1982). Moutoussamy also designed the Regents Park Apartments (5050 S Lake Shore Dr., 1972-1974), a twin-tower residential complex designed with distinctive concrete lattice-frame exteriors.
In 1978 the American Institute of Architects honored Moutoussamy’s contributions to the field of architecture by naming him a Fellow. He was a member of the Builder’s Club and the Wayfarer’s Club, the latter club included Bertrand Goldberg and Walter Netsch. Moutoussamy was married to Elizabeth Hunt and the couple raised three children. His son, Claude Louis, received his architectural degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and became principal of Dubin, Dubin, & Moutoussamy. The elder Moutoussamy’s daughter, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, is a prominent photographer who was married to the late tennis champion Arthur Ashe. John Moutoussamy died in 1995 at age 73.
