Arthur HEUN
Saginaw 1866 - Chicago 1946
Biography
Born in Michigan, Arthur Heun studied architecture at the University of Michigan and was apprenticed to his uncle, the German-born architect Ludwig Volusin Bude, in Grand Rapids. Heun began his career working as a draughtsman for the architectural firm of Francis M. Whitehouse in Chicago, one of the leading residential architects in the city at the end of the 19th century. When Whitehouse retired, at the height of his career and soon after completing the Choral Hall for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Heun took over his clientele and established his own practice, likewise specializing in residential commissions. Among his most significant early projects were several homes in the affluent Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, notably ‘Ardleigh’, an Elizabethan-style house built for the merchant and philanthropist John V. Farwell in 1896, and the neighbouring ‘Edgewood’, commissioned by Farwell’s brother Francis, as well as Mellody Farm, a very large estate built between 1904 and 1908 for J. Ogden Armour, the second wealthiest man in America at the time.
Heun continued to work in Chicago and Lake Forest for much of his career and counted among his clients such prominent citizens as William McCormick Blair, Albert Loeb, Astor Street and Frank Stout. An active member of the Chicago Architectural Club, Heun was also associated with The Eighteen, a group of architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, who met regularly to discuss common topics. In 1905 he joined Wright and several other local architects who took offices in the Steinway Hall building in Chicago, thereby coming into contact with the innovative ideas of Wright and the architects of the so-called Prairie School. Heun also designed the original buildings of the city’s Arts Club between 1916 and 1936. A member of the American Institute of Architects from 1911, Heun continued to enjoy a successful career as a domestic architect, receiving important commissions until the 1930s. In addition, he often designed the interiors and some of the furniture, lighting and windows in the houses that he built, and decorative elements from a number of homes designed by him are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Heun died at the age of 79 and, according to an obituary, ‘After retiring from active architecture he devoted himself to painting.’ At this death Heun bequeathed his collection of modern paintings and drawings to the Arts Club of Chicago.
