| Additional Information: | 2024 - International/Modernist. One story house with a flat roof, breezeway and detached one car garage, wood panel siding, metal fixed and casement windows, wood doors, landscaped site, and a concrete foundation.
The H. Carl and Darlene Schulze House, located at N61 W15801 Edgemont Drive, sits alone on a 0.58-acre lot. The Modern house sits in the middle of its large flat lot, set back from the curvilinear suburban street, with which it approximately aligns. The surrounding yard has several large trees and flower beds wrapping around the eastern side of the house. The one-story building itself is divided into shifting rectangles in plan. Two large ones make up the main mass of the house and on the south side is a semi-enclosed courtyard. On the north side is a raised platform, similar to a deck, which leads to a smaller detached garage rectangle. The roof of the house is a modified asphalt layer without any parapet with only the protrusion of vents, chimneys, and gutters visible. The elevation of the one-story house appears to be arranged in modular bays, approximately eight feet square, with the exception of doorways. The main entry is a solid wood door at the center of the north elevation opening out to a raised deck platform and a set of wood stairs facing the detached one-car garage, which matches the house. Each elevation bay is framed in painted wood, with the foundation below and a band, presumably the depth of the roof structure, above. The siding is painted vertical wood boards. Adjacent to the main entry is a bay of metal windows. Nearly all the windows on the house are identical and have a large, fixed plate glass section above, and two smaller operable awning windows below. There is another window bay at both the eastern and western end of the entry north elevation. On the east elevation there is a small wood porch with a simple wood railing and a floor aligned with the interior of the house. A pair of sliding glass doors, the width of one exterior bay, open on to the porch. There does not appear to be any fenestration on the western elevation of the house. The rear of the building is obscured from view, but consists of an open courtyard, with a high wall, matching the siding of the house, screening it from view. A set of sliding doors, each in its own bay and spaced apart, open onto the courtyard. The house is set on a concrete foundation. The detached garage across the porch from the house to the north has the same exterior material to match the house, a wood overhead garage door on its eastern elevations, and a series of three wood beams spanning the small entry porch overhead.
Based on recent real estate listing photography from 2021, the interior of the house is spare, with wood flooring and ceilings, plaster walls, built-in wood furniture, modernist light fixtures, painted concrete block for central service portions of the building, and an open plan, with public and private spaces segregated from each other. The overall appearance maintains a high level of integrity to the late 1960s and early 1960s.
Horst Carl Schulze was born in Berlin, Germany in 1925 and immigrated to the United States at a young age with his family, settling in Milwaukee. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he attended the University of Illinois, graduating with a degree in Architecture in 1952. Carl, his preferred name, married his wife Darlene soon after and the couple had two children. Immediately practicing on his own, he designed and constructed the Schulze family residence in 1958. Much of his early work was residential in nature and focused on the western suburbs of Milwaukee. In the late 1960s, Schulze took on a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee campus in the Planning Department and joined the firm of Gazinski, Schulze, and Zemanovic, designing commercial and industrial projects, also mostly in the western suburbs of Milwaukee in Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties. H. Carl Schulze retired from architectural practice in the early 1990s and died in 2009.
The H. Carl and Darlene Schulze House is an intact example of a mid-twentieth century modern house in Waukesha County. The house was designed and constructed by local architect H. Carl Schulze in 1958 and exemplifies one branch of modernist design sensibilities popularized in the United States during the 1950s among architectural schools and corporations that has its origins in the international style of the 1920s and 1930s. The exterior, and likely the interior, of the house retains integrity in terms of its location, workmanship, design, feeling, setting, association, and materials. H. Carl Schulze is not yet deemed a master architect so eligibility under the resource’s history or association with Schulze’s life was not considered.
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| Bibliographic References: | 2024 - Historic Architectural Survey, Granville CPCN; Cities of Milwaukee, Wauwatosa, Brookfield, Waukesha, and New Berlin; Villages of Butler, Lannon, Germantown, and Menomonee Falls; Milwaukee, Washington, and Waukesha Counties, Wisconsin – Stantec |
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