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"View Slideshow\n\nLucky are the people who are born with, or early on are seized by, a clear shining vision of their lives. Ever since he was in the fifth grade, Chicagoan Thomas Roszak has known that he would be an architect. He went to work for one of his professors before graduating from architecture school at 22 and at 30 started his own architectural and construction firm, which specializes in condominium development. Now 38, Roszak has crowned his vision with a house for some especially rigorous clients: his wife, his two-year-old twins\u2014and himself.\n\nWhat kind of a house does a man who has thought about buildings since he was 10 years old design to live in with his family? \"A place that is an accumulation of everything I've studied, seen, liked and learned from, boiled down to the simplest expression possible,\" says Roszak. What this means, in his case, is a house that shows everything and hides nothing, a building that, from the outside, reveals or gives clues to its interior structure, and from the inside appears to merge with its setting, a handsome, wooded acre of land on Chicago's North Shore.\n\nTransparency has become an overly convenient catchall word for modern glass houses. It seems particularly facile when applied to Roszak's, which advances a very specific, knowing interplay between architecture and construction, obviously reflecting the two sides of Roszak himself: \"I wanted every choice to have meaning,\" he explains. \"Nothing is arbitrary in this house; nothing has been left to accident. You see how the house was imagined and made, and you see how it's lived in, too.\"\n\nRoszak believes that ideas often become overcomplicated in contemporary houses. He deliberately pared his down to the most essential. At the core of his design is a single module, 16 feet by 16 feet, which he deployed as is, exponentially increased (the living room, for example, is 24 feet by 32 feet, or one and a half and two times 16, respectively) or halved. \"My idea was that you could put together a few of these perfect cubes. A family starting out might use one for a bedroom, another for a kitchen, a third for a living room. As you grow, you add on. The difference with us was that we did it all in a single phase.\"\n\nRoszak's modules emerged as only a piece of the whole. It soon became clear that they would have to be joined together in a way that would allow the house to function mechanically. This was when he came up with the idea of halving the 16-foot cube for what he calls interstitial spaces, which he used for hallways, connecting rooms and systems. In keeping with his idea that the exterior of the house should fully disclose the interior, he expressed the large cubes with expanses of glass that are shaded by horizontal silver blinds; the interstitial spaces, by contrast, are shaded by soft white cloth. \"Ideally, when you look at the house,\" the architect says, \"it should tell its story clearly and quickly.\"\n\nRoszak's house tells more than just the story of its floor plan, however. There are influential spirits too: A graduate of IIT, Roszak can't help but nod at Miesian rigor. He and his wife, Justyna, are also wide travelers and over the years have been much taken with the loving timber construction of Shinto temples, which he has sought to echo with modern materials and technology; hence the house's east-west concrete frame, on which steel tubes lie north\u2013 south, in the Japanese style.\n\nIt's a little surprising, in such a cerebral house, to find these tubes painted a bright, almost shockingly lively yellow, yet color was fundamental to Roszak's plan. \"A glass house does not automatically have to be a cold house,\" he says. \"The actual color was Justyna's idea. She thought it would bring the gray concrete ceilings to life, and she was right.\" Yellow steel tubes, tomato-red-lacquered panels cladding the house's core, mellow Brazilian cherry floors framed in French limestone\u2014all of this helps to humanize and integrate Roszak's precise glass cubes.\n\nSo does one of the house's great, quietly playful, gestures: When one of Roszak's large cubes is joined to one of his smaller ones, which is in turn joined to another large one, a wonderful effect results in which you can be in, say, the living room and look across an exterior space, then back into the entrance hall. This is transparency at its freshest and most debonair.\n\nHow does a house with so much presence get furnished, and actually used? \"It's surprisingly embracing of family life,\" says the architect, who created a library that is open to, and cantilevers over, the living room, so that he and his wife could be separately occupied yet still, in essence, en famille. The children's day nursery, a glass box within a glass box, serves a similar function, while conveniently muffling noise.\n\nAs for furniture, Roszak unsurprisingly chose sleek contemporary Italian pieces, modernist classics by people like Gray and Breuer, Eames and Noguchi, and paired them with pieces either of his own design or by established firms that he had customized. Tribal rugs and contemporary artworks by Jon Rife and Henryk Musialowicz soften the furniture in the way that the color does the architecture.\n\nIn a house so attuned to its setting, it's worth noting that Roszak has had his hand in the landscape too. He chose the lot (where a 1941 ranch formerly stood) in part because it had sufficient mature trees on its south side to offer natural protection for a glass house. Elsewhere he inserted new trees that follow the grid in four-foot modules but grow, as trees will, in a way that feels organic. \"The garden is meant to be a counterpoint to the machine-made sensibility of the house,\" says Roszak. \"Though I admit I did choose birch trees because their branches echo the windows' silver mullions.\" The juxtaposition says everything about Roszak's sleek, rational house: Nature reigns freely\u2014as long as it matches."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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