Bungalow gets its due with fascinating exhibition.

Byline: Blair Kamin

CHICAGO _ Just as Chicagoans don't think twice about bone-chilling winters or corrupt aldermen, there is another part of their urban scene they take for granted _ the humble bungalow.

The city, after all, is packed with dazzling skyscrapers and drop-dead houses by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. Against that gem-studded backdrop, the bungalow _ solid but squat, affordable but hardly elegant _ seems like a dime-store bauble.

Yet a fascinating new exhibition at the Chicago Architecture Foundation proves that there is good reason to put the bungalow under the microscope, even if the looking isn't always easy. Actually there are several good reasons:

_First, Chicago has lots and lots of bungalows, nearly 80,000 of them. They make up almost one-third of all the single-family houses in the city.

_Second, the bungalow is a kind of Rosetta Stone that reveals how new technologies changed the American home _ and the life of the American homemaker _ in the 1920s.

_Third, as the show goes to considerable pains to demonstrate, not every bungalow is stamped out of the same architectural cookie-cutter.

Would you believe a bungalow with a Swiss chalet roof? Or a "bungaloid" mansion, with huge roof brackets and a massive dormer, that is at once charming and grotesque?

Even more typical bungalows have different colors and patterns of brick, as well as a variety of stone trim, dormer…