George Hall
The west-side home was part of the architect’s experiment in prefab design.
Internationally, some of the biggest news out of Madison this year has nothing to do with Scott Walker or presidential politics. Instead, the recent discovery of a previously unknown Frank Lloyd Wright home has gone viral and global.
Interest has come from the BBC and publications in Rome and New Delhi, and the news has hit blogs and social media in at least 15 countries.
“It seems phenomenal,” says Mary Jane Hamilton, the Madison-area architectural historian who did the detective work. “I’m not a publicity person. I just do what other people would consider boring — researching things.”
Boring?
Her research into the house at 2107 West Lawn Ave. on Madison’s near west side has all the excitement of a hidden treasure tale. Nearly 30 years ago, a friend first called Hamilton’s attention to the home’s possible significance. But there was no proof, and it seemed unlikely; a Wrightian side entrance with an un-Wrightian band of dark brick? Over the decades she kept hearing rumors. After searching Madison building permits and records at Taliesin West, she finally found the proof in a 1917 builder’s advertisement.
As a result, retired teacher Linda McQuillen hit the jackpot: Her 1917 home (bought for $100,000 in 1989) was designed by one of the world’s most famous architects. But what’s the significance to Wright scholarship and to Madison?
In the 1910s, Henry Ford’s pioneering assembly line was viewed as promoting positive social change. Industries of all sorts were quick to adapt, including housing. Builders and even Sears, Roebuck & Company began offering “kit homes,” with plans and pre-cut materials. (Sears sold at least 70,000.)
Wright saw an opportunity. Between 1915 and 1917 he designed a series of “American System-Built Homes,” which he intended to be built by franchised dealers.
“He was thinking, ‘How can I design a beautiful house that everyone can afford to live in?’” says Mike Lilek, curator of four American System-Built homes in Milwaukee owned by Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin, a preservation nonprofit.
Wright called it organic and democratic design. “This is really his first and broadest gesture to a really wide audience,” says Lilek. Although the architect is best known for huge projects such as New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, his innovations carried over to his prefab designs. “There isn’t a thing about these homes that would subtract from Wright’s thinking on architecture,” says Lilek. One American System-Built home, for example, though just 805 square feet, has 33 windows.
Wright partnered with a Milwaukee man to organize the builder network and package materials into kits. They had a falling out over bookkeeping, and some of the homes were “lost.” Sixteen are known to have been built, and 14 still stand. One was discovered in Milwaukee’s Shorewood district last June.
Wright also built three prefab homes in Madison during the 1950s, so the discovery “connects the beginning of Wright’s thinking of housing for everybody and the end of Wright’s thinking of housing for everybody,” says Lilek. “It gives Madison a unique distinction that no place else in the world has.”
The West Lawn home is private, and is not open to the public. Lilek and Hamilton ask that the owner’s privacy be respected.
