Eugene Gilmore House
120 Ely Place
Madison

Private home. Not open to the public.

In 1904, University of Wisconsin law professor Eugene Gilmore bought a large, fan-shaped lot at the highest point in the new subdivision called University Heights, which was former farmland adjoining the western edge of the university campus. At the time, few houses had been built in the largely treeless subdivision.

He rejected the proposals of the first architect he appointed, and was looking for someone a bit more creative when he came across an essay written by Wright in March, 1908. Gilmore contacted Wright and by June had a set of plans for the concrete, wood, and plaster house that eventually cost about $10,000.

At the time the house was built, Gilmore's lot offered some of the most spectacular views in Madison. From the top of the hill were visible Lakes Mendota, Monona, and Wingra, the Capitol, and the University campus. Today the views are somewhat obscured due to new houses and more mature trees.

Wright took advantage of the site by designing a cross-shaped home on a raised basement. Wright often used this approach to get the living quarters high above street level. Off of the living room is a porch with a cantilevered roof. A high wall extends out from the porch, providing privacy for those in the garden, The first floor also held the dining room, library, and kitchen. The second floor contained four bedrooms, two of which, at opposite ends of the house, had triangular balconies.

The house is classic Prairie School, with its low hipped roof, wide eaves, rows of leaded glass windows on both floors, a large central Roman brick fireplace in the living room, and the cantilevered porch roof.

Unfortunately, the cantilevering didn't hold up, because the contractor left out a steel support beam. The porch roof swayed with only the slightest breeze, so Wright built a bench in the middle of the porch which was supported between two pairs of sturdy floor-to-ceiling posts.

When the Gilmores left Madison in 1922, the house was sold to Howard Weiss, a researcher at what later became the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory.

The Weisses repaired and enlarged the house, replacing the shingled roof with the present copper one, and they hired the Madison architectural firm of Law, Law and Potter to design two additions. The addition visible from the street is the new entrance. Instead of entering through the basement (though it is still usable), visitors now climb and external staircase to a new entryway off the living room.

The house is in excellent condition, both inside and outside, with virtually all the original woodwork, many original light fixtures, nearly all the original leaded glass windows, and the built-in benches and sideboard intact.

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The John Pew House
3650 Lake Mendota Dr.
Shorewood Hills

Private home. Not open to the public.

Research chemist John Pew and his wife moved to Madison in 1930 when Pew took a job with the Forest Products Laboratory. They purchased a long, narrow lot with fifty feet of frontage on Lake Mendota in Shorewood Hills, a Madison suburb that was mostly undeveloped.

The home is designed in layers. The large living-dining and kitchen layer is wrapped on two sides by an open balcony. The second layer is created by a second floor open balcony, and the third layer is the bedroom wing which rises to one side of the second floor balcony. Seen from the lake, the house appears to step up the slope, yet from the street only the square mass of the bedrooms and the jutting carport can be seen.

The Pews lived in their home until 1986, when they sold it to the current owners. The home is in excellent condition, having been well maintained and updated but never altered.

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The Herbert Jacobs House I
441 Toepfer St.
Madison

Private home. Not open to the public.

Jacobs I was built over a period of six months in 1937, with Wright himself supervising much of the work of local contractor Bert Grove. Wright hoped the 1,300-square foot house would be a prototype for moderate-income housing of high aesthetic quality. In pursuing this goal, he incorporated a number of innovations. The house was designed on a two-by-four foot grid to accommodate standard size sheets of plywood, which was cheap and was just coming into widespread use as a building material. This was one of Wright's first uses of a grid system, and he eventually used grids of all shapes and sizes in many buildings designed throughout the remainder of his career.

To save money, Wright designed the house with a flat roof, no attic, no foundation, a tiny basement just large enough for the furnace, and utilities grouped around a central core to permit short runs of pipe.

Heating was by steam (later changed to hot water) forced through steel pipes laid in the concrete slab on which the house sits. Wright was anxious to try this approach to heating, because he had designed it for the large and expensive Johnson Wax building, and he had never tested it. The system did work (and still works in the Jacobs house), and was then used in a number of other designs by Wright.

The house was furnished with tables and chairs designed and built by Katherine Jacob's cousin Harold Wescott, who had spent a summer at Taliesin and first suggested to the Jacobses that they approach Wright to design their home.

The L-shaped house hugs a corner of the 120-by-126 foot double lot. The outer walls of the L that face Toepfer Street and the adjoining lot are broken only by a row of clerestories (a window, or row of windows that are placed high on a wall just below where the wall meets the roof) that run just under the roof line. This arrangement lets in light and ventilation while protecting the occupants' privacy.

The inside of the L wraps around a terrace and garden area. The walls of this side are almost entirely glass doors and large windows. One wing of the house is dedicated to three small bedrooms with low ceilings, while the other wing contains an open living area, dominated by the massive brick fireplace and utility core and high-ceilings. There is also a dining nook, a small, open kitchen, and a cozy bathroom.

The Jacobs family sold their first Wright home in 1942 to move to another Wright-designed home in the country (Jacobs II) because they needed more room for a growing family..The house appears today virtually as Wright designed it, with a few renovations here and there.

*I have a special connection to the Jacobs I house, because I lived in it with my parents when I was very young. My parents owned it from 1975-1982. The reason that they sold it was for the same reasons the Jacobses did... They decided it was time for a larger home that would be more comfortable for a growing family.*

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The Herbert Jacobs House II
3995 Shawn Tr.
Middleton

Private home. Not open to public.

In November, 1942, Herb and Katherine Jacobs moved from their Jacobs I to a 52-acre farm nine miles from downtown Madison in what is now the suburb of Middleton. They intended to build another home as soon as possible, and began talking to Wright in early 1943. His first design was too large and expensive, but in early 1944 he produced a more modest design based on a semicircle. At this time, he was beginning work on the Guggenheim Museum, and was obviously interested in exploring the design possibilities of circles. Just as the Jacobs' first home was the pioneering first Usonian, Jacobs II was a pioneer of passive solar design and was also the first of many buildings Wright designed based on circular forms.

The design is essentially one large limestone and glass room, 80 feet long and 17 feet wide, with only the kitchen downstairs and the bathroom upstairs given distinct separation through their placement in a masonry core. Separation of functions downstairs was effected through placement of furniture. Moveable wood partitions separated the bedrooms on the second floor, which is a wide balcony hung by steel cables from the ceiling beams. A row of narrow windows just below the flat roof on the north side, and the open south side, provide natural light throughout virtually the entire day. The large south-facing windows provide solar heating in winter to augment the radiant heating in the concrete floor.

One of the unique features of the house is a small circular pool that is divided into halves. One half is indoors, and is used for a water garden. The other half is outdoors and is a small plunge pool in which Herb Jacobs and the Jacobs children cooled off in on hot summer days. The halves are separated below the water line by concrete and above by the glass of the home's south wall.

In 1961, Herbert Jacobs left his reporting job and moved his family to California. Since then, the chain of owners have watched the suburbs eat away at the farmland in the area. The home is now at the edge of suburban residential and commercial development.

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The Marshall Erdman Prefab Homes

Throughout his career, Wright was interested in mass production of housing. In 1954, he discovered that Marshall Erdman, who contracted the Unitarian Meeting House, was selling modest prefabricated homes. Wright offered to design better prefabs, ones that he believed could be marketed for $15,000, which was half as much as Erdman was charging for his own version.

Wright didn't do much on the project until late 1955, but by spring of 1956 he had final plans for a Usonian-type home. His design was for a single story home with a pitched-roof bedroom wing joining a flat-roofed living-dining-kitchen area centered on a large fireplace. A carport with one end of its roof resting on a detached storage shed completed the design. Eventually, Wright produced variations, including a fourth bedroom and options for a full or partial basement. The versions ranged in size from 1,860 to 2,400 square feet.

The prefab package Erdman offered included all the major structural components, interior and exterior walls, floors, windows and doors, as well as cabinets and woodwork. In addition to a lot, the buyer had to provide the foundation, the plumbing fixtures, heating units, electric wiring, and drywall, plus the paint.

Before the buyer could purchase the house, he or she had to submit a topographic map and photos of the lot to Wright, who would then determine where the home should sit on the lot. Wright also intended to inspect each home after completion, and to apply his famous glazed red signature brick to the home if it had been completed as planned.

Erdman built a model prefab on Anchorage Ave. in fast-growing west Madison. Eugene Van Tamelen bought it in 1957. Erdman eventually sold seven of the first prefab model, including 3 others in Wisconsin. The other homes went to buyers in Illinois and New York.

The Eugene Van Tamelen House
5817 Anchorage Rd.
Madison

Private home. Not open to the public

This house is one of 5 constructed from the "Marshall Erdman Prefab Design #1". Two of the others are also in Wisconsin. These plans include a masonry "core" L-plan.

The Walter Rudin House
110 Marinette Trail
Madison

Private home. Not open to the public.

Wright's second prefab design was a two-story, flat-roofed, essentially square home of considerably more architectural interest than the first version. The second prefab had a two-story-high living room lit by a wall of windows. A stairway leads to a balcony and the three second-story bedrooms. Under the balcony on the first floor are the dining area, kitchen, entry hall, utility room, and the master bedroom. A large concrete block fireplace separates the kitchen and living room. A carport attached to one corner of the house completes the design.

A model home was completed in June, 1959. Erdman sold only 2 of the houses. The model went to University of Wisconsin professor Walter Rudin, and the other to a buyer in Minnesota. The model only cost Erdman $30,000 to build.

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The Robert Lamp House
22 N. Butler St.
Madison

Private home. Not open to the public.

Robie Lamp met Frank Lloyd Wright in 1878, soon after the Wright family moved into Lamp's east side Madison neighborhood. They shared a common birthday, June 8, though Lamp was a year older, having been born in 1866. Wright remembered Lamp with considerable affection, and speaks at length in his autobiography about their relationship.

In 1903 Wright designed a house for Lamp that was built at the rear of a large lot on North Butler Street. Immediately after, he designed a modest rental house for Lamp that was to have been built on one of two 33-foot-wide lots in front of his house.

The Lamp house is stylistically related to Wright's other work of this period. The Lamp house, Unity Temple in Oak Park, and the Larkin Building in Buffalo, projects on the drawing boards at the same time, all are solid masses with hollow piers at the corners, though the Lamp house is obviously on a smaller scale than the other two.

The house had gone under several additions and renovations. However, you can get a feel for Wright's original design if you look at the east and north sides, and avert your eyes from the third floor addition.

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