The Wisconsin State Journal reports.
The city, which has rarely if ever acted to preserve the view from a private property, may change its Downtown height map and reduce the allowable height of adjacent properties to preserve the view to the lake from the top floor of the three-story home, which Wright designed for his lifelong friend Robert Lamp and which originally captured views of lakes Monona and Mendota and the Capitol.
The owner of the Lamp House, which is now surrounded by other homes and much taller buildings, contends the view isn’t worth saving and that doing so could preclude a larger redevelopment that could involve moving the landmark out from the middle of the block to a more visible spot, while providing additional housing Downtown and boosting the property tax base....
The owner is Apex Property Management, which seems to be more interested in a proposal Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy to move the building "as part of a
larger redevelopment." Obviously, that owner doesn't want restrictions on development. The chairman of the company, Bruce Bosben, says:
“I think it it is irresponsible to curtail development of Downtown real estate merely to preserve a view from a private house... There is no other such view preserved in Madison.”
But:
The city’s Plan Commission voted unanimously in favor of the ordinance amendment last Monday, and the City Council is set to consider it on Tuesday. Organizations that protect Wright’s legacy — Wright in Wisconsin and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy — are looking at the bigger picture and encouraging a broader dialog on how best to preserve the landmark.
Speaking of views, it would be nice if we the people of Madison could see this building. It's in the middle of a block with buildings surrounding it! And yet, there is the subtle question whether the positioning in the middle of the block is integral to Wright's design and would be destroyed by moving the house.
The Lamp House design was intentional on Wright’s part, creating a private space for the dwelling in the heart of the city by constructing it in the middle of a block...
If you go to the article and can see it, look for the photograph with the caption: "The view toward Lake Mendota from the third-floor penthouse of the landmark Lamp House. Only a narrow sliver of the lake can be seen above the surrounding rooftops." The words "narrow sliver" barely convey the extreme tininess of the bit of lake to be seen.
Cradled among the taller buildings, the house’s grounds are overgrown and strewn with lawn chairs, a fire pit and other signs of student life.
Oh, no!
The cluttered, lived-in interior, typical of student housing, has wooden floors and features, fireplaces and attractive diamond-paned glass windows. The house, Bosben said, once had been divided into three apartments, returned to a single-family residence and then returned back to student housing, especially popular with members of the UW marching band.
“It’s in pretty decent shape,” Bosben said. “The inside is pretty much as built. The exterior never should have been painted. The glass has been a constant battle. We’ve probably replaced every piece of glass in the house at least once... I think the house should be moved to a location where it can be owner-occupied.”
I blogged about Lamp House once before, in 2009: "Do you know about the Lamp House? What do you think of this proposal to raze the surrounding buildings and construct a giant glass box all around it?"
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5 comments:
Craig writes:
I’d say that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
Move it to a neighborhood that resembles the original, restore it, and open it to the public.
Leaving it where it is and attempting to force development to fit it is a case of the horse having already escaped the barn judging by the picture.
Though Wright was famous for designing his buildings to fit in with their surroundings, they still work in others. Several Wright houses have been disassembled and moved hundreds of miles away.
In Buffalo, a couple never-built Wright designs were eventually constructed far away from their planned locations: a boathouse planned for Lake Mendota now sits next to the Niagara River and a gas station sits in a downtown Buffalo museum.
They still work.
Lloyd writes:
"I actually like the way Wright's designs and plans continue to cause "issues": they make people think about the design of homes and neighborhoods, geographic and climate surroundings, etc.
"There was a great doc on his Los Angeles buildings. A very dark time in Wright's life. In various ways he was exposed to images of Maya buildings, and he built arguably beautiful but forbidding, even funereal structures with geometric patterns. He had to invent a new kind of building block out of native soils, and this never quite worked: there were leaks, and the buildings are literally dissolving today. One of the universities now owns one of the buildings, and a woman came on to say they are leaning toward letting the building gradually dissolve, returning to the landscape. Sort of the closing of the Wright circle for a particular piece of property."
K writes:
"I watched the video at the link regarding the “re-imagining” of Madison’s downtown. I am struck by the gentle woven notion that blacks were never welcome until now. Thank heavens the riots of 2020 opened our eyes. Madison freed the slaves in 2020! Women have the right to vote now too. Very exciting changes in Madison.
"Here in B-town, CO, we enjoy murals and artwork on local downtown buildings that remind us the slaves are still enslaved, blacks are not allowed to vote, and women are still banned from voting. We need voting rights, now! So glad Madison is figuring it all out.
"The Frank Lloyd Wright house is so buried and hidden now, what is the point of preserving something that is all but lost? Preserve the house – yes! The view …? What view? The image at your link shows a tiny sliver of a view – from the top floor. Laughable."
Richard writes:
"There is something about an urban streetscape that abhors preservation efforts like this one. The urban context for which the Lamp House was built ceased to exist decades ago, and it’s not coming back. The streetscape in 1903 plainly featured mainly pedestrians and horse-drawn transport. Electrification throughout a home would have been new, and was far from universal. That horse-drawn transport made for a very messy street (in Brooklyn where I live, the iron-work at the sides of the stoops came with boot-scrappers to deal with the worst of it), and that transport serviced a much smaller population, with its density being a fraction of what it’s become today. Presumably there were stables nearby dotting the street. In 1903, the scale of the surrounding structures both in the vicinity and the city in general would have been similar to, perhaps even a bit smaller than, the Lamp House. An architect-designed, single family home was surely even more of a rarity – the population in the market for such an extravagance (it’s still an extravagance today) must have been tiny, suggesting that the neighborhood was probably up-scale and fancier than most.
"That’s the world for which this boxy, three-story house on its small, mid-block lot was built, and it’s the domestic reality it was meant to serve and the perspective from which it was meant to be seen. That world is dead and gone. The worthies in Madison trying to preserve sight lines that are just as clearly dead and gone may have their heart in the right place, but their head has gone completely missing.
"It’s a choice between leaving Lamp House as a residence, subject to the decay and indignities that come with old age – among them, being unfashionable, out-of-date, sagging at the edges and constantly being pushed aside by younger upstarts; or treating it as a museum piece, which (if that’s the choice) will probably work better if it were moved to some different location where all of those incongruities will be less dominant. But it’s strikes me as very unlikely that trying to do both at once is going to work out well."
Ignorance is Bliss writes:
The... interior... has wooden floors and features, fireplaces and attractive diamond-paned glass windows.
"Is it just me, or does it feel like an incompetent editor added that comma?
"Is it wooden floors and wooden features?
"Or does the house feature fireplaces and attractive diamond-paned glass windows?"
I say:
Good catch. That's definitely a mistake made by somebody who misunderstood the role "features" was playing.
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