Anna Andrzejewski: Midwestern Modernism

Midwestern Modernism: "Wrightification" and Domestic Architecture in Madison, Wisconsin, 1930-70
 

The Graduate Program in Historic Preservation is pleased to present visiting lecturer Anna Andrzejewski. Dr. Andrzejewski is Director of Graduate Studies; Buildings, Landscapes, Cultures Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This talk examines ways in which architects and builders in Madison, Wisconsin, adopted and transformed elements from Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture to achieve a regional form of mid-century modernism.  It examines a range of architects and builders, who “Wrightified” their buildings in different ways and to different degrees.  Some designers, such as Herb Fritz and Marshall Erdman, had direct contact with Wright as Taliesin fellows or informal apprentices, whereas others, such as William Kaeser and John Randal McDonald, knew Wright more casually.  Through close examination of houses and their different modes of Wrightification, archives surrounding their design, and responses from their residents, I suggest that Wright’s iconography, however loosely interpreted and often misunderstood, held temporal and regional significance for architects, builders, and their clients.  Wright-derived floor plans, exterior ornamentation, and elements of interior design ultimately functioned as signs of “Midwestern-ness” and “modernity” for Madison’s architects, builders and residents. In arguing for the importance of place in Madison’s mid-twentieth century domestic architecture, this lecture seeks to revise dominant narratives about postwar architectural modernism, which claim that regional factors diminish in significance in favor of a streamlined, timeless, and universalist modernist style by 1950. 

Anna Andrzejewski is a Professor in the Art History Department at UW-Madison, where she teaches courses on the history of North American vernacular architecture and landscapes, and also has an affiliation with Urban and Regional Planning, the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment, the Department of Geography, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Her first book, Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2008. Currently she is working on two projects: a book on Madison builder/developer Marshall Erdman and post World War II building and a study of oil landscapes in West Texas. She also co-directs the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures program, a joint Ph.D. program in architectural history with UW-Milwaukee. Prof. Andrzejewski also co-edits Buildings & Landscapes: The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.