Lamp, Robert M., House

About this property

The Robert M. Lamp House is a residence built in 1903 two blocks northeast of the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his lifelong friend "Robie" Lamp, a realtor, insurance agent, and Madison City Treasurer. The oldest Wright-designed house in Madison, its style is transitional between Chicago School and Prairie School. In 1978 the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Lamp (1866–1916) lived here with his parents and an aunt until their deaths, and later with his wife and stepson. He selected this location near the Capitol Square because of its proximity to his office on Pinckney Street. Both he and Wright had the same birthday (June 8), exactly one year apart. Following a schoolyard fight in 1879, they became boyhood friends. By 1893, Wright had designed for Lamp a lakefront cottage and boat landing in Lake Mendota, Rocky Roost, destroyed by fire in 1934). Ten years after that, Lamp asked Wright to design a house for him. Both projects occupied unremarkable locations, sites developed virtually out of nothing. The Lamp House has a mid-block location, a siting unique among Wright's works. Bounded by East Washington Avenue and by Mifflin, Webster, and Butler Streets, it is accessible only from Butler Street via a narrow, ascending driveway on a right-of-way between two houses. The "keyhole" lot then opens up, producing a compression and release dynamic encountered frequently in Wright's works. This telescoping effect contributes to the monumental impression made by the house, which is further heightened by two flights of poured concrete steps, so that the visitor approaches the house through a three-stage mount from driveway to front facade—a layout shared, for example, by Wright's Westcott House in Ohio, built five years later. It is also characteristic of Wright's design that the entrance door is not visible as one approaches the house but is out of sight, around the corner on the north side, which has a paved veranda the full length of the house. Despite its downtown location, the Lamp House has a secluded feel because of its mid-block site. In addition to laying out the driveway and steps leading up to the eastern side of the house as well as the veranda on its north side, Wright hardscaped the lot with urns (now missing), curbs, and concrete-capped rubblestone retaining walls to develop an extensive yard and garden, sculpting what had originally been a steeply sloped lot into a cascading, multi-tiered landscape. The basement receives sufficient sunlight from a window on the eastern facade to overwinter tender garden plants in containers.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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