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Firm foundationsBy Marv BalousekLegend has it that Frank Lloyd Wright would shake his cane in anger at architect John Flad, a former apprentice who had deserted Wright to start a rival architectural firm, whenever Wright encountered him on a Madison street. Despite the animosity, Flad & Associates ? the Madison-based firm founded in 1927 by John Flad ? is part of a Wright legacy less obvious than Wright-inspired buildings like Monona Terrace or Wright's own design firm, Taliesin Architects.
The Wright connection of another Madison-based architectural firm, Marshall Erdman & Associates, goes back to Marshall Erdman's work with Wright in 1948 on the Unitarian Meeting House, 900 University Bay Drive, a difficult project that gained fame for Erdman but nearly destroyed his fledgling company because of escalating costs. Later, Erdman used Wright's designs for a line of prefabricated housing. Both Marshall Erdman & Associates and Flad & Associates are architectural firms with national reputations that may owe some of their success to the fact that their founders were Wright associates. Marshall Erdman & Associates has built its reputation by focusing on medical buildings. It also pioneered the design-build concept, in which the same company is architect and builder. Flad & Associates has earned its reputation by designing academic buildings like the UW-Madison Chemistry Building and the planned UW-Madison Institute for Science and Discovery. Some architects have built national reputations on a well-defined style, using it to put a distinctive mark on everything they design. But Wright's influence may be seen in the emphasis shared by the Erdman, Flad and Taliesin firms on designing buildings instead to meet the needs of clients and to blend well with the site. "I don't think any of the larger design firms are going to get away with limiting themselves to a single style," said Jeremiah Kimber, an architect with Taliesin Architects of Spring Green. "Frank Lloyd Wright educated the public to demand more from architects." David Braucht, senior vice president at Erdman, said: "There are a lot of us who cultivate these concepts of social responsibility, looking at ways that (a building) does more than become a blob on the land. Mr. Erdman often spoke about social responsibility, design and Wright. You have to believe there was a connection there." Braucht said the Middleton Hills subdivision is one expression of Erdman's idea of social responsibility in which he tried to design a subdivision that was an alternative to the popular sprawling suburban designs. Some Wright connections to Erdman are more explicit. When Wright helped design prefabricated housing for Erdman, the architect insisted that door and window trim be beveled to 15 degrees instead of squared off. Braucht said Erdman employees for years referred to beveled trim boards as FLW trim. David Black, a design principal and part owner of Flad, said no visual influence of Wright's style is apparent in the buildings his firm designs. While Wright may have helped foster John Flad's knowledge of architecture, Black said Flad's other major contribution was sound business practices. "He realized the importance of good architecture done in the context of a sturdy business," Black said. Charles Montooth, 84, who joined Taliesin Architects in 1945, said working with Wright was the equivalent of a musician being tutored by Beethoven or Mozart. He said Taliesin architects still follow Wright's design guidelines. "We go by the principles as we understand them," he said. Taliesin Architects, which has about a half-dozen architects in Spring Green and more in the summer, designs a lot of houses and churches, two kinds of projects that Wright often designed. Madison isn't the only community with Wright-inspired architectural firms. Bing Hu of China won a scholarship to the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Ariz., and joined Taliesin Architects in 1987. Hu later started his own firm, H&S International, in Scottsdale. The Wild Rose Lodge in Wild Rose is a Wisconsin project he designed. "When you build a house on a site, you try to make the house disappear," Hu said in a 2004 interview with the Business Journal of Scottsdale. "The more the house disappears, the more you achieve." mbalousek@madison.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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