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Robert M. Lamp House
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The Lamp House viewed from the east
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| Location: | Madison, Wisconsin |
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| Built: | 1903 |
| Architect: | Frank Lloyd Wright |
| Architectural style: | Chicago School, Prairie School |
| Governing body: | Privately held by Apex, Inc. |
| NRHP Reference#: | 73000077[1] |
| Added to NRHP: | 1/3/1978 |
The Robert M. Lamp House (1903) is a residence at 22 N. Butler Street in Madison, Wisconsin, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for "Robie" Lamp (1866–1916), a realtor, insurance agent, and Madison City Treasurer. Lamp resided here with his parents and an aunt until their passing, and later with his wife and stepson. He selected this location one and a half blocks east of the Capitol Square because of its proximity to his office on Pinckney Street. He sometimes walked to work, but because of a withered leg he used crutches and canes, and he usually drove to work. Boyhood friends, Wright and Lamp shared a June 8 birthday, though they were born one year apart, and they remained close until Lamp's premature death at age 49. From early on, Wright called Lamp "Pinky" or "Ruby" because of his red hair, and he also used these nicknames for the youngest of his four sons, David Wright.
The simple, boxy shape of the Lamp House was quite modern for its time and marks a transition between the styles of the Chicago School and the Prairie School. Contemporaries dubbed it "New American" in design,[2] while the casement windows were "Old English" in inspiration. Some elements, including the diamond-shaped ornamentation in the brickwork and the corner piers rising to the height of the second-story window sills, have been attributed to Wright's draftsman Walter Burley Griffin.[2] Massive corner piers were a hallmark of Wright's nearly contemporaneous Larkin Building (1904) in Buffalo, New York. The house was carried out not in house brick but in cream-colored commercial brick, which Wright had also used in his own home (1895) and studio (1898) in Oak Park, Illinois. The Lamp House's diamond-paned windows with frames painted a dark brownish red also echoed those of Wright's Oak Park home and studio, which Lamp visited many times. Sometime after Lamp's death, the building was painted white.
The house has an unusual mid-block site and is accessible from the street only via a narrow, ascending driveway between two houses. The "keyhole" lot then opens up, producing a compression / 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, with 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.
A small vestibule opens into a large, rectangular living room occupying the entire eastern half of the ground floor, while the western side has a dining room open to the living room and a kitchen. Within the living room, a triangular-shaped fireplace—a feature shared with the nearly contemporaneous Hillside Home School in Spring Green, Wisconsin—is positioned at the center of the house rather than at the more traditional location of an exterior wall. A flight of stairs between dining room and kitchen leads to the second floor, where four bedrooms and a bathroom are connected by a central hallway positioned directly above the fireplace downstairs—the flue is divided and diverted up through the walls of the hallway. The stairway continues up to the roof level. From the top floor, the house originally afforded views of the nearby Capitol as well as both Lake Mendota to the north and Lake Monona to the south. Robert Lamp, a skilled oarsman himself, enjoyed watching boaters on the lakes from an elegant roof garden complete with a greenhouse and an impressive grape arbor grown on a pergola. The penthouse enclosure on the roof is a later addition, the pergola was deconstructed in the 1960s, and the view of Lake Monona is now blocked by a high-rise on an adjacent lot.
Despite its downtown location, the Lamp House has a secluded feel because of its mid-block site. It has always been surrounded on all four sides by other residential buildings. 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 shape an extensive yard and garden, sculpting the grounds into a gently sloping, multi-tiered space on what had originally been a steeply sloped lot. The basement receives sufficient sunlight from a window on the eastern facade to successfully overwinter tender garden plants in containers.
The open floor plan Wright developed for the Lamp House became a standard in the following years, reused in no fewer than 25 of his later projects, including the Barton House (1903–04) in Buffalo, New York, and adapted by Prairie School architects in numerous other projects. Wright adapted it in a plan he published in 1907, titled "A Fireproof House for $5000" which became one of the standard modern residential floor plans of the period up to about 1920.[3]
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