Meet the Recipient of the First Frank Lloyd Wright Endowed Professorship

In 1886, a then-unknown Frank Lloyd Wright enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study civil engineering. He barely made it a year, dropping out and moving to Chicago to work as a draftsman. Long after he became a famous architect, Wright made a posthumous return to the university, in a sense, when coursework on his ideas were introduced in the 1970s. More recently, there’s at least one class dedicated to his oeuvre, taught by architectural historian Anna Andrzejewski. And it sounds popular.

“Every time I teach it, it fills to its enrollment cap of thirty, and then I usually have a waiting list of undergraduate students that long, and then auditors who are clamoring to get into the course,” she says. Andrzejewski, who has taught the course since 2016, adds that it attracts a wide group, from art history majors to engineers, historians, and those seeking an architecture certificate, and brings them along on site visits to Wright’s buildings in the region.

UW-Madison isn’t the only school to fold Wright’s teachings into its curriculum. Colleges including Duke University and West Virginia University offer courses, too. Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida, home to 13 Wright-designed buildings, launched an architecture school for undergraduate students this fall, and it includes a course in Wright’s design principles, says Dr. Andrew Phillip Payne, the school’s founding dean and professor of architecture.

But now, Andrzejewski will be expanding on her class as the first appointed chair of a new Frank Lloyd Wright endowed professorship at UW-Madison. It was created in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and funded by school alumnus Dan Erdman, the son of builder Marshall Erdman, who was a frequent collaborator of Wright’s.

“This new position will allow me to develop seminars that focus on issues in twentieth-century building,” says Andrzejewski, who researches post-WWII development for the art history department. The position will support her research, and part of the coursework she’s helping create will examine Wright within the context of midcentury America. “This offers exciting possibilities that can serve other units, besides engineering and the architecture certificate. I view this as a chance to bring students together from related disciplines.”

We spoke with Andrzejewski to hear about what she hopes to accomplish with the new position, how it will build on Wright’s legacy, and why the architect’s design principles are perhaps more relevant now than they’ve ever been.

Tell us about your new position. What exactly will it entail?

Anna Andrzejewski: The new position will allow me to focus on my research interests in 20th-century American architecture and develop curriculum that supports the study of architectural history at UW-Madison. Architectural history, which has long been taught on this campus, sometimes in landscape architecture, sometimes in art history, will be cemented. It frees me up from teaching the wide variety of art history classes to exclusively hone in on architecture. That’s really exciting and important at a campus like Madison, where you have design, landscape architecture, and real estate.

What are some examples of classes that students can take?

All of my architectural history classes look at the built environment around us. With the new curriculum, at least once a year I will continue teaching a course that looks at Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings and his legacy in Madison. In that course, as well as others I teach, I take students out into the community. We go out and look at buildings, because it’s the best way that students can actually learn. To understand architecture is to engage with architecture.

How will the university and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation partner on this?

I get chills running down my spine when I think about this. We’ve been working closely already with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and particularly the Taliesin Institute, which was created to bring universities and the foundation together for educational programming and opportunities. We’re hoping to connect students with not only Taliesin in Spring Green, but also out in Arizona, at Taliesin West. We’re also talking about ways student research can help enliven programming efforts through the foundation, contributing to the quarterly journal they put out and student internships. I am a person who is all about collaboration. It makes me so excited to think about where we might be 10 years from now. 

How will this new chair position build on the ways the university’s architecture program covers Frank Lloyd Wright?

There’s a new architecture certificate in the College of Engineering. When that was announced two years ago, it enrolled close to a hundred students in its first semester. A requirement of that certificate is that students take a course in the history of architecture, to prepare for architecture school. This professorship will cement American architectural history courses being taught regularly. The Frank Lloyd Wright course will be taught at least once a year and perhaps every semester. It will expand offerings in the history of architecture.

Her coursework takes students out into the field to experience buildings firsthand.

Photo courtesy of UW-Madison

What are a few of Frank Lloyd Wright’s lasting design principles, and why should architecture students learn them, in your opinion?

Organic architecture is one—thinking about a building as an organism that is responding to its immediate environment and context—is important for architects. Another is environmental design—thinking about sustainability, how we can shape everyday living in the single-family home, and capture religious spaces that bring us together in this transcendent experience. We create better architects if we get them thinking about not just how Wright was thinking about this, but how it applies more broadly. I’m hopeful that students that do go on in the field of architecture will take these lessons with them and really think about Wright not just as a genius with all these great buildings, but how he was working on issues that continue to be with us today, in the 21st century.

What was one of your first encounters with Wright? How did it inspire you?

One of Wright’s last adventures was a [prefab] house he designed in 1959 in Madison with Marshall Erdman, the Walter and Mary Ellen Rudin House. It debuted in the Parade of Homes that year and stood out like a sore thumb amongst the other houses. That house was a trigger for me. Wright started thinking about organic architecture in the first decade of the 20th century. But at the end of his life, he [was] still trying to work that out, but also trying to work with this idea of mass production in the suburbs. I saw that he was connected with all the themes that 20th-century architecture was wrestling with, and yet he was also staying true to his philosophy. When I first saw that house, back in 2008, I already knew Wright’s work. I’d visited his sites, but that house got me thinking about his ongoing impact and sparked my interest in Wright as a figure.

What do you hope to accomplish in this position? Why is it important to spread the teachings of Frank Lloyd Wright?

It makes sense that Wright is being taught in his home state through the University of Wisconsin. This legacy gift makes that possible. Wright is not a figure that lives in the past. His lessons about organic architecture, the ways that buildings, all parts of buildings, need to work together and respond to their landscape and environment, continue to motivate young architects. With the closing of the architecture school at Taliesin, there is a void. By experiencing the buildings, by studying his philosophy, we can continue to impart some of Wright’s lessons onto the next generation.

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After 50 Years, a Frank Lloyd Wright Finally Got Built. Then It Spawned a Sibling.