File:Robert M. Lamp House, Butler Street, Tenney-Lapham, Madison, WI.jpg

English: Built in 1903, this Prairie-style house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his friend, Robert “Robie” M. Lamp, being considered Wright’s first true “Prairie School” building, and his first major departure from his Shingle-style roots towards the more radical and organic designs he would come to be known for. The house still has some overtures to Wright’s earlier work with leaded glass diamond pane casement windows, but features a painted brick exterior rather than wooden shingle cladding, and a low-slope roof enclosed by a parapet, much more common at the time on commercial buildings than residential ones. The house’s original owner, Robert “Robie” M. Lamp, was one year older than Wright, and the two had become friends, evidently following a fight stemming from their differing ethnic backgrounds, in 1879 at the ages of 12 and 13, respectively, with both of them sharing the same birthday in June. Lamp was a realtor, insurance agent, and the Treasurer for the city of Madison, and he enjoyed boating on Lake Mendota, with Wright having designed an earlier lake cottage and boathouse on an island in the lake for Lamp known as “Rocky Roost”, combining several structures into a single building in 1901-1903, with the Shingle-style building being destroyed by a fire sometime in late 1934. The house was the residence of Lamp, and he remained friends with Wright, until he died at the age of 49 in 1916, likely a result of his multiple chronic health conditions that made walking difficult. The house was designed and built with Lamp’s love of boating on the lakes in mind. The two-story house features a painted brick exterior with brick piers at the corners, “English-style” leaded glass diamond pane casement windows, a low-slope roof enclosed by a parapet with a penthouse addition featuring ribbon windows and a stucco-clad parapet, brick corbeling, a terrace wrapping around the house to the north and west, enclosed by a low brick wall, an enclosed one-story sun porch on the facade facing Lake Mendota, and a fire escape mounted on the facade above the sun porch. The house was built rather rapidly, so the attention to detail on the exterior facade treatment is less evident than in other Wright projects, yet it does still demonstrate several characteristics that came to define his Prairie School style. The interior of the house features a square “open” floor plan without walls between the living room and dining room, which was devised by Walter Burley Griffin, and was a feature reused in many of Wright’s Prairie School houses. The interior also features a triangular-shaped fireplace in the middle of the house, and a staircase located between the dining room and kitchen, leading to four bedrooms and a bathroom arranged around a central hallway. The roof originally was an open terrace with a roof garden and pergola, which afforded sweeping views of the Wisconsin State Capitol, the Downtown Madison Isthmus, Lake Mendota, and Lake Monona, though this was enclosed during the 1960s by a later owner to create additional interior living space, and the views from the house are now blocked by mid-rise development that has been constructed to the house’s west, south, and east, leaving only the view towards Lake Mendota to the north unimpeded. The house sits far back from the street in the middle of the block, surrounded on all sides by other buildings, and is hard to view from most angles, made even more apparent by the construction of large buildings around the periphery of the yard in recent decades. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and is one of Wright’s most significant early works in that it shows the transition between his earlier Shingle and Chicago School work to his more abstract Prairie School work. The house today remains a private residence, and sits in an area that has been zoned for denser, taller development, though the house is protected by local historic landmark designation.