Frank Lloyd Wright and the Sixty-Year Dream
Near Madison, Wisconsin
Frank Lloyd Wright had a relationship with Madison that was largely defined by rejection. He proposed a civic center for this city in nineteen thirty-eight. He did not see it built. He died in nineteen fifty-nine. The building opened in nineteen ninety-seven, nearly sixty years after he first drew the plans.
Wright had grown up in Wisconsin, and he spent much of his adult working life at Taliesin, his home and school in the Wisconsin River valley about forty miles northwest of here. When the city of Madison began discussing a lakefront civic center in the late nineteen thirties, Wright proposed what he called a dream civic center: a curvilinear structure spanning ninety feet over Lake Monona, connecting the lakeshore to the State Capitol a few blocks away. It would include an auditorium, a rail depot, a marina, a courthouse, and a city hall.
The Dane County Board defeated the plan by a single vote.
Over the next two decades, Madison voters approved bond referendums and Wright modified his designs. He was approved as architect, then the project stalled again, then funds were debated, then the city changed its mind about the configuration, then the composition of the City Council changed. Wright submitted design after design. He and the city of Madison were locked in a slow, peculiar argument for more than two decades, a city that wanted a landmark and a famous architect who was not known for compromise.
Wright died in April of nineteen fifty-nine, still at it.
The project sat dormant for decades before Madison revived it in the nineteen eighties. The Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, built to Wright's design with interior adaptations by Taliesin architect Tony Puttnam, opened in July of nineteen ninety-seven. It spans ninety feet over Lake Monona. The rooftop garden covers sixty-eight thousand square feet. The view from the roof, looking northwest toward the Capitol, is roughly what Wright drew in nineteen thirty-eight.
He had been right about where to put it. The city just needed sixty years to agree.
