University Place

Marshall Erdman’s Contributions to Postwar Architecture

– Welcome to the University Roundtable. I’m Mary Ellen Gabriel, Director of Communications for the College of Letters and Science, and a member of the Roundtable Planning Committee. And now it’s my pleasure to introduce Anna Andrzejewski, a professor of American art and architecture in the Department of Art History. Her research focuses on vernacular buildings and landscapes in North America, with an emphasis lately on post-World War II architecture. She has completed a book on the postwar building boom and is currently working on an in-depth study of the cultural landscape of vacation and retirement in south Florida between 1945 and 1970. Her work often intersects with current events. After the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida in June of 2021, Professor Andrzejewski found herself in demand as an expert, given her focus on the vacation and retirement building in south Florida. While she can’t answer the question, “Why did it collapse,” she is the perfect person to consider how our quote, “craving for landscapes of leisure” collides with the toll that this kind of development takes on the environment. Closer to home, Professor Andrzejewski has spent months on the prairies of North Dakota, trying to document the fast-vanishing stone and earth buildings constructed by the area’s German and Russian immigrants. And here in Madison, she has studied and written about the enduring influence of local architects and builders, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Marshall Erdman. Please welcome Anna Andrzejewski.

[audience clapping]

– Thank you so much, Mary Ellen and everyone for being here today, and I really wanna thank the organizers for inviting me. It’s always a pleasure to speak about my work, which I am indeed passionate about. In December of 1956, House & Home magazine published a feature about a bold new experiment in housing. The cover illustrates a long, one-story dwelling with wide, overhanging eaves and a bank of windows wrapping around the corner. Inside, the editors described the model house as prefabrication’s biggest news. “This is both big news and amazing news. It is big because it gives prefabrication, once the stepchild of home building, the prestige associated with the greatest name in contemporary architecture. It is amazing news because the principle advocate of standardization and modular planning had to wait 60 years before he had his chance to put his original theories into practice,” end quote. The editors extolled the house for fulfilling Wright’s aesthetic demands while also being economical. “It has every basic idea in Wright’s vocabulary,” they wrote, “yet it can be produced within the prefabricator’s budget.”

The prefabricator was Marshall Erdman, a young builder from Madison, Wisconsin. Erdman first met Wright when he served as the architect’s contractor on the Unitarian meeting house in Shorewood Hills a few years earlier. The two men maintained a cordial relationship after this, with Wright visiting Erdman’s west side office when he came into town from Spring Green. By 1953, Erdman was producing a line of pre-cut houses in the Madison region when Wright expressed interest in helping him design better models. Obviously, the chance to collaborate with Wright upped Erdman’s profile. The young builder giddily told House & Home, “This is the biggest thing that has ever happened to us.” For Wright, nearing the end of his life, the prefabricated houses appeared to have been little more than a side hustle. While Wright earned $750 for every house completed, his energies were more likely focused on other notable commissions at the time, which included the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California, completed in 1960, Beth Shalom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, which he worked on between 1953 and 1959. Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1956. And of course, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, finished in 1959.

While it is true that Wright’s foray into prefabrication at this juncture capped off a lifelong interest in building for the masses, the venture likely had greater significance for Erdman, who capitalized on the flurry of media attention to expand his business beyond Madison and the region. Over the course of his career, Erdman grew his business from a local home building operation to a national company specializing in prefabricated medical buildings and doctors parks. Marshall Erdman and Associates eventually had offices across the country, and even launched a successful line of office furniture known as Techline in the 1970s. Across his five-decade-long career, Erdman credited Wright with his success, reflecting in later years that, and I quote, “Wright was almost like a father to me. He opened doors that never would’ve been open to me without his association,” end quote. Without denying the relationship’s importance, in today’s talk, I want to shift the focus away from Wright to consider Erdman’s contributions to the post-World War II landscape in their own terms. In doing so, I foreground the role of the Madison area as Erdman’s laboratory. Wisconsin’s capital city is where Erdman got his start, as well as where he grew his business to nationwide success.

Looking at Erdman’s formative experiments in their local Madison context reframes the way we understand his relationship to Wright as well as the importance of his work in larger architectural and suburban histories. My presentation today is part of my ongoing research on the post-World War II building industry, which seeks to redress the neglect of builders and developers in architectural history. While their projects may be less well-known than those of architects like Wright, merchant builders like Erdman were chiefly responsible for the industry’s rapid recovery, after more than two decades of stagnation due to depression and war. In my research, I draw on what I call builder archives: collections preserved by descendants to recenter the role of these actors in dramatically shaping the modern cultural landscape, especially the rapid growth of the postwar middle class suburbs. While I focus on figures like Erdman, my project is not strictly biographical. In Erdman’s case, we have an excellent biography from which we glean much about the builder’s life and personality. Instead, I look at circumstances surrounding the construction of the buildings themselves, seeking to understand them as the product of builders’ decisions and the cultural context in which they worked. In particular, I focus on using local stories to explore how builders’ day-to-day decisions affected the ways cities and suburbs changed in the 25 years after World War II. Because Erdman’s projects play a central role in my research, I focus on his work for today’s lecture.

Erdman began his building career producing modest houses for veterans in Madison’s rapidly expanding suburbs.
As discussed in his biography, Erdman’s first sale was a home that he and his wife Joyce decided to build in February of 1947. Joyce designed the 1,200-square-foot dwelling, which the pair planned to build themselves on a small suburban lot at 509 Meadow Lane for $1,000. In June, the couple sold the house before it was completed to Elise Fansler, a widow who made the Erdmans an offer on the spot. Immediately after, the couple bought more lots on Meadow Lane, as well as several lots in the nearby village of Shorewood Hills, where they would eventually make their home. They built houses on these lots and advertised them as designed and built by Joyce and Marshall Erdman, while also acquiring permits elsewhere on the west side. Although Erdman frequently professed market demand pushed him into the building industry, it likely also stemmed from his family background. Scant evidence survives about Erdman’s childhood growing up in Lithuania, but a 1951 article in the Milwaukee Sentinel described Erdman’s father as a building and construction engineer who had given his son a working knowledge of the building trade crafts such as carpentry, masonry, painting, and so on. Erdman’s father, Jonas, raised Marshall and his younger brother after the death of his mother, sometime around his 10th birthday. During the early 1930s, Jonas began to consider moving his family to the United States, although Marshall appears to have been the only family member to do so before Nazi occupation. The impressionable 16-year-old came to the United States in 1936, taking up residence with an uncle in Chicago.

As Erdman learned English and worked to support his aspirations to attend college, he also began thinking about a building career. In September of 1940, Erdman matriculated at the University of Illinois, pursuing a degree in architecture. However, Erdman stayed on this path for only one semester and earned a less than stellar grade in his one and only architecture course. While Erdman subsequently transferred into the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the experience in architecture was formative. The course he took was taught by Professor James Lendrum, a founding director of the Small Homes Council at the University of Illinois. Formed to ameliorate the housing shortage, the Small Homes Council published a popular series of circulars during the postwar years on prefabrication, standardization, and efficiency in modern design. Although the council was not officially formed until 1944, when Erdman had left Illinois to enroll in the Army, Erdman persistently credited his interest in prefabrication to his time at Illinois. In a 1982 interview, Erdman stated, and I quote, “The University of Illinois was one of the first architectural schools that believed in prefabrication. They had something called the Small Homes Council, and I was involved in that,” end quote. Erdman’s time at Illinois also likely shaped his decision to enter home building during the late 1940s.

Like many places across the country, Madison experienced an acute housing shortage after World War II due to pent up demand, and because returning veterans sought to purchase homes under terms of the GI Bill. Erdman’s earliest projects targeted the veterans market. A front page article in the Wisconsin State Journal from February of 1948 describes Erdman’s venture to cut rates on 11 small houses. For this project, Joyce designed the houses while Marshall negotiated charitable terms with local subcontractors. The one-story compact houses, described by the Wisconsin State Journal as efficient and attractive, enclosed about 600 square feet of living space on the main floor. Each contained an L-shaped living/dining room, kitchen, and two small bedrooms, with a full basement and attic. The costs were kept low, around $8,000, some of the lowest in Madison at the time. Even though 4 of the 11 houses were ultimately built, Erdman’s effort was remarkable in its aspirations. He assembled a team of suppliers willing to slash rates on materials and charted an ambitious schedule to complete the houses in six months. The driving idea was to streamline production, something that would stay with Erdman throughout his career, while his experiments, compared with similar efforts elsewhere in the United States with prefabrication and mass production, Erdman was the pioneer here in Madison.

Around the same moment, Erdman was selected as Frank Lloyd Wright’s contractor for the First Unitarian Society’s new meeting house. To step from veterans’ housing to the meeting house commission was a major coup. Erdman landed the project in 1949, mainly because the congregation could not find an experienced builder to complete the structure for $75,000. Erdman described his first meeting with Wright at Taliesin in a later interview, and I quote, “So Harold Groves called me and said, ‘Mr. Wright would like to see you. ‘ For me, it was just like going to Mecca. So it didn’t take me long to get out there. I got to Taliesin about 12:30 or 1:00, and Mr. Wright was still taking a nap. Finally, Mr. Wright came out about 2 o’clock with his cane in the proper setup, and he looked at me and said, ‘Baby, how would you like to be famous?’ [audience laughing] And that was the beginning,” end quote. Other prominent contractors bid the $75,000 job between half a million and a million dollars, reflecting the practical problems associated with Wright’s ambitious and complex design. Nevertheless, the impressionistic, always ambitious Erdman seized the opportunity. He later remarked that he took the project without a bid because he felt he would give anything to work with Frank Lloyd Wright.

While the opportunity propelled Erdman into the national spotlight, he struggled to complete the project. During a 1980 symposium at the New School in New York, Erdman recalled some of the difficulties, commenting that, and I quote again, “Mr. Wright didn’t want to use anything bigger than a two by four for the whole building. He wanted a very simple country church and wanted very light materials. When we built the trusses for the church, I suggested we should use two by sixes, to which he responded, ‘What the hell do you know, baby?’ So we built the first truss with two by fours, but when we picked it up with the crane, it broke in half. After this, when Mr. Wright was not around, I used two by sixes and I took quite a beating on it,” end quote. In another case, Erdman tried to add steel reinforcements to windows in the church’s prow, before Wright ordered them removed. And eventually, they had to be reinstalled to avoid disaster. While Erdman’s costs for the project are unknown, a letter from Wright to the treasurer of the First Unitarian Society shows Erdman was paid about $1,000 for his labors. Despite the professional and personal challenges of the meeting house commission, Erdman defended his decision to become involved throughout his life, stating in 1980, “The church got finished and Mr. Wright ended up becoming like a father to me. I think perhaps he felt he had imposed on me a little, but I must admit, I didn’t mind. He told me that he would make me whatever I was to become, and he did. When we finished the church, people from all over the world called to ask if they could come see it,” end quote. For Erdman, the chance to work with Wright undoubtedly helped cement his professional reputation.

During the 1950s, in work he did with or without Wright, Erdman capitalized on his relationship with the famous architect as a powerful marketing tool. A feature in the Milwaukee Sentinel of 1951 focused on Erdman’s low-cost houses, but touted his connection with Wright, as did advertisements for the Erdman company through the 1950s and ’60s. Erdman also seems to have been enamored with Wright’s modular design method and the Prairie style aesthetic, both of which remained an integral part of his subsequent work. In the wake of the Unitarian project, Erdman refocused his energies on home building, with an eye to continuing to streamline production in keeping with trends in the building industry. In 1952, he formed a partnership with Henry Peiss, a local Madison builder and cabinet maker. Erdman-Peiss Lumber Company operated out of the office and factory Erdman had recently built on University Avenue on Madison’s far west side. Cost of lumber had gone up, raising the cost of houses. By pre-cutting wooden components at their factory, Erdman-Peiss was able to pass savings on to clients and home builders. A series of advertisements in the Wisconsin State Journal in early 1953 promoted the company’s availability to pre-cut lumber for any house plan, as well as produce U-form cabinets of birch or mahogany. A feature celebrated the company for cutting the cost of kitchen cabinets in half through pre-cutting the pieces that the homeowner would assemble themselves. Using pre-cut pieces in standardized sizes also allowed clients to customize their kitchen cabinets and their arrangements. According to Peiss, who spearheaded the U-form cabinet projects, “There is no place that the amateur can go wrong if he can fit one part within a groove or bring another flush against the proper neighboring part.”

The U-form cabinets seem to have been a gateway for the partners. By late spring of 1953, advertisements for the cabinets included language that the same ideas could be applied to houses. One ad suggested, “Build your own home with pre-cut lumber,” also noting that “Erdman-Peiss is willing to give you friendly, helpful advice too.” By the fall, the firm had extended the U-form concept into furniture and complete kit houses. The firm hired Taliesin-trained architect Herb Fritz to design a complete line of do-it-yourself plywood furniture meant to be assembled without nails and varnished by the customer. As the Wisconsin State Journal explained, and I quote, “A chair, for example, comes in four pieces, seat, back, and two sets of legs. In less than two minutes, a person can insert the legs into the seat, the back into the seat, and presto, he has a chair,” end quote. The idea was to create an entire line of ready-made products by prefabricating the process as much as possible, making building of cabinets, furniture, and even houses a push, pull, click, click process.

Erdman and Peiss promoted the U-Form-It product line as a DIY effort, which resonated with the home improvement craze then sweeping the nation. In fact, they debuted the furniture and the U-Form-It line of houses at a weekend-long Do-It-Yourself show in Madison in September of 1953. The company took out a series of full-page ads in the local papers for the weekend show, which they promoted as the first of its kind in Madison. Held on the grounds of Erdman’s office and factory, the show was open to multiple vendors, but clearly showcased the U-Form cabinets, furniture, and dwellings. The star of the show was Erdman’s do-it-yourself house. Designed by the local architectural firm Weyler and Strang, the modern, three-bedroom dwelling made of pre-cut parts could be built for around $9,000, inclusive of all materials, excavating, plumbing, and electrical work. In theory, the rest of the work could be done by the homeowner. Erdman displayed the home cut in half to show the nuances of construction, a strategy builders frequently use to stage their model homes. And of course, Erdman promoted the U-Form cabinets and furniture inside the dwelling itself. LIFE magazine featured the house in an article in October of 1953, noting that Erdman’s pre-cut houses were neither the first nor the cheapest kit. The LIFE editors boldly asserted that they were probably the best designed.

For the next several years, Erdman focused his attention on the U-Form-It houses. Several months after the LIFE article, Erdman announced the firm would construct a $250,000 addition to the factory, specifically to cut parts for the pre-cut houses. Ads for U-Form-It houses “As Seen in LIFE” flooded local and regional papers. Despite the original plan to build the U-Form houses in a 400-mile radius of the factory, the effort was concentrated in Madison. Madison was Erdman’s laboratory for testing the market for pre-cut houses as well as where he could experiment with working methods, pre-cutting component parts, and assembling these into a kit that could be erected on site by the homeowner. His broad promotional effort in local newspapers, magazines, and Parade of Homes shows was typical of the way in which merchant builders across the nation grew their businesses. It is in this context that Erdman took the next step into more complete prefabrication, which led to the experiment with Wright, which I talked about at the beginning of this lecture. UW-Milwaukee architectural historian Paul Sprague has attributed the genesis of the Erdman-Wright prefabs to a chance stop Erdman made at Wright’s Madison office to use the phone sometime in 1954. When Erdman saw, I’m sorry, excuse me. When Wright saw Erdman’s designs for the U-Form-It dwellings, he told him he could design a much better house.

By February of 1956, the pair had decided to go forward with construction of the first model, the one featured in House & Home. The plan was derived from 16-inch modular units. Walls were built of eight by eight-foot stressed skin modular panels with redwood battens on the exterior and mahogany battens on the interior. Panels were prefabricated at Erdman’s Madison factory and shipped to the building site, extending Erdman’s working method beyond pre-cutting components into more complete prefabrication. News articles from around the country hailed the first prefabricated house as an aesthetic breakthrough in prefab housing, bringing together Wright’s world-renowned design and aesthetic with the latest trends in the building industry. Wright designed two more model prefabs for Erdman, although only one of these two was built. This model, like the first, being completed in Madison. The two-story dwelling was based on Wright’s conception of the one-room house. The entire house was designed on a two-foot module. The two-story window walls show this well with a series of two-foot by four-foot windows. Like the first model house, the second prefab received plenty of attention in the national media, but it also had meaning in a local context. Mary Ellen Rudin, one of the original homeowners, explained to me in a 2011 interview how she and her husband, Walter, came to purchase the house when they were both young UW mathematics professors. Erdman took them to see it after it did not sell during the 1959 Parade of Homes, marketing it to the young couple as an economical way to own a house designed by the master, Frank Lloyd Wright. Rudin explained that Erdman also sold them add-ons in the form of Wright-designed furniture, several pieces of which they purchased to furnish the house. A Madison-based experiment in prefab design, the Rudins made the house their home for 51 years.

Despite an outpouring of national press attention, the Erdman-Wright prefabs never achieved widespread success. Some of this was due to their relatively high cost, tied to the complexity of Wright’s designs and significant site work. In fact, Prefab Model One was estimated to cost between $40,000 and $50,000 depending upon options, and siting and materials of Prefab Two could cost anywhere from $38,000 to $45,000. Yet this experiment, largely confined to the two Madison models and several examples in the region, and a few isolated examples elsewhere proved formative on Erdman’s other major endeavor in the late 1950s, the prefabricated medical buildings.

Erdman’s target clientele gradually shifted toward the medical profession in the mid-1950s, a time when the housing market was slowing and builders were changing up their practices. In Erdman’s case, the idea to specialize in medical buildings grew out of a failed attempt to build a 60-unit apartment complex adjacent to the Unitarian meeting house in Shorewood Hills. The Farley Land Company, for which Erdman was vice president, wanted to build a series of 15 four-unit apartment buildings arranged in a U-shaped configuration. The village board killed the project in April of 1950, refusing to rezone the land to allow for multi-family units. A year later, the development team announced an alternative, a doctor’s office building to help solve an acute shortage of medical office space in Madison. Drawn by local architect William Kaeser, the plan called for construction of a two-story, L-shaped medical building of red brick and glass to house up to 60 doctors in 30 offices, each with a waiting room and several consultation rooms. The building would also include a gymnasium for employees, a pharmacy, and a nursery. Parking was located between the arms of the L-shaped structure. This proposal sailed through rezoning without controversy in early 1952, but ultimately did not come to pass. Erdman later described the scheme as an expensive failure. $10,000 went into a design that Erdman realized no one wanted. The Wisconsin State Journal reported that quote, “Doctors, it seems, are highly individualistic. Their requirements vary. One wants to own and another wants to rent. They have different ideas of space layout. Many want a separate building with their own sign in front,” end quote.

So instead of the large medical building, Erdman erected the first doctors park in 1955, taking advantage of the more permissive zoning to construct a series of 10 to 12 small buildings, each designed for and privately owned or occupied by a small cadre of partner doctors. The individual offices were modeled after a medical building Erdman had constructed for two dentists at the northwestern corner of the intersection of Glenway and Monroe Streets in the West Lawn neighborhood in 1954. William Kaeser, who had designed the plan for the medical arts facility, developed models after this example for three different kinds of offices at doctors park to accommodate between one and three doctors. Each building stood on a roughly half-acre parcel of land, allowing for parking for several cars and surrounded by ample landscaping. Thus, the scheme mirrored the residential setting of suburban neighborhoods on Madison’s west side. The office is visually blended with the nearby single-family dwellings, and yet offered a commercial service: medical care for suburban residents. Erdman applied thinking from his U-Form-It dwellings to the medical buildings, using modular planning and prefabricated components. Essentially, the buildings employed a plug and play system by which doctors customized their offices around their individual needs. As Erdman explained in a 1957 article in the Milwaukee Journal, the basic unit was a 28 by 48-foot structure of prefabricated parts assembled at the Madison factory. It contained a waiting room, reception room, four exam rooms, and laboratory utility spaces. The article touted that flexibility of size is one of the features. Additional rooms can be added in pairs to the end of the structure, or side-by-side duplex models are available as well as an L-shaped plan. Moreover, doctors could choose redwood, cedar, or composition siding or masonry for an additional cost, as well as purchase Erdman’s prefabricated cabinetry. As important as the flexible design scheme was to the success of individual medical buildings, Erdman’s conception of siting these buildings in a park was arguably more vital for their ultimate popularity.

Moving the buildings to the suburbs took the practice of medicine out of downtown hospitals, which meant medicine was more accessible to suburban patients, something doctors appreciated about the parks. The location of individual offices in a clustered setting meant that doctors could consult with or send patients to specialists as needed like a hospital, but without the problems of a downtown location, specifically parking. According to Erdman and I quote, “For a group of doctors interested in maintaining independent practices and yet remaining in close touch with other doctors who are specialists in other fields, doctors parks are the answer,” end quote. And we can perhaps talk about that individualism a bit later in the Q&A. Doctors parks, which the Wisconsin State Journal called shopping centers for medicine, also satisfied an auto-oriented middle class culture. Built in suburban locations where inexpensive land was plentiful, the medical offices were surrounded by ample parking, which won the patronage of suburban middle class residents. In a 1964 article for the Physicians Management Journal on the medical buildings, Erdman wrote, “Adequate parking for a doctor’s office is as important as an efficiently planned medical building.” Erdman went on to argue that one couldn’t isolate consideration of a building from parking; that they should be thought of as one entity. Erdman again, “Generous parking is not a luxury. It is a necessity.” The first doctors park in Madison also included a drive-in pharmacy, perhaps the first in the nation. It opened to great fanfare on June 16th, 1958. Erdman’s logic in locating a pharmacy in the park was tied to his conception of it as a medical community. As Erdman explained, a doctor could easily call the prescription over to the pharmacy such that the patient could pick it up on their way home.

This conception of doctors parks as communities of individuals resonates with the postwar suburban context in which these parks were located. Erdman consciously designed his buildings and their landscaping to echo the middle class suburban domestic landscape. Part of this was to provide pleasant surroundings in which to work. But there were other tactical advantages that Erdman undoubtedly recognized. The fact that the buildings looked like mini houses allowed them to blend such that they would easily be allowed by exception in R1 residential zoning. For Erdman, doctors parks were part and parcel of postwar suburbia. As he opined in Physician’s Management, and I quote again, “A doctors park provides the answer to ever-increasing problems of downtown traffic congestion and lack of access in parking, and takes the practice of medicine to residential areas where the greatest number of patients can be served,” end quote. This made sense to Erdman. Patients were in the suburbs, so removing the parks to this area was logical, even if he had to initially convince doctors, and to an extent, patients of this logic. To do so meant launching a publicity campaign of sorts. Much as he did with the U-Form-It houses, Erdman sought out any and every opportunity to sell the concept of the doctors parks. He advertised in trade journals, like Physician’s Management. His buildings appeared in feature articles in The New York Times, and he advertised in the Wall Street Journal. Erdman also maintained an extensive file of testimonials from doctors for whom he had built his buildings, which he sent to prospective clients across the country upon request. In 1986, the company boasted they had a list of 22,000 physicians who practiced in one of more than 2,000 Erdman medical buildings across the country.

Prefabricated panels were initially made in the Madison factory. Subsequently, the firm established offices in New Jersey, Dallas, Atlanta, and elsewhere. Erdman’s business had grown from one builder’s small operation in Madison in the late 1940s to generate $100 million in sales annually by 1986. And while Erdman’s path, compared with other merchant builders in moving from local to national markets, his specialization in medical buildings appears to be unique. Erdman was the pioneer of this building type, and arguably, the premier builder in the country. In pioneering the concept, moreover, he essentially suburbanized medical practice on a nationwide scale. Although buildings within these doctors parks made use of prefabrication, Erdman never intended the medical buildings to be cookie-cutter products. Each was customized for the site in question. And Erdman and his staff worked closely to meet the individual needs of each and every client. For Erdman, prefabrication was a tool that allowed him to meet the needs of an expanding suburban market in a more efficient manner, something he learned partly from his work with Wright on the prefab model houses.

But while Erdman was indebted to Wright, he also learned much from the city in which he worked. A demanding market in Madison, a demanding housing market in Madison, immediately after World War II prompted Erdman to sell his first house and set him on a course toward mass production. Madison embraced the U-Form-It experiment with Peiss that led Erdman to collaborate with Wright on the prefab model houses. And finally, Madison was the location where Erdman developed the prefabricated medical buildings which would shape medical practice across the United States in the late 20th century.

As his career entered its twilight in the early 1990s, Erdman worked closely with world-renowned architect, planner, and founder of the Congress of the New Urbanism, Andrs Duany, to develop a 153-acre site about eight miles west of downtown Madison. Middleton Hills was Erdman’s most comprehensive venture to date, a master-planned, neotraditional neighborhood development with a commercial town center and a variety of dwelling types on small lots, surrounded by community-oriented green spaces. Following principles of the New Urbanist movement that espoused a return to early 20th-century architectural styles rooted in region, dwelling units in Middleton Hills loosely followed one of three styles found throughout Madison in the early 20th century: Arts and Crafts, Bungalow, and not surprisingly, the Prairie style. Like other projects throughout his career, Erdman wanted Middleton Hills to be pathbreaking, and yet, as he told the Capitol Times, this project was different and it was special. “This will be my swan song,” he stated. “I believe in it. I want this to be my contribution to the community. I want to do something worthwhile.”

After more than a year of negotiating zoning and permits, Middleton Hills received final approval in September of 1994, fulfilling Erdman’s wish to give back to the community that had nurtured so many of his pioneering experiments. I end this lecture by looking more closely at the landscape of Erdman’s swan song. The use of the Prairie style supports the New Urbanist commitment to region while honoring Wright’s legacy. Today, the development pays tribute to the local by preserving a sizable wetland area and at the Prairie Caf, which boasts of the Wright burger, with a W. Then there’s the street names, which pay homage to the landscape, such as Glacier Ridge Road, and notable figures with connections to Wisconsin, such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Gaylord Nelson. And of course, Wright himself. Undoubtedly, Erdman viewed Wright as a kind of father figure, and as I’ve shown, made much of their relationship across his career. And yet, there’s so much more to the story than Erdman’s reverence for the world-famous architect. And you might take a moment to consider here who’s on top.
[audience laughing]

At Middleton Hills, Erdman paid homage to his home. The place where he entered the building industry, transformed the field of prefabricated construction, became the nation’s leading producer of medical buildings, and revolutionized production of office furniture in this country. Middleton Hills is, as Erdman wanted, a swan song, but not just as a cap to a productive building career. Rather, I see it as a tribute to his home for five decades. And it echoes the theme of my talk today, that understanding Erdman’s building career demands we attend to the ways in which his buildings were Madison-made. Thank you so much.

[audience clapping]

And just a note of special thanks to Dan Erdman and the Erdman Archives, and as well to the biography from which I drew much of the biographical details today. Great.

– Man: So my colleague and I will walk around with the mic for questions, so.

– Audience Member: Thank you, Anna. One of the things Marshall did halfway through his career, started an art department because he was tired of doctors’ wives finishing off the buildings, and he would loan art that mostly was accepted, and it was a beautiful way to finish off buildings. But you made no mention of that. I kind of viewed that as a innovation that was part of the Erdman legacy of really finishing these buildings off in an extraordinary way. How do you view that? It was in the Moe D’Alessio book.

– Yes.

– About the art department.

– Sure; thanks, Steve. So what I was focusing on today was largely Erdman’s career in the ’50s and ’60s, up to the time that the prefabricated skin of the buildings was getting built. That’s the period of my research, and that’s largely what I focus on in my own work on Erdman. But undoubtedly, the fact that he did have an art department to furnish the buildings was sort of part of the design build, from start to finish, all scales of this thing. And so interiors are undoubtedly an important part of Erdman’s career, particularly later on, when the experiments in the prefabricated buildings themselves was sort of solidified.

– Audience Member: Thanks. In your talk, you bring up Middleton Hills and Andrs Duany, and back then, I was in a co-housing group that was looking for a place to settle, and we thought of the future of Middleton Hills as a possibility. And I remember taking part in a charette, which was a brand-new concept to me, and I think it was Duany and his group that brought that in. Can you talk about, would Erdman have been involved in that and what was his attraction to working with that other group?

– Yeah, this is a great question and you’re absolutely correct. Duany, his firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk, DPZ as it’s known, and Erdman did hold charettes to specifically work on designing different aspects of that community. I don’t know if that was ’93 or ’94; what I can speak to, and I was not in Madison at that point. What I can speak to is your, the second part of your question, which really was where he got this idea. Again, this falls outside sort of the focus of my research on the immediate post-World War II period. But what I see with that is Erdman’s persistent desire to be at the forefront, to find the latest things. And he found out about New Urbanism. It was in the news somewhat, certainly in architectural and building circles in the late ’80s, early ’90s when the Congress of the New Urbanism was being formed. Seaside, the first New Urbanist community in Florida was in the news at the time. And Erdman always wanted to be at the cutting edge of the building industry. And I liken his interest in New Urbanism in the early ’90s very much to the Do-It-Yourself show that I talked about today. Do-It-Yourself was a movement that really was galvanized in the early 1950s as a way to build yourself. Contractors were in short supply, builders were in short supply. And so, Erdman heard about this. He saw that there were Do-It-Yourself shows elsewhere, including famous ones in 1953, the same year he staged the one in Madison. There was one in New York and one in Chicago. And he got right on it, he did it. And I think that’s the same as what you see with Middleton Hills and his interest in New Urbanism.

– Audience Member: Professor Andrzejewski, thank you so much for this fascinating talk and also the great book that you’re writing in Florida, which I find fascinating. I have two questions. One is, early in your talk, you mentioned Joyce Erdman doing design work, and I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about her contributions. The second is, have you ever been able to interview someone who built one of these homes and, like, what their experience was with the kit? Was it really so easy, for example?

– Joyce’s involvement in design of the houses seems to be early on, for the most part. And that makes sense. She had a growing family and sort of fell out of it, and you can read the biography for more information, but in the early 1950s. That’s not to say she didn’t have a say. We all know that partners have says later on. But again, because my work is more focused on the architecture itself and sort of the realization, I haven’t focused so much on that particular aspect. So no, I have not talked to anyone who used these kits, but in the newspapers, and there was a. . . I didn’t bring it in today, but there was sort of veiled language that it was very hard to do it yourself, which is not surprising, right? And some of this you see in ads, I didn’t show any of them today, that they would also help you with it, right? And that help in one case, in a newspaper article was double the cost of the house. So if you got the house for $9,000, it would be in the realm of $18,000. I mean, we all know houses costs, labor is a big cost. So indeed, it seems that for people that are interested in the furniture, which I am increasingly interested in myself, there are some examples of the Herb Fritz-designed furniture that I know of out at Taliesin. And that would be really interesting to see how easy those were because it was described in the paper as push, push, pull, click. So. . . Thank you.

– Audience Member: Hi, thanks a lot. This is so interesting. I’m curious about the quality of materials and also craftsmanship. I think you mentioned Peiss, when he partnered with Peiss, and this was a guy who was a craftsman with furniture. And so I’m wondering how much your research got into trends in that area? I mean, just knowing that the general trend in our country has been decreased quality of materials.

– Sure.

– I’d like to hear about anything you uncovered there.
– Yeah, no, this is an excellent question, because it was one of the reasons that prefabrication, which builders everywhere were experimenting with to different degrees. Some of it was limited to pre-cutting parts, some of it was assembling wall panels, some of it was assembling whole houses. In fact, with prefabrication, people were concerned because they thought it would cheapen it, that it would be built less well. The opposite in many ways was true, that because they were mass producing it of standardized quality materials, these prefabs tended to be of a particular quality. So it’s kind of opposite, and I’m speaking not just about Erdman’s experiments here, but the building industry as a whole. One of the things that is particularly interesting about Erdman, and this is talked about in the biography as well, particularly in later chapters, was that he never gave up on his sort of guarantee, so to speak. He was a particularly attentive builder. So if you commissioned to work with him, he would see it through, or have his office make things right, if it wasn’t. Now the U-Form-It houses, anecdotally, things happen. The houses are 70 years old, right? But for the most part, they seem to have been fairly well-built.

– Audience Member: Thanks so much. That was really wonderful. I’m fascinated, perhaps because there’s a lot of ads that you showed, in the financial aspect of it. And kind of two things I’m wondering about. One is, can you tell us roughly in today’s dollars, what $9,000 was in, or the $40,000 that was for the Wright houses? And do you have a sense of whether those numbers were really what somebody would end up paying, or was it more like a kind of marketing, not scam, but the idea of grabbing your attention and then, “Oh, well, we can help you and we can add this and it’ll cost this, and then you need the electrician and the plumber,” and the total cost ended up being what? – Yeah, this is an excellent question, and I’ll be an art historian and say, no, I don’t know the cost in today’s dollars. What I can tell you is the average, averages around the time. $8,000 to $9,000 in Madison in the early 1950s was pretty low. Things tended to be $10,000 to $12,000, going for $10,000 to $12,000 with the advertisements. A few years ago, you would’ve asked me this question and I could have been even more specific on that and given you the rates; I can’t, off the top of my head. When you get into things like site work, this is some of the issues that explain why the Erdman-Wright prefabs were so complicated because you would go see a model that was fully built. And this is true with model houses everywhere. When you see a model, you’re often sold, and I see this in Florida as well, you’re often sold on the walls, maybe the slab in Florida, but you don’t take into account excavating and some of those details. So with Wright’s houses, which had the prefab, right, Erdman prefabs, which had basements, then you start upping the cost, right? But like anything, the second prefabricated house model that Erdman-Wright designed together was marketed in the 1959 Parade of Homes. If it would’ve sold for, I think it was, don’t quote me on this because I may be wrong, but for around $18,000, I think if it would’ve sold, that would’ve been fine with him. But if you built another one elsewhere, it would’ve cost twice that much. Model houses are super interesting. I’ll give a plug here for a new book coming out from the University of Minnesota Press on 20th century American model houses. They’re absolutely fascinating because in many ways, those models are marketing tools that builders are willing to take a loss on, just to try to build their brand and build more houses.

– Audience Member: Does Erdman’s building company still exist today in any way, shape, or form, purchased by another firm, et cetera?

– This is a great question. So, I would kick it to someone in the audience who knows more than me, but essentially there are, okay, who wants to say in the audience? It’s a more complicated story.
– Audience Member: It does still exist. We do medical buildings, we do senior living communities, and we have nothing to the level of the construction that Marshall had in the ’70s, ’80s, and even in the ’90s. But we do still build our buildings.

– So part of the reason I kicked this away is that for my interest as a historian, my interest when the family divests significantly of the interest, I’m like, “Oh, it’s gone.” I wrote about a Florida builder that sold off their interest in the company, but then a great-great-grandson came back and started it up again, but it’s totally different. But anyway, that great-great-grandson contacted me and said, “It still exists.” And I was like, “Okay, I guess it still exists.” So, thank you.

– Audience Member: There is an interview with Marshall Erdman dating from the 1990s in which he says something to the effect that he didn’t know whether Wright was a good engineer, but he certainly was a good salesperson, marketer. And as you’re going through your slides, I was amazed at how many times they were in LIFE magazine and Look, and all the different publications, and I wonder if one of the best things that Erdman learned from Wright was how to be a marketer.
– I love this question/assertion. I think you’re absolutely right. I think. . . I did not know Marshall Erdman. He died in 1995. I moved to Madison in 2000; I regret that, but that would’ve been one of the first questions I would’ve asked him, about how Wright’s salesmanship influenced him. Because I think it did. I think a lot of things about Wright were formative on Marshall that had nothing to do with architecture, and I think that’s the best example. That being said, and I do think you’re right, the strategies that Marshall Erdman employed here were strategies that you see builders across the country also engaging in. Marshall, I’m sure, saw the Levitts, the Levitt brothers of Levittown on the cover of TIME magazine and was like, “I’ll get LIFE magazine.” Like, I’m sure that was part of it. But the fact that the Levitts were there influenced him just as the Mackle brothers in Florida, who were the largest builder in the country of vacation and retirement houses in 1959 also sought to be on the cover of Business Week and TIME magazine and everything else. So, you kind of gotta think about both sides of it here.

– Audience Member: I’m curious if there’s any appreciable difference you see in the Usonian houses by Wright prior to working with Erdman and whether they were influenced by them being prefabricated with Erdman and his influence on Wright.

– So the relationship of the prefabs to Usonians?

– Audience Member: Yeah.

– Interesting question. Undoubtedly. I mean, Wright kept returning to this idea of building for the masses throughout his career. He goes back, the American System-built experiments in Milwaukee in the 1910s that Wright worked on. He returned to his concept of trying to build for a more middle class audience in the 1930s and beyond with the Usonians. And then here at the end of his life, Wright died in 1959. So the prefabs with Erdman came at the very end, literally, of his career. You know, that was his lifelong interest. I didn’t talk about it today, but the third prefabricated model house that Wright designed for Marshall on paper was never built and never got off the drawing board. And it’s interesting because Marshall kept pushing that house because it was the most affordable. Like everything Wright did, the cost just kept creeping up, ’cause the designs kept getting more complicated. So if you look at correspondence in the Wright archive between Marshall and Frank, it’s back and, I’m sorry, Mr. Wright, it’s back and forth, Marshall begging Mr. Wright to design this affordable house. And Wright saying, “Yeah, I’ll get to it.” Again, I think it was a side hustle for Wright. I mean, I think he cared about Marshall, but, like, when you’ve gotta finish the Guggenheim, an affordable house is not probably gonna rise to the top of your list. So I think it was, you know. . . I think it capped off Wright’s lifelong interests. I think Erdman would’ve known, undoubtedly, the Herb and Catherine Jacobs house in the Westmoreland neighborhood and Usonia project in general. And I’m sure he was looking at that partly, but always with an eye to affordability. And these are, Erdman was a builder, and they think differently. They weren’t trying to one-off something huge and famous, except to build more, right? So it was a little bit different for him. I hope that answers your question.

– Man: All right, well, I want to thank everybody for coming today, and let’s have one last round of applause for Professor Andrzejewski. [audience clapping]