PBS Wisconsin Documentaries

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I first came out to Taliesin in 1953, and as far as I can recall, Monona Terrace was the first building I ever worked on. A reporter tried to get me into a little controversial question about saying aren't you really irritated by Madison? It's taken so long and they can't make up their mind and they keep struggling about this building. To which my answer is it's the only town in this country I can imagine where a good idea could have kept alive so long. Yeah, it would be-- I can visualize it out there. You know as an architect, I think it's wonderful anytime we get a chance to build one of Mr. Wright's buildings because you can only experience architecture when it's built. Beautiful drawings, wonderful art for books, but the truth of the matter is you've got to build it for it to be architecture. Until then it's just a design, it's a rendering, it's you know, whatever, but when it's built, when the stick and the bricks hit the road, then it becomes architecture. That's the only way you know. That is the only way you know whether the ideas have merit and whether those ideas can continue to grow and expand. The town, unfortunately, is a wheel with a costly hub inhabited by the State of Wisconsin, the Capitol. Their hospitals are office buildings, their banks and newspapers all prefer office buildings. Their hotels are office buildings too. Having the Capitol, do they think all Madison needs is more office building? The beautiful lakes are around there somewhere. You try to find them. Frank Lloyd Wright. As a boy growing up in Madison, Wisconsin. Frank Lloyd Wright believed the city had turned its back on its best feature, its lakes. So when the opportunity came along to correct that unfortunate mistake, the irascible architect seized it, happily putting himself at the center of one of the longest running, most heated, totally improbably civic controversies ever endured by an American city. Monona Terrace opened its doors in 1997, nearly four decades after the designer's death and close to a century after a precursor to Wright's idea was first developed by a landscape planner named John Nolen. Architect Tony Puttnam. John Nolen in 1910, a very famous city planner of his day was very interested in having the city of Madison identify itself and connect itself to the lake, and so this was his proposal, this formal avenue of government buildings was to come down to the lake and terminate-- not as we see it today on a high bluff overlooking the lake-- but with monumental steps. In 1938, when Mr. Wright was first asked to do a building to combine civic and governmental functions, we can only guess, but probably remembering John Nolen's idea that Mr. Wright sited his buildings carrying the semi-circular forms of the Capitol out into the lake. It was almost like, for me at least like reading a novel whose outcome you didn't know because there were so many little twists and turns that you... It was not a novel. Reality is built of more amazing stuff. What happened between 1938 when Frank Lloyd Wright first presented his idea and 1997 when Monona Terrace proudly took its place in architectural history is more than enough to fill a book, and it has. But gathering details of a story that enveloped generations of key players, presented ten referenda to the city's voters, inspired repeated major design revisions and had more deaths and resurrections than any dime novel would bear was no easy task for authors David Mollenhoff and Mary Jane Hamilton. We have about 4,000 clippings here from both the Wisconsin State Journal on this shelf right here and the Capitol Times on this shelf right here. The Cap Times saw only white, the State Journal saw only black. In other words, whether it was right or any of his plans, someone would find all of the good things and the other paper would find-- if there was anything negative, that would become the headline. We have volumes of key documents that were used by the

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Common Council records, the County Board records. We have all of Wright's correspondence here by topic and by date. We have other volumes that are just on the designs, the eight different designs that Wright did, the additional designs, etc. You were always seeing things that if you were writing a story, you'd want to do it this way, and it just turns out that's the way it was, things that you could never have anticipated.

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Now a politician, of course, is just nobody until he has money to spend. And as a class, politicians seem to think just now that spending money you haven't got will make prosperity for all. That being so, then how about doing positive harm by spending? Frank Lloyd Wright, October 15, 1938. By the late 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was pulling America out of its Great Depression by spending vast amounts of public money. Madison's politicians had their eyes on a share of that money for a building that would house the combined offices of the city and the county, another office building. Paul Harloff was an electric contractor here in Madison who did work on the construction of the Wisconsin Capitol. He and Wright met at some time in the mid 30s. When they met we don't really know. What we do know is that in the fall, the early fall of 1938, Paul Harloff contacted Frank Lloyd Wright and asked him if he was still interested in this idea that they had talked about in the mid 30s. Wright claims that the idea was one that he had had as a little shaver, walking the streets of Madison. When he got the idea is arguable, but that appears to be the moment of conception when Monona Terrace was first discussed by two people. Both of them were feeling that what the city and the county were proposing was not appropriate. Either the place or certainly the design which was a very typical kind of thing that had been cranked out that was a kind of generic 30s, looked somewhat like some of the schools that were going up in Madison. The funding cycle for the Public Works Administration was well underway, and the building did have to begin construction by December. So when Wright showed up at the county board meeting on November 2nd with all of his beautiful drawings to try to persuade them to build this building, it was clearly a long shot. This was an incredibly audacious building. It had about a million square feet in it which is about the same amount of space as a large, regional shopping center. It went out almost 700 feet into Lake Monona and extended for several blocks along the lakeshore. It was a huge building, far bigger than anything that anybody had ever imagined. And as far as we know, nobody ever thought about putting all of these functions into a single building. They did not have an auditorium, so he included an auditorium. He also included-- He felt that they needed a new railroad station, so he added that. He knew they still had these unsightly boathouses, and so he as providing for that. His mega-structure was going to cure all the civic ills of Madison in one fell swoop-- get rid of those ugly boathouses, be provided with parking, get your auditorium thrown in and a city county building with the jails. And so I'm sure it's one of those things where he felt if he could solve that many more of the civic needs, the people would automatically rally behind his because, you know, it would fix everything. Prospects of getting this kind of a job through official channels was absolutely zero. The mayor of the city left the position as the head of the city's largest architectural firm to become the mayor. Now you've got an architect as mayor and he was not the least bit interested in hiring Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright had done a lot of speaking in Madison. He would come here to give lectures on a fairly regular basis to give exhibits of his material and so forth. And as someone once observed, he was always a little more popular before he spoke than after because he had the perverse habit of lambasting Madisonians. Frank Lloyd Wright's dream civic center was not built on that first try, nor was any city/county building. The idea resurfaced briefly a few years later, only to be interrupted by Pearl Harbor and World War II. Construction of civic buildings was put on hold, but people remembered.

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Madison would take a proud place among the Capitols of this world, adding to Wisconsin's State Capitol prestige a prestige of her own. Frank Lloyd Wright. When you look at Mr. Wright's preliminary sketch, he sketched the Capitol up here and drew the street in and then drew this cross-actual relationship for this building and he stuck with it from that day forward. When it came to Madison's architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright considered the State Capitol to be the "Best of Show" in town. It was the context into which his own design must fit, thereby elevating both. His intention was not to place a rival to the Capitol just down the street but to extend the idea of the Capitol back out to the natural world from which it had been severed. He would create a building that married the Capitol and its city to a lake. Mr. Wright respected the Capitol. He believed that building a noble and dignified building for state government would elevate the quality of government. He said you know I think that probably sounds overly optimistic that a good building can elevate life and dignity, but he said that I'm an architect, that's what I believe. That's why I'm an architect. He didn't ever want to do a building like that Capitol, but he wanted to do a building that would join with the Capitol and resonate with it. The Monona Terrace building is the half circle. It has towers at the corners which replicate the cross axes layout of this building. It has domecular forms, arches. It has the entire vocabulary of neo-classic architecture re-invigorated and re-invented in many cases into its fabric. Another part of the design concern is to have the Monona Terrace do what this building cannot by its very form accomplish, that is relate to nature. On the lake side, you'll see that there is a series of arches, and these arches are both arching in the conventional way but also projecting out beyond the facade of the building. This is a brand new invention of a way to do an arch, but you might look into these galleries and think that possibly you see the germ of that idea where it's a combination of a barrel vault and the two dimensional arch cutting through it. Mr Wright like many artists was a sponge who picked up everything that came along. He was really quite right in usually denying that he had actually actively taken a theme or copied from another building because it had gone through and internal process of being reinvented and it would come out as a fresh and new idea. Monona Terrace was meant to be an expression of tradition, of society, of American democracy, but it also had to be a new and fresh thing. A noble seat of government would elevate the quality of the government it housed. The reinterpretation of that nobility would serve and inspire a modern democratic culture. Frank Lloyd Wright would settle for nothing less. The Citizens Monona Terrace Project Committee, by this time feeling unduly put upon by authority and the insolence of public office, themselves now came forward and demanded a referendum. At last the Democratic process had broken into politics in Madison by way of architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright. In the 1950s, with the war behind it, Madison was again ready to construct its city/county building. But when the design turned out to be just another office building, citizens called upon Frank Lloyd Wright one more time. He responded with new drawings of his dream civic center, renaming it Monona Terrace. There was a small group of people who were genuinely excited by this grand Wright vision. They were enchanted by it. They had never seen anything like it. They thought the design was absolutely beautiful. They liked the way it linked the city to the lake. They like the fact that it would be a source of community pride. They envisioned thousands of people coming here from all over the world just to see the building because it was a Frank Lloyd Wright building. These were excited people and they went about their mission with great commitment. They had a sound truck that went around the square with a horn, and the man would slow down just enough so that he would hit every red light. And of course, the reason for the square was because that's where all the people were. At Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home, former apprentice and aide Richard Carney remembers that autumn of 1954. One of my most vivid recollections of that time is being in Madison with Mr. Wright and walking down the street in front of the Park Hotel and having a sound truck coming along saying vote Wright, vote for Frank Lloyd Wright, and I never thought I'd hear Mr. Wright being part of a political campaign. The backer of Monona Terrace had demanded and received another referendum, but instead of one question, voters were asked to vote on three including Frank Lloyd Wright as architect and the location on Lake Monona. It was a complication almost certain to guarantee defeat. The power brokers of the city were absolutely stunned that this tiny group led by two women that they pejoratively called professor's wives were able to beat these guys at their own game and to do it with three referenda questions. I mean that was absolutely contrary to conventional wisdom. This wasn't supposed to happen. And Wright was absolutely elated. He had never been elected architect for any project in his life, and he said to one of his friends you know I've never been in politics before, but now that I'm in it, I think I can do a pretty good job. But just because it was passed by the referenda did not mean it was clear sailing. If anything that was just the beginning of the... - There was a small group of equally committed people who did not want a Frank Lloyd Wright building anywhere in Madison and particularly at that location. It would block that surpassingly beautiful view at the end of the avenue. Well at that point, another opponent named Carroll Metzner decided that he would try to get a bill passed that would make it illegal to build any building in Law Park that was taller than 20 feet. He succeeded in do that because he was the only Republican from the Madison area. He was serving in a legislature that was dominated by Republicans, both houses, the governor, etc. So politically he was able to use a state law to preempt Madison's plans. The Metzner law, I remember the Metzner law and that's what in essence finally killed that building at one point. And Mr. Wright was talking about the fact that what Monona Terrace really did was in no way hide the lake, it framed the lake. I mean it really emphasized the lake, presented the lake to Madison to be enjoyed. And he was feeling that it was too bad that people didn't quite understand that. The furor continued throughout the decade. Politicians were elected and defeated for their stance on Monona Terrace, but always, there was one more obstacle standing in the way. Mr. Wright came back from Madison one day. I can't remember the occasion, but I think that something discouraging had happened, and he came back and said well you know they're not going to build this building now, but someday they will. And I think he very clearly saw that probably that someday was not during his lifetime. Opponents were aware that time was running out for the aging Frank Lloyd Wright and shortly after signing his final set of Monona Terrace drawings in 1959, the architect died. It was young old John Bright who stood up and declared in England's parliament, one man and the right idea is a majority. He pointed to history to prove it. History in this case may again prove his point. Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright was gone from the scene, but the struggle over Monona Terrace continued unabated until economics forced alternative solutions. Government got its city/county office building and an old movie palace was renovated to serve as a civic center. Monona Terrace was no longer needed. That is until the 1980s when Madison discovered that without a convention center, it was losing valuable business to smaller cities. Guess what was waiting on the wings. There is a long kind of tribal memory in Madison and in most cities and again a small group of people began to say why don't we build that splendid Frank Lloyd Wright project. If we're going to build something, a convention center on the lakeshore, why don't we build his building and adapt it as a convention center use. It triggered a very interesting series of development. There was a busload of civic leaders who left from Madison to go to Taliesin and to meet with Tony Puttnam. The purpose of this meeting was to investigate whether the Monona Terrace concept could be re-treaded as a convention center. I had several feasibility studies done by various consultants and they had a list of rooms and sizes and things that the building should accomplish, and so they came out and said given the Frank Lloyd Wright footprint of the building, would these things work within that. And it was sort of a mysterious coincidence-- you know everything just sort of fit in. They said we should have a 40,000 square foot exhibition hall and it turned out that the space on the lower floor for the exhibition hall was something like 39,000 square feet. Okay, 350 seat lecture hall, oh yeah, we've got this which was the theater and it fits there. So it was a sort of miraculous kind of way that everything just fit into the building. And it was interesting because on the way up on this bus trip, people didn't say very much. There was this kind of you know look straight ahead and don't talk too much, a lot of suspicion left over from these decades of debates. But then they went into Mr. Wright's old office at Taliesin. It was a magical place. And the mood shifted. There was an excitement there that had to be there. The people on that bus trip were the people who were able to make this decision and all of these people came back and they said you know, let's do it. One last referendum stood between design and construction. Frank Lloyd Wright had been elected architect once in his lifetime, nearly forty years later, he was elected architect again. Utility and beauty are not the enemies habituated sloth and fear would make them out to be. In good minds, utility and beauty are one. Madison has a mind at last. Frank Lloyd Wright. Finally, it was time to build Frank Lloyd Wright's Monona Terrace, but with design teams in Arizona and Wisconsin, subcontractors all over the country and owners that included a city, a county and a state, all for a building that was famous before ground was even broken. There was every chance that construction would prove as difficult as deciding to build in the first place. Managing Principal, Rick Loope. This client was a bit complicated. The owners' committee had initially 18 representatives on it. Then, just to make things interesting there were about 22 constituent groups that were public constituent groups, non- city or state, but for a project of this size, considering we had a multi-headed owner and a lot of passionate participants in terms of the populous in Madison, it's gone amazingly smooth. In a high intensity project like this, it's going to be under a lot of scrutiny both publicly, financially, technically. Having everybody sort of be able to communicate with each other is pretty critical. Every time a new contracting group would come on, subcontractor or principle contractor, we would sit them down in a large conference room on site and give them a presentation about the design intentions and the history of the building. This was incredibly successful. People would bring their families down on the weekends to show them the building. IN the nice weather they'd picnic down there and the level of pride and ownership if you will was more distributed in this project than any project I've experienced before. I love it. It's great. There's no place I'd rather be. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity, especially with all of this, you know it's not your normal rectangular warehouse. Monona Terrace extends out over a lake from a narrow strip of land which is share with a busy highway. There is no room for storage, so the delivery of building materials and the arrival of subcontractors must occur simultaneously. If you're coordinating over 2,000 major operations under these conditions and on a tight schedule, you'd better have a good plan. Project manager Larry Thomas and assistant Kent Gender. It's a plan for us to build the building by to give ourselves and our subcontractors some guidelines as to what's reasonable and what we intend to do and when we intend to do it. The interface of different systems, like we've got steel tying to concrete tying to masonry so trying to interlink three different contractors to get the work done is a definite challenge. And actually then there is pre-cast hung on the masonry that's tied to the steel, so it's a tough puzzle. Conditions change, times change, weather impacts things. Delivery schedules as contractors are brought on board. Different conditions occur. So this changes day to day and week to week. But it's like a road map. Here we go. Structural steel north of T-line east. The footprints of the 1959 plan and our plan superimpose almost perfectly. What we've tried to do is to keep the spirit of the building, the primary architectural characteristics the same. Maintaining that vision was one thing for the exterior. But Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for Monona Terrace had never quite reached the point of interior details. Filling in the blanks was up to Principal Architect and former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Tony Puttnam. There's not direct testimony as to how the interior would have been handled. There are clues. One of the things we're going to try to do is Mr Wright designed a line of colors for a paint company and simplified life. You know instead of worrying about maybe it sould be a little whiter or a little pinker, he just said this is the color, do it. There's some things like that where we had some guidance of just saying okay this is what we're going to use. That color might end up being about 90 percent of the interior of this thing. Mr. Wright was not one for you go in the lobby and you get one color scheme and you go over to the next room and you're in a different world. He didn't do that. And oh yes, the stigma of all Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, the roof which for Monona Terrace is also a park. Nowadays, the technology of putting a garden on a roof is so much more advanced than Mr. Wright's time. Now what normally you would call a roof is actually a waterproofing membrane that goes over the entire surface. It's a two-layer system that's torch applied, fully adhered to the entire roof surface. The roof is a reservoir liner. It's used only for building huge reservoirs that can't leak and so it's extremely tough. Over the top of that we get insulation and pedestals and pavers and planters set over the top of all of that. This is a once in a lifetime project. It's the last Frank Lloyd Wright building. He will never design another one, and everybody has pride in this and everybody wants this to turn out to be a first class facility done at the highest quality level. And we've taken a lot of effort to make sure that that does happen. I mean we've spanned a railroad track, a four lane divided highway, a cantilever 90 feet out over the lake, have made a lakefront presence that didn't exist before allowing bike traffic and foot traffic and convention traffic to all mingle without causing bleeding and provide parking in the downtown area that always needs parking. And a 65,000 square foot roof garden where the citizens of Madison can finally commune with the lake without getting run over. And this building is bringing all of that and Mr. Wright's vision of an urban architecture that is humane, that is organic, that is part of its time yet timeless. When the great advantage of this architectural synthesis is seen and realized, will come what has always proved the world over to be the most lasting enjoyment of a civilization, a noble environment, appropriate to nature and beautiful in style of construction. Frank Lloyd Wright. Taking shape nearly 40 years after the architect's death, serving a totally new function and undergoing the inevitable alterations required by construction, could Monona Terrace truly be a Frank Lloyd Wright building. Many people were waiting anxiously to find out, including historian William Cronon, me. I've never been up here before but I think one of the things that strikes me is with any Wright building you want to think about how he places it on the sight, what its relationship to the landscape is. And the lake is so crucial to what this building is trying to do. I think one of the controversial things about the building is when you walk down from the Capitol towards the sight, it used to be one of the most dramatic views in Madison and now that view is blocked by this building, but that means that as you climb up here, this building becomes the kind of "ta-da" which presents the lake to you in a dramatic way. And I'm sure he intended that. I'm sure he knew exactly what he was doing. He was taking the drama of the lake for himself and he frames the Capitol then too, so it effect is claiming not just the lake for the building but the Capitol as well, the other most dramatic building in the city. And it's great the way he's in a sense put the Capitol on a pedestal there. What I'm wondering about is what's the moment when you get the "Eureka." I have a feeling he didn't intend that the visitors at the building first come up here. When you look toward the Capitol you have this wall of buildings that forms this corridor, so you're walking down through this hallway in effect from this great neo-classical building, the Capitol headed toward the lake and before this building was here the lake kind of opened up between the walls that are around us on either side, and the building is preventing you from seeing that and he wants it to prevent you from seeing it because he's saving his biggest moment for when you go inside. It's one of the most famous and predictable of Wrightian conventions and most of his buildings that he gives you this experience of entering the building which the architectural critics and historians describe as you go through a constricting space which then has a moment of release. And it's very clearly what's going on here. This great cantilever hanging over the entranceway. We move in, it feels low and tight and constraining. We're moving into a dark space. And what lies on the other side of that dark space is in some ways the great point of the building. It's what he want-- what he's preparing you to experience. So here if you enter at the level of the walk down from the Capitol, you're presented entering the building by this dark space, the elevator-- you walk down these stairs, you're kind of bending around. You don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, this is wonderful. You come around this corner, he's blocked your view and then he begins to reveal to you what's about to open up as you walk down this approach. Notice again, the whole experience of this building is moving between walls. All the way back from the Capitol we've been between walls, we've been moving into this constricted space that's become more and more constricted until we come into the entrance. And then we're presented with this arcade that we walk down. It's still tight, it's still focused but we can see the destination now. He's framed the lake. The lake is the image. The lake is the painting in effect that he's prepared the building as the frame for. As we move down this corridor, it's going to open up progressively. It will not just become filling in that space but I can already see what's going to happen is that the sides are going to open up and we're going to get this great panorama that he's laid out. And you have to experience this in motion. And it's very dramatic. In the last 30 feet of the walkway here, these walls suddenly release themselves and you have this great moment of expression this explosion of view. The horizon right at the midpoint of the lower window. So that it's exactly laid out as a kind of geometrically perfect organic facade that he's given. This is great. This is really neat. And the dynamism keeps, it keeps moving as you move toward this, the frame keeps changing, but the windows retain lake elements and shore all the way to the edge. It's actually the curve of the building that allows you always to be seeing shore on the edges. If it were a flat facade, it would become kind of a flat lake surface. It would just be flat blue that would be out here, but there always a frame. The edges are very active in the way that we're viewing this. That's again organic to the core design of the building which is this great arc that he's projected out onto the lake. This is the building. This line. Everything in the building hangs on this one line. This fundamental experience, whatever its particular expression could hardly be more Wrightian. This is Frank Lloyd Wright. This is wonderful. Madison's citizens would revel in it. Conventions would gravitate to the city. Tourists from all over the world would flock there, a continual stream of citizens from other states would come to see, have a look and go home to do something likewise. Cost, it isn't so much a question of what the project would cost, no, it is what the project will pay back that counts. It will make money as well as fame for Madison. Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright believed that a building lived only when it had people and activity within. And the success of the building was determined by how well the life within was served. As construction neared completion, the life within Monona Terrace began to stir. City Official Bob D'Angelo. We're in our third generation. When Mr. Wright first envisioned this building in the 30s it was to be a government office building, re-configured in the late 50s it was to be a performing art center with two theaters and a museum in it. And yet again reconfigured it's now a convention center. And each time the interior of the building has been adapted to suit the current need and in fact in its current generation of what we're doing with it, the design of the building may be best suitable. I don't think you'll be able to tell by looking at it that this wasn't its original use. And that's a credit to a very gifted and dedicated design team that's been working round the clock for many years on this project now. I think the building and the bricks and mortar can only take you so far. Ultimately what will be important is what happens within the center, what it means economically and socially to this community and how well we operate it. That's going to be a big task down the road. And it's a challenge for the management and promotional staff of the center to meet. My second day here in town, I went to a meeting and I met this gentleman and sat down next to him at dinner and he asked who I was and I told him I had just been hired to finish the Monona Terrace Convention Center and he said you know when I was five years old my mother took me downtown to Madison, we went shopping and there was a man standing at the corner right outside of the Madison Club with a model of a building. And it was Frank Lloyd Wright and he explained the entire model of the building to my mom and to my brother and I. And I just thought that was so neat. Here I had barely come to town and there was someone who had actually seen the original model and talked to Frank Lloyd Wright. We're going to be dealing with a serving people who were coming to Madison to meet, to do business to have fun, to enjoy themselves, to celebrate. And it's going to be our job to make sure that they have a wonderful experience. And it is a real privilege to be part of a team that's bringing the building to life. 50,000 or 100,000 details later

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is how you bring it to life. The tile project really is the excitement of having a legacy in sense of history. I did a presentation to that commission and ended it by saying what do you think of the idea of having your name along with everybody else's name, whoever wanted it to be on Monona Terrace. And it was a Friday afternoon,

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30, everybody was tired, and everybody sat up in their chairs and it was very exciting and got a tremendous response. And I thank this generation that built this wonderful Capitol building for us. I know it's just a building. I know it's just marble and everything else, but people walk a little taller in this town because of that building. This is Friends of Monona Terrace and some volunteers are actually 22 volunteers coming up and indexing and mapping all of the tiles, all 6,644 of them. If our grandfathers and mothers had the opportunity to have their names inscribed around the Capitol when it was being built, then it'd be wonderful for us to go up there and see. Obviously that didn't happen, the process with that wasn't around in 1912, but it is today. We have almost I think all the states are going to be represented on there, plus a couple European countries, as well. Frank Lloyd Wright has an amazing reputation that I think even we were surprised at, and people are very proud to have their names associated with the project. And this is a great legacy for our children. And I think they're going to walk a little taller when Monona Terrace is built, too. The moment of truth was at hand. After decades of promises and protests, of fists raised and defiant and fingers pointed in accusation, Monona Terrace was ready to open its doors. And the people who had fought for it, including a few who had been there from the start were ready to face the consequences. Every one of us on this team has some questions that won't be answered until after we open the building. The ultimate test is whether the public buys it. Not how well you designed it but how well the public thinks it's designed. And we're going to find that out pretty soon.

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City and lake were so joined that both were made more beautiful by being thus brought together. These belated nuptials between lake and city so long in coming were at last evident in all respects in architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright. Wisconsin will forever be linked to this great man and his legacy. It is that legacy that will draw visitors from across the nation, from every corner of the globe to marvel at the genius and the inspiration of America's architect. Frank Lloyd Wright hated the fact that in Wisconsin whether it was the Wisconsin River or the lakes in Madison that we were avoiding them. Madison built all its buildings away from the water so nobody knew about the water. He never understood that. So you go look at that view and you'll understand that revenge of Frank Lloyd Wright. The building is open, come on in.

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Enjoy it. Enjoy it. He called his work organic architecture, and this might be

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that a building should relate to the earth, a building should love the stars, and a building should love people. That's really what it's about.

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"Finale" to the William Tell Overture

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Tonight, we celebrate the opening of the Monona Terrace Community and Convention center. The wedding of the city and the lake and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

regal orchestra music

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I think we will have the knee jerk criticisms that will say oh, this could have been better, that could have been better, or Mr. Wright would have done something different or these guys weren't as faithful as they should have been. But I think the critic who takes the time to really investigate the ideas that this design was based on and looks at it holistically. How this building embraces its environment, its place, and the people it serves will find that this building is not only true to the principles and tenets of organic architecture that Mr. Wright first espoused but those tenets and principles have been expanded and elevated. I don't see any reason why the world should be deprived of any buildings that Mr. Wright has designed that have not been built exactly in the same way that should you not play Beethoven's music anymore because Beethoven is not around to see his orchestras play it correctly? Most great artists didn't make great neighbors. I suspect if Beethoven had lived in Madison, Madison Symphony would debate whether to play Beethoven. We had one consultant on this project who said he took this job because all of his career he had been fighting with architects and he figured this was an opportunity to work less restrictively because the architect was deceased. And then he said he figured it wrong. That the spirit of the architect was ever present and as present had he been in the room. He had a real appreciation for the Capitol, for the city, for parks for buildings. That was kind of the bedrock of Mr. Wright's life was this enormous appreciation of how beautiful the world was and how important it was to do things like this for it. That's a great and exciting vision. That's the important vision of this building.

fireworks exploding

said to represent three ideas

Frank Lloyd Wright was never reluctant to express his opinion no matter how controversial. Aside from the arrogance, the lifestyle and the radical designs, what infuriated his critics perhaps most of all was that those insufferable opinions so often proved correct. The architect had promised that his Monona Terrace would be built one day that the citizens of Madison would revel in it, that both city and lake would be made more beautiful by being joined together. It will take years of perspective to truly judge the success of Monona Terrace, but on this July weekend in 1997, it certainly appeared that Frank Lloyd Wright was right again.

triumphant orchestra music