Anna Andrzejewski Named First Frank Lloyd Wright Endowed Professor at UW–Madison

Anna Andrzejewski, an architectural historian who has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 2000, has been named the inaugural holder of a new Frank Lloyd Wright endowed professorship. The chair, created in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and funded by alumnus Dan Erdman (son of Wright collaborator Marshall Erdman), will support Andrzejewski's research and expand interdisciplinary teaching on twentieth-century American architecture.

Popular course and hands-on learning

Andrzejewski has taught a dedicated course on Frank Lloyd Wright since 2016; it routinely reaches its enrollment cap of 30 students and often generates a waiting list and numerous auditors. The class draws a wide mix of students — art history majors, engineers, historians and participants in the College of Engineering's new architecture certificate — and emphasizes on-site learning through visits to Wright buildings across Wisconsin and the broader region.

I get chills running down my spine when I think about this.

What the professorship will do

The endowed chair gives Andrzejewski the resources to develop seminars focused on midcentury building issues, support her scholarship on post-World War II development, and anchor regular offerings in American architectural history at UW–Madison. She plans to teach the Frank Lloyd Wright course at least once a year — possibly every semester — and to expand related courses that bring together students from design, landscape architecture, engineering, real estate and art history.

She is already collaborating with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Taliesin Institute to create opportunities for students at Taliesin in Spring Green and Taliesin West in Arizona. Proposed initiatives include student internships, research contributions to the foundation's journal, and programming that links campus work with the foundation's outreach.

Core themes and a local example

Andrzejewski highlights two enduring themes from Wright's work that she emphasizes in the classroom: organic architecture — treating a building as an organism that responds to its environment — and environmental design, which encompasses sustainability and how built spaces shape everyday life and communal experience. She encourages students to see Wright not only as an individual genius, but as a thinker wrestling with issues that remain relevant in the 21st century.

One local example that influenced Andrzejewski is the Walter and Mary Ellen Rudin House in Madison, a prefabricated design Wright created with Marshall Erdman in 1959. First shown in that year's Parade of Homes, the Rudin House illustrates Wright's late-career engagement with mass production, suburbanization and the continued pursuit of organic principles.

Filling a gap in architectural education

With Taliesin's architecture school closed, Andrzejewski and UW–Madison view the new professorship as a way to help transmit Wright's lessons to future architects and scholars. By combining rigorous scholarship, fieldwork, cross-disciplinary seminars and partnerships with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the chair aims to keep Wright's ideas alive and relevant for contemporary design challenges.

Related items in the original reporting referenced a Frank Lloyd Wright travel-trailer project that never materialized and a recently completed Wright design that inspired a later sibling project.