New professorship recognizes Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy
The story behind a new professorship named for Frank Lloyd Wright starts in 1949, when the world-famous architect decided to help a young Madison builder find fame.
Marshall Erdman loved to tell the story of the day he first met Frank Lloyd Wright.
The year was 1949 and Erdman, not yet 30 and starting a building career in Madison, had been summoned to Taliesin, the famed architect’s home and studio in Spring Green.
Wright had designed a new building for the First Unitarian Society in Madison, but no established building firm would touch it. The design far exceeded the Unitarians’ budget. (Wright’s inattention to bottom lines was legendary.)
He found young Erdman through a friend. That day at Taliesin, Wright looked at Erdman and said, “Baby, how would you like to be famous?”
Over the next 46 years, Erdman grew famous enough that when he died in 1995, his obituary appeared in The New York Times. And though he’d created a company that built over 2,500 medical office buildings around the country, with annual revenues totaling $175 million, the Times’ obit — and Erdman himself — credited his association with Wright for launching him.
“It made his career,” says Dan Erdman, Marshall’s son. Last year, Dan Erdman endowed the first Frank Lloyd Wright Professorship in Modern American Architecture in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Art History.
“In a sense,” Dan Erdman says, “I feel that in endowing this professorship, I’m closing the circle and extending my father’s appreciation of Wright for giving him a chance.”
Anna Andrzejewski, an art historian who arrived at UW–Madison in the early 2000s, is the first holder of the Wright professorship, which was inaugurated on July 1, 2025.
Andrzejewski has taught a course on Wright’s architecture and writings since 2016. The endowed professorship — which she calls “utterly transformative and inspiring” — will enhance and expand Andrzejewski’s Wright-related teaching and research while supporting student field trips to Wright-designed buildings in the region.
“I will teach the Wright class every year,” Andrzejewski says. “I will also be developing courses focused on the history of modern architecture in the United States. And I will be working on several research projects related to Wright.”
One project focuses on what Andrzejewski sees as a “Wright revival” in Madison, starting in the late 1980s and including the eventual construction of the Wright-inspired Monona Terrace Convention Center in 1997.
Forty years earlier, the Wright project that led to the new professorship didn’t just propel Marshall Erdman to prominence.
It nearly broke him.
That happened when the dream of working with Wright on the Unitarian Meeting House collided with a harsh fiscal reality: The building wasn’t finished — no roof! — and the money to build it was gone.
Wright was angry and vented to the young contractor.
“Marshall borrowed, mortgaged and cashed in his life insurance policy to raise the several thousand dollars needed to put on a copper roof,” notes the 2003 Erdman biography, “Uncommon Sense,” which I co-authored with Alice D’Alessio. Still, it wasn’t enough. “Marshall, fighting back tears, promised to raise more funds somehow.”
In the end, Erdman found a banker willing to extend a loan. Wright himself contributed, giving lectures that helped raise funds. They made it to the finish line, and with time the Unitarian Meeting House received its due. The American Institute of Architects named it one of Wright’s 17 most important creations. In 1973, it was included in the National Register of Historic Places.
A few years after their work on the Unitarian Meeting House, Erdman and Wright collaborated again, this time on a prefabricated house designed by Wright and built by Erdman.
How did it happen? In the version of the story Erdman usually shared, Wright looked at a prefab home designed by the builder, shook his head and said, “Marshall, I think you’ll really go broke this time.” Erdman replied, “Mr. Wright, you could save me by designing one.”
Erdman built the first Wright-designed prefab on Anchorage Avenue in Madison. It made the cover of House & Home magazine in December 1956. Wright had delivered. The Erdman name was becoming widely known.
Andrzejewski, a Missouri native, wasn’t aware of Marshall Erdman — nor was she especially interested in Wright — when she started teaching full time at UW–Madison in 2002, specializing in American art and architectural history.
But the famed architect’s strong local ties — Monona Terrace had recently been completed — piqued her interest. As did, eventually, Wright’s connection to Erdman and the post-World War II building boom, including prefabrication.
Andrzejewski first met Dan Erdman in 2010.
“I was working with a student who was interested in Wright,” Andrzejewski says, “and I had become interested in [Marshall Erdman’s] doctors’ parks. The student and I wrote a cold-call email to Dan and he was gracious enough to allow us into the archives.”
They stayed in touch. When Andrzejewski was chair of the Art History Department, Dan Erdman was invited to sit on its board of visitors, where he remains. (This past November, Dan and his wife, Natalie Erdman, were given the outstanding philanthropist award by the Madison chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.)
Over time, Andrzejewski became a preeminent scholar on Marshall Erdman. In 2022, she gave a UW–Madison University Roundtable lecture titled “Marshall Erdman’s Contributions to Postwar Architecture.” She’s published a few pieces on Marshall Erdman, including a 2021 article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, and she’s finishing a book on changes to the building industry related to prefabrication, marketing and financing, in which Marshall Erdman factors significantly.
She has also, of course, become an authority on Frank Lloyd Wright.
“Anna’s a Wright scholar,” Dan Erdman says, explaining his thinking in endowing the Frank Lloyd Wright Professorship. “I thought it would be good to memorialize Wright’s name in the department. He’s one of Wisconsin’s most famous native sons. He’s left his footprint all over Madison and Wisconsin with his buildings.”
Seventy-seven years ago, Wright offered to help make a young Madison builder famous. As Dan Erdman noted, the professorship closes a circle that opened that day.
“I just felt there couldn’t be a more appropriate way to recognize and promote Wright in perpetuity,” Erdman says. “Anna and her successors will ensure there will always be an emphasis on Wright and modern American architecture in the Art History Department.”
Doug Moe is a Madison writer and a former editor of Madison Magazine. Find more by Moe in his web-exclusive blog at madisonmagazine.com/dougmoe.