History of the Wright Boathouse

At a very busy time in his architectural practice, Frank Lloyd Wright was approached by Cudworth Beye, the student commordore of the University of Wisconcin crew team, for a commission for a boathouse. The year was 1905, and the students were looking to have an auxiliary boathouse built so that they would have a second site they could row out of when Lake Mendota was to windy, choppy or frozen over.

Cudworth Beye, of Oak Park, Ill, whose family was friends with Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote to him in the fall of 1905 asking for the commission. Wright responded,

My dear Cudworth-
We are always ready when “Alma Mater” calls – We will design any thing for the W.U. from a chicken house to a cathedral, no matter how busy we may be.
Yours truly
Frank Lloyd Wright

In December of 1905, Wright sent Cudworth the sketches. The students then were responsible for coming up with the necessary funds to get the boathouse built. As the spring of 1906 approached it was apparent that the students would not be able to raise the money and Beye returned the sketches to Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Remarkably Abstract Boathouse
As you view the boathouse from the south side you see very clearly the strong elements of Wright’s Prairie Style. In 1905, Wright was at the height of his Prairie Style era. He was striving for a truly “American” style of architecture that broke free of the ornamentation of the Victorian style that was so prevalent at the turn of the century.

The boathouse is very much of Wright’s prairie style buildings yet far more abstract than anything that had preceded it. This was the first time he brought the hip roof all the way down and made the roof perfectly flat. The cantilevered portion of the roof is 10 ft long on both ends.

There is perfection and balance in the overall proportion and scale of the building. And we were very careful not to change anything from Wright’s design.

The designs for the Darwin Martin House, the Larkin Administration Building and the rowing boathouse all came off Wright’s drafting table within months of one another. The designs of both the Darwin Martin House and the Larkin Administration Building were fresh in Wright’s mind (they were still at the “punch-list” stages of construction) when he drew the design of the boathouse. One look at the North and South elevations of the boathouse will quickly reveal the similarity between the hierarchy of piers that Wright employed in those earlier works and that he used again in this boathouse; for its north and south elevations echo the Martin House and Larkin Building rhythms, with the largest piers on the outside rising upward but stop short of the cantilevers, and the narrower piers, located to the fore are nested closer to the center of the building, reach upward and rise all the way up to support the great cantilevers.

Frank Lloyd Wright Falls in Love with his Boathouse Design
It would have been easy for a project such as this, which was not supported by a “serious commission,” to have been filed away by the architect and largely ignored; but that was not the case. Quite the contrary, Wright selected the design of his rowing boathouse as one of a number of important designs that he had completed during the early years of his career for inclusion in his, now famous, Wasmuth portfolio that was published in Berlin in 1910 and 1911. All of the designs in this retrospective portfolio represented Wright’s “best works” as of that time.

Notably, this boathouse design was included, though it was the only project so included that had not actually been built by the time the portfolio was published in Europe. One can fairly infer from the fact of its inclusion in the Wasmuth portfolio that Wright was particularly fond of this design. Through the publication of the Wasmuth portfolio designs, Wright was able to share his design drawings (from the first two decades of his career) with European architects, who studied them, came to understand what Wright was doing in America and who were influenced accordingly.

Years later, in about 1929 and 1930, Wright redrew the drawings of the rowing boathouse, conceiving of it in concrete. At that time he also built a scale model of this boathouse, exhibited it first in America. Then, he packed-up that model (along with seven other scale models of his best works), and he sailed for Europe.

There, he lectured in several European countries speaking about several of his works that he viewed as root buildings of American modern architecture (and that these models represented); the purpose of this European lecture tour was to remind European architects (by now known as the “European Modernists”) of Wright’s signal influence on European architecture

Given that Wright had designed hundreds of works by the time of his European tour (which occurred nearly 40 years after he began practicing architecture), the fact that he included the design of his rowing boathouse, gives clear evidence of the importance of this project in Wright’s own mind.

Proportion, Scale, Balance and Symmetries
Like so many other Wrightian works, the boathouse design is a weaving together of many symmetries: the north and south elevations are identical; the east and west elevations are also identical; the first floor has two boat bays, each the reciprocal of the other. There are stairs at either end of the floors communicating between the first and second floors.

Two large identical balconies run the length of the second floor, one on the east side of the boathouse and one on the west side.

There are two locker rooms, one at either end of the second floor.Lastly, at the center of the second floor is a large gathering space, a “club room.”

The diamond-pane art glass windows represent exactly the window motif that Wright designed for the building on his first drawings of the boathouse in 1905. The size and proportion of each is exactly as Wright drew them. The trim throughout and the window frames are quarter-sawn red oak. Interestingly, this diamond pattern is identical to the diamond pattern Wright used on the art glass windows for his own home that he had built a few years earlier.

Tony Puttnam, one of Wright’s apprentices from 1953-57, was the lead architect on the project. We relied on Tony Puttnam to create the working drawings for construction and to interpret the interior features, such as trim, colors and fixtures. All these features are of the 1905 period and are similar to features found in other of his works at that time.

Some changes had to be made for modern building codes – for example we added a handicap lift, emergency lighting, a fire suppression system, and glass panels along the parapet.