106 North Prospect Avenue
Madison, WI, USA

Harold C. Bradley House

Harold C. Bradley House, also known as Mrs. Josephine Crane Bradley Residence, is a Prairie School home designed by Louis H. Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie. It is located in the University Heights Historic District of Madison, Wisconsin, United States. A National Historic Landmark, it is one of just a few residential designs by Sullivan, and one of only two Sullivan designs in Wisconsin.


History

When Harold C. Bradley, a biochemistry professor at the UW and a founder of the Hoofers Club, married Josephine Crane, her grandfather Richard T. Crane built this house for them as a present. Money was not a concern, and Crane hired the prestigious Chicago firm of Louis Sullivan to design a large home in the then-popular Prairie style. The house is two stories with a T-shaped footprint, with distinctive cantilevered sections that hold sleeping porches (A sleeping porch was a way to deal with hot summer nights before there was air conditioning.) At the back is a porte-cochère. The architects also designed furniture, rugs, draperies and fixtures inside. Though Sullivan was the principal of the firm, George Elmslie may have designed much of the house and furnishings.

George Grant Elmslie joined the architectural partnership of Adler & Sullivan in 1888. Following the dismissal of Frank Lloyd Wright from the firm, and especially once the partnership dissolved, Elmslie's role under Louis Sullivan increased. Elmslie was entrusted with the design of the main facade of the Gage Building and of all of the details of the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building. The Bradley House was designed at a time when Sullivan's architectural practice was starting to fail. Once considered the foremost designer of skyscrapers, Sullivan now struggled to secure commissions and often sparred with clients. The Bradley House was "designed by Elmslie with only occasional suggestions from Sullivan." All drawings of the building were sketched by Elmslie and many of the architectural details are consistent with the style he would develop later in his career with William Gray Purcell. The Bradley House was the last building Elmslie designed while with Sullivan; he left to partner with Purcell in 1909.


An elaborate design was initially planned for the Bradley House with a cruciform design. It featured a living room and force to the rear, a library and kitchen on the two wings, and a porte-cochère on the main entrance. Bays projected out of the house, lined with casement windows. However, the Bradleys rejected this draft as too large. Elmslie reenvisioned the house on a smaller scale and included a pair of cantilevered sleeping porches on the second floor. Sullivan was probably responsible for the idea of the sleeping porches, though Elmslie was responsible for integrating them into the final design. Elmslie was not satisfied with the result when the house was completed.

The Bradleys lived in the house only a few years. Even after reducing the size, they still found it too big and expensive to maintain. They hired George Elmslie again, now partnered with William Purcell, to design a smaller Prairie style home with sleeping porches about two miles to the northwest at 2914 Oxford Road in Shorewood Hills. They moved there around 1915. Since then, the first house has been occupied and maintained by the Sigma Phi Society, University of Wisconsin–Madison chapter.

The Harold C. Bradley House was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. The blueprints of the Bradley House are held in the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections at the University of Illinois Library in Urbana–Champaign.

National Register of Historic Places - Harold C. Bradley House

Statement of Significance:

Between the end of his skyscraper period in 1905 and his death in 1924, Louis H. Sullivan built only two residences. "Both were fairly elaborate buildings in which cost was a secondary consideration, and they are of particular interest for the comparisons which they afford with Frank Lloyd Wright's residences of the same years." These are the Henry Babson residence in Riverside, Illinois, built in 1907, and the Harold C. Bradley house in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1909. Both commissions came at a time when Sullivan's practice and his business and personal affairs were at a low ebb. This is especially true of the Bradley commission, the only one Sullivan had to live on in 1909. But in relating this, Connely remarks, "Only the wellspring of his inventiveness never failed him. He drew a long low house with gigantic overhanging verandas held up by. Cantilever supports which retailed the "Biblical phrase "everlasting arms."2 Adversity, then', lay in the results of financial depression, personal misfortune and lack of commissions; there was no corresponding poverty in the architect's ability to produce another masterful work.

The Bradley house is a Prairie house in design, and it makes excellent use of the cantilever, of which Sullivans’s “former protege, Frank Lloyd Wright, was to become the undisputed master. As indicated above, the Bradley house shows the influence of pupil on master. "The parallelism with Wright's projecting gables of this period is evident, but there is a superior vigor and force in the weight and salience of these features as compared with Wright's."3 The work is Sullivan's, capable of standing by itself as one of significance and distinction. Actually, "It seems just to attribute the design of this house to at least an equal cooperation between Sullivan and Elmslie,"^ which, however true, still takes nothing away from Sullivan. After leaving Sullivan later in 1909, Elmslie went on to design houses in "the Prairie idiom" and the Bradley house may well have served as one of his prototypes (Gebhard, D., "William Purcell and George Elmslie and the Early Progressive Movement in American Architecture from 1900 to 1920," U. of Minn., Ph.D. dissertation, 1957).

Aside from being the last Sullivan residential commission, as well as being pne of only two documented Sullivan buildings in Wisconsin, the Bradley house is a major work of architecture done at a critical time in the master' career, and one of Madison's major architectural landmarks.