Category:Quisling Clinic (Madison, Wisconsin)

Located at 2 West Gorham Street in Madison, Wisconsin, and built in 1945–46, the Quisling Clinic was designed by the Danish-American architect Lawrence Monberg for Dr. Abraham A. Quisling, a prominent Madison physician of Norwegian descent (see the Property Record online). Along with the nearby Quisling Towers and Edgewater Hotel, it was the second of Quisling's three notable Art Moderne or Streamline Moderne buildings on Wisconsin Avenue evoking the “stream liner” trains and “ocean liner” ships of the era.

One of the more distinctive buildings on the downtown Madison isthmus, it is a contributing structure in the Mansion Hill Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. It remains in use today as a rental apartment building known since 2006 as the Quisling Terrace Apartments.

The building features buff brick cladding, long ribbons of windows with orange brick panels between them, stone fins that accentuate the building’s horizontality, with the second-floor windows on the front facade being narrower than those on the first floor. The building’s corners are rounded, softening the appearance of the structure, which is echoed in the “porthole” circular window next to the entrance door, decorative oversized aluminum handles at the original front entrance, which sits below a curved concrete canopy with circular openings, a curved corner, and aluminum lettering spelling “Quisling Terrace” atop the canopy, with a quarter-circle stoop and steps below. The front of the building includes light wells for the basement and brick planters, which echo the appearance of the rest of the building. The main massing of the original building is two stories in height with a smaller and deeply setback third floor with curved corners and few windows, with the entire building capped with a low parapet and low-slope roof.

The building has been expanded several times with additions that echo the original materials and forms of the building but lack much of the ornamentation and detailing of the original section of the building. An addition built in 1964 to the southeast of the building is taller than the original structure, standing five stories tall, and matching the buff brick cladding and curved corners of the original building on the front, but with simpler details, with less complex canopies, less variety of trim, and a boxier overall form. The interior of the building has been fully modernized and renovated,

In 1998, after the Quisling Clinic had closed, the building was threatened by demolition for a new building but was saved by a local developer, who converted the clinic in a historic preservation adaptive reuse project into affordable housing for people making below area median income. The renovation fully reconfigured and altered the interior, which had been renovated multiple times since the 1940s, leaving very few historic character-defining features, but has allowed for full preservation of the exterior of the building. Window openings on the rear and side facades were enlarged to add small balconies outside many of the apartment units.