Category:Quisling Towers Apartments (Madison, Wisconsin)

Located at 1 East Gilman Street in Madison, Wisconsin, and built in 1937, Quisling Towers Apartments was designed by the Danish-American architect Lawrence Monberg for Dr. Abraham Quisling, a prominent Madison physician of Norwegian descent in the mid-twentieth century (see the Property Record online). Along with the nearby Quisling Clinic and Edgewater Hotel, it was the first 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 most distinctive buildings on the downtown Madison isthmus, it remains in use today as a rental apartment building.

A fine example of Art Moderne architecture and the best preserved of the three buildings designed by Monberg in the Mansion Hill Historic District, Quisling Towers was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

This is a category about a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 84003648.

Notes: Quisling Towers Apartments originally housed 26 apartment units, and despite the updating of a few systems and features, it retains most of its historic, character-defining elements. It was built of fire resistant hollow clay tile, a common building material at the time, with plaster on the interior and buff brick cladding with terra cotta and Bedford limestone trim on the exterior obscuring the structural material. The building sits on a sloped site, being six stories in height in the rear, along a private drive off of Wisconsin Avenue, and five stories in the front, on East Gilman Street.

Quisling Towers Apartments features a buff brick exterior with corner bands of windows featuring horizontal fins that create strong visual horizontal emphasis at the building’s corners, with casement, one-over-one double-hung, and fixed windows being present on various parts of the building. The front entrance on East Gilman Street is flanked by low stone walls and features a suspended semi-circular aluminum canopy above, with semi-circular door handles and sidelights. The facade is broken by thin belt coursing at the top and bottom of the windows on most floors and features soldier brick courses between the second and third floors. At the base of the building and at the terraces are thick bands of trim with flutes aligned horizontally, further de-emphasizing the building’s vertical thrust. A stepped retaining wall at the basement light well along Wisconsin Avenue also features the same trim cap. On the fifth floor, the building has corner setbacks which are home to rooftop terraces, two-story “tower” sections with curved brick piers flanking curved brick balconies with large fixed storefronts and French doors at the balconies, and stacked bond and soldier brick framing the storefronts. The fifth floor is the smallest, consisting of the “tower” with the curved brick piers and balconies on the floor below, as well as a setback section to the northeast, with two large roof terraces on the rooftop of the fourth floor at the northeast end of the building. The rooftop terrace is enclosed by a modern wire safety railing and features curved corners, following the curved corners of the fourth floor below. The rear of the building features recessed balconies enclosed by low brick walls on the exterior, which have had their views of the State Capitol blocked by an adjacent building constructed several decades later.

The interior has plaster walls with a lobby featuring curved walls and a linoleum floor, recessed radiators, simple stone fireplace surrounds, curved staircases with metal handrails, Art Deco-style pendant and sconce light fixtures, and kitchens with the original cabinets, subway tile wall cladding, built-in cutting boards, and tile countertops.