File:First Unitarian Society of Madison Meeting House, University Bay Drive, Shorewood Hills, WI - 52788248733.jpg

English: Built in 1949-1951, this Modern building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Marshall Erdman to house the First Unitarian Society of Madison, utilizing a strong emphasis on the geometry of triangles in its design. The First Unitarian Society of Madison was founded in 1879, and two of its founding members were William Cary Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones, the parents of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was comprised primarily of those who followed Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle. Frank Lloyd Wright was a member of the church as well. The Unitarians completed their first building in Madison in 1885, which was located downtown, and was the home of the local Unitarian congregation until they sold the building in 1951 and moved to Shorewood Hills, a suburb of Madison located west of the University of Wisconsin - Madison campus. The budget for the church was exceeded by a factor of 3, owing to unforeseen complications during the construction process, and led to members of the church taking on some of the labor to build it. After its completion, the church was widely celebrated as a highly innovative church design, and influenced the design of many Modernist churches in the United States during the subsequent two decades.

The building is a long, mostly low structure underneath a copper and wood roof that follows the topography of the site, with it being more open with larger windows facing towards the adjacent University Bay Drive to the north, and less open towards the parking area to the south. The roof is hipped with low eaves, the lowest of which is about 5 feet above the sidewalk, right at the building’s original main entrance. The exterior is clad in limestone, with both vertical punched opening windows and long horizontal bands of ribbon windows on the wings flanking the “upper meeting house,” which terminate at the entrance at the southeast corner of the building and a fellowship hall in a pointed section at the northwest corner of the building. The most notable feature of the building is the “upper meeting house,” a tall space with a tall triangular pointed roof that slopes to a low eave at the south face of the building, and a facade on the north side of the building that tapers to a narrow point reminiscent of the prow of a ship, which is wrapped by a planter at the base and a glass curtain walls with angled mullions above, and resembles hands folded in prayer. The roof of the space is supported by hinged arch trusses that are supported by being counterbalanced at the eaves, forming a 64-foot span with no interior supports. The interior of the pointed section of the building is home to an organ and a simple limestone altar, with the light from the prow window in the front of the space being diffused by several light shelves. The ceiling features multiple soffits in the rear that have similar triangular shapes to the rest of the building, a glass storefront with a pointed top that contains two doors to a terrace outside, and a stone wall that penetrates up through the roof, appearing much like a chimney.

The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2004. The building complex has been expanded multiple times as the congregation has grown into one of the largest Unitarian organizations in the United States, necessitating additions to be built to the southwest of the original classroom wing in 1965 and 1990, designed by Taliesin Associated Architects and mimicking the footprint, exterior cladding, window placement, and layout of the original building, but with low-slope roofs instead of hipped roofs. In 2008, the church received a massive contemporary addition to the rear to house an additional worship space and community spaces, designed by Kubala Washatko Architects, and meant to both preserve the historic landscape around the original building and embody similar design principles. The building is maintained under the stewardship of the non-profit Friends of the Meeting House, Inc., which has existed since the 1970s to address the building’s various preservation and maintenance needs. The church today remains in use as an active worship space for the original congregation, which also allows various community groups to utilize its facilities.