Category:Quisling Clinic (Madison, Wisconsin)

The Quislings of Madison were prominent physicians of Norwegian descent during the mid-20th century. They opened a clinic at this location in 1935 in a Queen Anne-style house built circa 1885. Its interior was modified to house offices and its front porch enclosed. In 1945-46, the clinic was greatly expanded and reconfigured by the Danish-American architect Lawrence Monberg as a Streamline Moderne or Art Moderne-style building evoking the “ocean liner” ships and “stream liner” trains of the era. With the Edgewater Hotel and Quisling Towers, it is one of three notable Art Moderne-style buildings designed by Monberg for the Quislings. 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.

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. 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 addition has been heavily modified with window openings enlarged and metal railings added to create balconies for the apartment units that now occupy the building. The interior of the building has been fully modernized and renovated, leaving very few historic character-defining features, but has allowed for full preservation of the exterior of the building.

The building is a contributing structure in the Mansion Hill Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. 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, and enlarged window openings on the rear and side facades to add small balconies outside many of the apartment units. The building today remains in use as an apartment building known as Quisling Terrace.