After a 30 year investigation, Frank Lloyd Wright scholar Mary Jane Hamilton announced Tuesday there is one more Wright house in Madison.

The house, which belongs to Linda McQuillen, was built as part of Wright’s System-Built project which involved using prefabricated parts put together on-site. Hamilton verified its origins by identifying components specific to the project after coincidence and thorough investigation led her to the house located on West Lawn Avenue.

Hamilton began her investigation on the house in 1988 while working on an exhibit documenting Wright designs around Madison for what is now the Chazen Museum of Art. During the exhibit, people called in and told Hamilton about houses they believed were built by Wright, and one of them included McQuillen’s future house.

“It was very disconcerting because I thought the bands and windows looked right, but not that brick thing in the front,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton said she was unable to find records indicating Wright built the house, so the investigation was tabled.

Eventually she discovered an ad for an agency of System-Built houses in 1917 from around the same time the suspected house had been built.

“At that time, people began finding these System-Built houses all around the country … people began to realize there had been a lot more built than people had understood,” Hamilton said.

The ad had a name which she remembered seeing on a building permit she had discovered years earlier in her previous search for evidence linking the house to Wright.

She said the coincidence was still not enough to prove the house’s origin, so she set about trying to find the drawings Wright had made for the houses.

She and a fellow Wright scholar toured the house and discovered numerous telltale signs of Wright having built the house, such as a particular type of stucco and other aspects which could not have been added after construction.

She said the System-Built houses are an interesting departure from Wright’s popular image since they were built primarily for the working class. The houses were discontinued due to material restrictions imposed once the U.S. entered World War I.

“It was an attempt to provide a reasonable, well-designed, moderate-cost housing for the larger group,” Hamilton said.

She said there are likely many System-Built houses around the country which have not yet been discovered.