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Thursday, March 28, 2024
Bill Yudchitz and his son Dan designed and built the award-winning Experimental Dwelling for a Greener Environment.

Bill Yudchitz and his son Dan designed and built the award-winning Experimental Dwelling for a Greener Environment.

Father and son architects present their award-winning work

An award-winning pair of father-son architects spoke about their work with tiny houses at Monona Terrace Thursday as a part of the Wright Design Series.

Bill Yudchitz, who is based in Stevens Point with Revelations Architects, and his son Dan, who works at HGA in St. Paul, focused on several of their projects, including the EDGE project. EDGE stands for Experimental Dwelling for a Greener Environment.

Their designs are a part of the tiny house movement, a “social movement where people are choosing to downsize the space they live in,” according to the Tiny Life website.

As a part of the movement, EDGE focuses on living on the essentials. The EDGE house has been featured internationally, most recently in the Ukraine according to Bill.

“This [photo of EDGE] has gone all around the world,” he said. “Most recently in the Ukraine. And when I [read the] interpretation they said ‘Can you imagine Americans, shopaholics, building a building like this?'”

EDGE garnered national attention when it won an American Institute of Architects award. The Yudchitzs received phone calls from around the country asking about pricing, according to a USA Today article.

The tiny house is located in Bayfield, Wis., within access of Lake Superior. It is 12 by 24 feet, totaling 320 square feet, not including the two second-level sleeping lofts. The bed, couch and dining table are all located in the middle of the house, made from the same transformable blocks.

“In the end, this petite home asks a monumental question: What do we truly need to be happy? More than that, it suggests that it may be a lot less than we imagine,” Mary Louise Schumacher wrote about EDGE in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article.

The Wright Design Series, which hosted the talk, holds several architectural talks annually in honor of Monona Terrace designer Frank Lloyd Wright.

Retired architect graduate Robert Lockhart, who met Wright, voted for the Monona Terrace referendum in 1992 and worked in Madison designing houses for 33 years, has attended every Wright Design Series talk. He said he was impressed by Thursday’s event.

“This was the best one I have seen in a long time, because small houses were a part of my philosophy. I hate the big mansions in the suburbs today,” Lockhart said. “The most creative things I did were tiny houses.”


The next Wright Design Series talk is March 10 at Monona Terrace.

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