Former Mayor John Norquist’s New Urbanist architecture died in Milwaukee of natural causes. City officials, real estate consumers and developers have confirmed the death.
It seemed to come so suddenly. Wasn’t it just yesterday Norquist was advocating that new buildings look like City Hall? Modern architecture was “like sex without love,” the New Urbanists declared. Norquist celebrated neo-traditional buildings, like the Midwest Airlines Convention Center, which was supposed to be the antidote to its Downtown neighbor, that brash blue modern building. The Henry S. Reuss Federal Plaza was all wrong, like an overbearing bully with the wrong color socks.
Ten years later, you have to wonder what the fuss was about. The blue building looks OK and its plaza is the neighborhood’s liveliest public space. The neo-traditional convention center, whose “blended” style was supposed to be so friendly to the street, turned out to be a phony glad-handing hulk.
We live with buildings long enough for them to reveal themselves. The convention center did that so quickly – and with such drab finality – that not one neo-traditional building of consequence has been built in the city since. Architects moved on to other styles. The idea that a building should superficially reflect the older architecture around it became superficial. There is simply no market for historicist frippery. It moved out to the suburbs.
Today, we are making history rather than reflecting it. For the first time in more than 50 years, there is a consumer culture for architecture in Milwaukee. When that happens, theories aren’t so important. Once the game starts, it doesn’t matter what Charles Barkley says. Today, buildings are doing most of the talking.
Though New Urbanist architecture died, its planning ideas – which Norquist also championed – are thriving and reinvigorating Milwaukee. Meanwhile, Modernism is back, but the results are not so predictable. Consider, for instance, the two modern towers that have sprung up on Kilbourn and Prospect. It’s the biggest visual event in a generation.
University Club Tower and Kilbourn Tower stand 37 and 33 floors tall, respectively, and just 24 feet apart. At first, this seemed a little loony. Why cram the two biggest new buildings in Milwaukee into the same space? A developer tried to buy both parcels for just one building, but Peter Park, the former city planner, held his ground. The city owned the corner parcel and held a competition. There were going to be two buildings rather than one.
The proximity of the towers could be the least suburban thing ever done in the history of Milwaukee. One needn’t be a visionary today to see the upside. As any New Urbanist or developer will tell you, density begets liveliness, convenience
and safety.
Kilbourn Tower, designed by Grace La and James Dallman, came first. It’s a straightforward Modernist building – a bunch of rectangles that form lines and congeal into a whole. Modernism’s rationality and simplicity are underrated virtues. Like rock ’n’ roll, it’s a progression of simple chords. Small changes make a big difference. When done right, Modernism rocks.
The building has a beautiful glass edge that draws a dynamic vertical line. Its internal and external spaces are gracefully balanced and interwoven. The entrance sweeps around the corner under a cantilevered canopy that reaches over the entire sidewalk. Kilbourn Tower has one of the most generous and transparently luminous pedestrian passages in Milwaukee.
The composition works even though it seems a little stiff. Kilbourn Tower rises asymmetrically on different planes. It looks like three thin buildings stacked on each other. This lightens the mass, making the building more buoyant. Best of all, the parking is neatly tucked away under Kilbourn Avenue.
Kilbourn Tower’s partner in the skyline is modern as well. The University Club Tower is made of a handsome combination of white stone and concrete flowing around a lead-coated copper cylindrical service core that looks like a silo. The windows are small and densely patterned. There are some nice details, but its posture is fashioned to do just two things: look at the lake and make its partner disappear.
University Club Tower developer Barry Mandel says he wanted “to make the best building in Milwaukee for the next hundred years.” He spent more money per square foot than any residential tower in the history of Milwaukee. Paid a premium for a venerable architectural firm. And Peter Ellis, the architect from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, matched Mandel’s ambition by making a signature building that he features as one of the 10 “key projects” on the first page of his Web site.
University Club Tower cost more than $100 million to build, with 53 units valued from $1.1 million to more than $8 million. That’s nearly twice as much Kilbourn Tower, or any comparable new building in Milwaukee. Each condo owner will pay, on average, $45,000 in property taxes for the privilege of living in Milwaukee. These new city dwellers are a bargain. They don’t make messes, buy lots of stuff and pay lots of help. There’s only one child living in the building, who probably doesn’t go to a public school.
This kind of gentrification makes everyone happy. We get $2.4 million of additional annual tax revenue and they live in urban splendor unimaginable only a few years ago. “Understand the intangibles. Only then can the creative journey begin,” is how the Mandel Group promotes the building. “University Club Tower will be built on the best, urban waterfront site available in the country.”
Other than the amenities, including a cobbler and yoga instructor, living here is all about the view. University Club Tower “transforms the very notion of a room with a view,” its Web site promises. Like a compass pointing north, the building is aligned to the center of the Milwaukee Art Museum addition, a view I suspect the MAM’s designer, Santiago Calatrava, never intended. Ellis tells potential buyers that, for some mystical reason having to with the angle of the light, they could have the best view of the lake in the history of Milwaukee. Though he doesn’t say it, the meaning is clear: Finally, the city of Milwaukee has a rich-person retention program.
Steve Marcus and Mandel own the top-floor condos. Others residents include the chief executives or partners of the major manufacturing companies, banks, law firms and money funds, along with Brewers owner Mark Attanasio and some old Milwaukee families with inherited wealth. Maybe it’s a good idea to have all the moneyed elite in one place so we can keep an eye on them.
University Club Tower created our first new building that says “only the very wealthy live here.” That’s where the problems begin.
First, it snubs its more modest mate. The side of the building that faces Kilbourn Tower disappoints like the back of movie set. It’s a two-bit void, the window pattern of the rest of the building re-created, but in concrete. This saved about a million dollars, or less than half the cost of an average unit. Such a bogus facade is an embarrassment. University Club Tower is like a guy with a three-sided tuxedo stuck to a wall at a fancy party.
“But you don’t see it.”
Mandel is right about that. It’s invisible from Lincoln Memorial Drive, and easy to miss when you walk by. But we know many things we don’t always see. The residents of the building, for example, don’t have to see their fictitious facade because they know it’s there. It’s architectural white noise, a depressing gap in our three-dimensional mental image of the building.
The least the architect could have done is put the elevators and other mechanicals on this side of the building. Instead, Ellis created a service silo and put it on the side of the building that faces west, toward the city. In essence, this created a building with two backs. Why? Because Mandel’s entire marketing plan was to make sure every resident gets the same lake view.
The result is lots of postcard views, but little connection to the rest of the city. The journey promised by Mandel is more religious than creative, with only one way to view the world. Imagine if all the tall buildings in Milwaukee were built to face our art mecca. That would be priceless, like a bunch of cats hypnotized by a blank television screen.
To top off its worshipful aura, the building actually has a crown. Its rhapsodic public relations copy notes, “University Club Tower … culminates in a dramatic crown of vertical glass fins in homage to the soaring wings of the museum.”
It’s certainly an audacious idea, but the narrative needs some work; a crown never quite materializes. From the front, it looks like an amorphous cylinder. According to Mandel, it’s the rack of wireless antennas, the filigree at the front of the cylinder, that somehow creates a crown and that homage to the museum’s wings. Instead, it creates a scratchy-looking non sequitur that muddles the gleam of light on the cylinder. Almost anything simpler would be better. As Frank Lloyd Wright put it, “Less is only more where more is no good.”
I don’t know how a few tiny “vertical glass fins” are an homage to anything. I do know there ought to be a law against doing any homages to a biomorphic building on the lake that flaps its wings. Our Calatrava is already a hyperbolic homage to nature. Homages to homages start looking like mallardized table lamps in a Door County gift shop. The University Club Tower would have been better off with a gigantic jeweled tulip. It could change colors according to the stock market. How can you put a crown on this building and not be the least bit whimsical?
A final problem: The columns in front of the entrance are more like beefy guards than doormen. The space between the columns and door is pinched and dark. The glass outcroppings, which echo (sort of) the crown’s invisible fins, make no sense here, and don’t mitigate the uninviting approach to the street. University Club Tower’s entrance is more penal than private.
It’s weird to have so many destabilizing, obtuse and confusing elements within such a single structure. To paraphrase Lincoln, a building with two backs cannot stand.
Yet, miraculously, none of this matters.
The two buildings together define the longest vertical negative space filled with air and light in Milwaukee. This luminous rectangle is a wonder and also binds the buildings. University Club and Kilbourn towers are a delightful odd couple that grew up together and got over their differences. Each compliments and compensates for the other. They are good company, and from several angles, become one. Forgive and forget the entrance to the University Club Tower; it’s the back door. Look at the Kilbourn Tower’s front as the doorway to both buildings.
No one would ever think of putting these disparate things together, and that’s the charm of it. Cities manage spontaneity. Eccentric things happen when buildings are close enough to party and no one is in charge. A little chaos saves us from ourselves, and some buildings from themselves. Together, these two buildings are better than either developer could have done on their own.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to be said for a building with architectural clarity. On the corner of Pittsburgh Avenue and South First Street is a quiet, dapper building that is something of a revelation.
Vetter Denk started out making homes distinguished by their countertops and staircases, which were made of the primary colors of the materials being used – concrete, metal and wood. Its work grows out of the late 19th century designer-craftsmen movement that valued the intrinsic beauty of unadorned humble materials. Vetter Denk makes honesty into an architectural virtue. Wood is wood. Metal is just metal. In the right hands, nothing is more beautiful than the thing itself.
This building grew out of the values embedded in things like an admirable, heavy, handmade wood table that “they don’t make anymore.” Nothing fancy. These architects are not afraid of the forms they learned from playing with blocks. Their new corporate headquarters is made with conviction. It’s by far their best building in Milwaukee.
The defining form floats between the vertical neutral-gray service core that abuts the building to the north and a pedestal of horizontal glass and cool white steel. The rest of the building is, conversely, a palette of earth tones. Without the service core, the building is almost a cube made up of a horizontal rectangle of windows and an implied vertical rectangle that flows up through the building from the base.
Everything in the building matters. The final coat of concrete is tinted slightly green to look wet. They used gray mortar with gray bricks. Each panel has just enough handwork to be both the same and different than the others. Windows are exquisitely proportioned and paced and on different planes, only 2 inches apart. Surfaces are subliminally layered and modulated. The exterior wood-synthetic perfectly matches the tongue-and-groove mahogany boards of the soffit. The building sits on a gleaming stainless steel line. Even the glass sparkles more than most buildings.
The architects set out to make a straightforward building that would reveal itself, like the dialogue in an Elmore Leonard story. No airs. Nothing detracts from the elegant fusion of design, labor and materials. Its texture and tempo gives the rationality of the building a beat. This solid swings.
This is a version of the Modernist box the New Urbanists thought was “not the source of lasting joy.” But when you think about it, a simple box should have as much potential as anything else you can imagine.
New Urbanists got the spacing right. Densely packed buildings help each other. But they were wrong about the objects. Nothing has to look like City Hall – it has to be made like City Hall.
Urban architecture is not so much about styles as we once thought. City Planner Bob Greenstreet tells the triumphal story of how he rejected the first design by Greg Uhen of Eppstein Uhen Architects to rehab the old Downtown train station. Whitney Gould, a proponent of Modernism, also slammed the neo-traditional design in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Next slide: a new glossy rendering by Uhen, a design that was immediately accepted. A “spectacular gateway” to Milwaukee, Greenstreet declared. “New Glory,” John Gurda’s adulatory Journal Sentinelessay was headlined. “A jewel of modernist reinvention,” according to Gould. The paper’s editorial page joined in, calling it “a gem … a harbinger of more good things to come, both aesthetically and economically.”
A jewel? A gem?
Well, that depends how and when you look at it. There is the one “money shot” used to illustrate the building on the architect’s Web site and in Gould’s review, looking at the front of the building from the east at night. Glowing glass with the spires of the new Sixth Street bridge in the background makes a pretty picture. The newspaper and city officially agree on the correct architectural style for Milwaukee. That makes for a happy ending. But the story is incomplete.
Viewed in the light of day and in its entirety, Uhen’s structure is a hollow shell. The Amtrak station used to be a building. Now it is a mural consisting of a huge window and some graphics. When you get past the glow of the glass, the composition is hokey. The front facade is devoid of nuance or proportion. You’ve seen it before on some car dealer showroom or a shopping mall, a generic Modernist crisscrossing pattern on a grid. There is no rhyme or reason to the array of frosted and clear glass. The relationship between its transparency and the revealed interior space is aimless.
Then the lines are mindlessly extended and etched into the side of the building. And that’s it, the whole design, except for a few pasted logos.
This building is the “treatment” of the moment. It’s what a penny-wise and pound-foolish architectural HMO tells the city planner to do this year to fix an ailing building. Five or 10 years from now it will have aged like a leisure suit. It has no character because it has no desire. You can see this building but you can’t feel it.
It should have been a tip-off that the same firm whipped up these designs for two antithetical faux buildings, like a wedding band covering Frank Sinatra and Metallica. In art, one style can be as good or bad as another.
A transportation center is a pivotal civic structure that requires a little more inspiration. Everyone argues the new station replaced something worse. The same claim was made for the new convention center and the new Bayshore “village.” Being less bad is far from being good. The big-city solution to a horrible train station is a great one, unless, of course, you don’t have an appetite for architecture to begin with.
The rejection of a New Urbanist design for the train station is yet another example of how Norquistian neo-traditionalism has died in Milwaukee. Today, the conventional choice for the station is Modern. And so it goes. Styles change every few years. One style or another can’t be the answer. The buildings Norquist loves are 100 years old.
But a living city is full of surprises. The two towers started out fighting. Now they are happily married. Norquist and Peter Park provided a garden. No one put the University Club and Kilbourn towers together. They grew right next to the Cudahy Towers. Enjoy – it’s our redwood forest.
Vetter Denk probably surprised themselves as well. If not, they would have made their best building a lot sooner. There are no formulas for anything we really value.
At its best, Modernism was never just a style. Great buildings can be written in any language. Making it real matters. It’s like Louis Armstrong said, “There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind.”
Tom Bamberger writes regularly about architecture for Milwaukee Magazine.
