The Urban Ecology Center is a building you really want to like. The East Side
facility, built in 2004 in Riverside Park, is green all over, from its
environmentally sensitive rooftop garden to its rainwater retention pond.
Rainwater is used in the toilets, which have a petite flush option that uses
only half the tank. The building’s 44.4 kilowatt photovoltaic array of solar
power spares the atmosphere 53 tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Countertops are made from ground-up wheat shafts and nontoxic glue. Carpets
are recycled rubber. The chalkboards are used, recycled from a church. The wood
in the executive director’s office was reclaimed from area high schools, the
Pfister & Vogel tannery, and, I kid you not, ex-Milwaukee Buck Glenn
Robinson’s mahogany stereo system. The chairs were discarded by the Fox Bay
Cinema Grill.
The “highlight” of the library, as the Center’s Web site dubs it, is a table
that has been recycled twice. That is, part of a bowling alley was made into a
table for someone, who then donated it to the center. The building is “an
accessible role model for other institutions seeking to incorporate sustainable
principles into their construction projects,” the Web site declares. For that
matter, the building looks recycled, too – like a jumble of styles scrounged
from countless sources.
It’s maddening. The center’s planners did everything right. They vetted every
conceivable aspect of the building for its environmental impact. They engaged
the community, and many individuals and organizations made their best efforts to
help. And they picked a highly qualified local architectural firm that seemed
particularly suited for the job.
Kubala Washatko Architects had just done the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center in
Bayside. Its urban buildings, such as the Public Market and Alterra’s complex on
Humboldt, are a forthright exposition of materials and form that come together
to create the character of a place. The firm’s architecture is less glossy than
most, and as wholesome as seven-grain bread.
And the company practices collaborative architecture. Its architects listen
to the client, which in this case was a community of very concerned citizens who
had an awful lot to say.
The end result is like a classroom turned inside out. The center reads like a
children’s book with a long list of lessons for all of us. The value of this
building could be expressed by pedagogy per square foot.
The architects think they did some of their best work, and they use the
building as a showcase for future clients. I admire the Urban Ecology Center.
The organization is fantastic. The building is heart-warming: Everywhere you
look is an earnest recycling story. To top it off, there’s a cute observation
tower.
But once you clear your head and just look at the building, it poses a
question: Does everythinghave to be recycled? Its architecture is
post-apocalyptic, as if it sprung up after everything had fallen down, was
scavenged and then sewn back together again. It’s composted rather than
composed.
The exterior of the building is a swatch book of styles. The materials
include split-face concrete block, corrugated sheet metal, horizontal wood
clapboard, cast-in-place concrete, cedar siding, painted steel in several
colors, laminated wood beams, pink brick salvaged from a warehouse in Chicago,
and African Benghazi wood from the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Not to mention three
different kinds of railings used on the back of the building. In other words, an
architectural run-on sentence with too many modifiers and adjectives.
Then there’s the frame for the teepee on the roof of the garage, which looks
like it migrated from the top of the Potawatomi Casino. A huge adjustable
climbing wall, so kids can use it, is sort of tacked on to the observation
tower. There was a gracious courtyard off the street until moveable fencing
caged the retention pond for insurance purposes (it’s often removed during the
day).
The interior is more familiar and comfy. The log railings and log furniture
were handmade by La Lune Collection, which makes the most eco-friendly furniture
money can buy (though it was donated in this case). They start by harvesting
invasive species (poplar and willow trees) that are strangling our venerable
elms, pines and oaks. The only way to be more eco-friendly, I guess, would be to
get rid of all the furniture and just sit on a recycled floor.
Like every other contributor to this building, La Lune makes for a great
story: When the company moved to Riverwest, it started a youth center to take on
the gang problem in the neighborhood. They make a good product that they sell to
Disney. No wonder a committee chose them.
But why is an urban place that teaches modern science so rural and primitive?
The coat rack is a bouquet of sticks, the chalkboard is another log construction
held together by rope.
The Urban Ecology Center is rustic, like the visitor centers built in our
national parks in the early 20th century. Park lodges were conceived as an
accessory to the wilderness. Of course, these lodges were also about conquering
and domesticating nature. The log furniture was a trophy, like the moose heads
on the wall, the bigger the better.
From there, it didn’t take much for American Rustic to become codified into
tourist decor. It’s the same idea behind Great Wolf Resorts, a chain of water
parks that claims to be “sustainable fun” on its Wisconsin Dells Web site. The
Urban Ecology Center and Great Wolf Resorts are both countryfied kitsch.
This retro-styling puts us on a one-way street back to a simpler time. Before
the discovery of DNA or atomic power. Before anyone listened to Al Gore or put
“urban” and “ecology” in the same sentence. The Urban Ecology Center should
embody a postmodern rather than a premodern city, reflecting a world where
millions of people work in glass towers, communicate with hand-held computers,
and ride titanium bicycles – and where it’s not the least bit natural to live in
a big hollowed-out tree.
A building is not just what it does; it has to be something too. In all the
excitement, no one ever asked the question: What is an urban ecology center
supposed to be other than the sum of its virtuous parts? It had to be really
urban to make sense of the practice of ecology in a city. It could have been
light and transparent and flowed into its surroundings. Perched on a river
bluff, it might have at least tried to interact with the slope of its site.
Sorry, an observation tower doesn’t do it. Because these issues weren’t
addressed, the building defaulted to something like a recycling theme park.
If nature is beautiful, we should do our part and make something beautiful
too. A truly sustainable building should have lasting value, should be something
we want to look at for the next 100 years. The Urban Ecology Center is expanding
to the Menomonee River Valley. Next time, how about some native architecture?
How about a sublime Milwaukee building to go along with all the native plants?
The new Froedtert & The Medical College of Wisconsin Clinical Cancer
Center, designed by Chicago-area
architects OWP/P, is adamantly rational and
synthetic. Yet it looks dreamy next to its little pond.
It’s a complicated structure, but simply resolved, like an elegant math
theorem. From the street, the building flows across an enormous space. Its
gentle arc is visually ambiguous – it looks simultaneously curved, bent,
straight, flat, layered and rounded. It stretches across space like a field, yet
seems to float above its smartly detailed concrete parking structure, a pedestal
that launches it into space. I can think of no comparable horizontal expanse in
Milwaukee that soars as this one does.
That’s one view. Then you turn the corner, and the front of the building,
where you walk in, is a taut angular space that slices into the back of the arc.
That they are two sides of the same building seems like an optical illusion.
Their masses are incredibly mismatched, and the grammar shifts. The building
becomes vertical. But it works and concentrates the energy that sweeps across
the face of the building.
All of this formal wizardry would be for naught if the vast glass curtain
wall of the building was not so exquisitely drawn. An irregular pattern of
transparency, translucency and opacity shimmers against the finely tuned grid of
rectangles. This fine-grained window wall is so delicate and nuanced that you
don’t fully comprehend it – the surface of the building vibrates in your brain.
“The client had a passion for great architecture,” says Jim Mladucky of
OWP/P. Sue Derus, the executive director of the center, says she wanted to
express “hope.” How?
“By making a strong timeless building, with elegant lines and soaring
spaces,” Derus answers. “We needed architecture that expressed our spiritual,
emotional and passionate commitment. We needed a brilliant building to inspire
our patients, doctors and staff.”Such a lucid building inspires confidence that
we can take nature into our own hands and cure cancer at the same time. To
sustain life, we have to also
create it.
