It might seem easy to create a museum for one of the most well-known brands in the world. But design is never easy.
“You are always a little scared,” says Willie G. Davidson, senior vice president and god of the Harley-Davidson brand, who’s designed its motorcycles for 40 years. “When I stare at a white sheet of watercolor paper, I’m scared.”
And that”s for a new bike, not a museum. “We prototype everything at Harley, but you can’t prototype a building,” he adds.
The first idea was to rehab a building in Schlitz Park. Architect James Biber of Pentagram in New York made the short list for the project, but lost. He got mad and bought a BMW motorcycle. Harley came back to him after its first architect thought he was smarter than his client. Biber got back on his Harley and eight years later finished the museum. That’s a long time to work on a building.
The museum, however, had to be something completely new. Lots of Harley lovers would have been happy with a theme park. But that would have embarrassed Davidson. As he once put it, “Design is a process of discovery.”
Yet it also had to be pure Harley. Again, from Davidson: “When you get down to it, at the end of a day’s work at Harley-Davidson, motorcycles are as pure as they’ve always been: a motor, a seat and handlebars.”
Davidson and Biber started out with the idea of the “factory” that grew in Milwaukee back when Harley began and this was the machine shop for the world. There were more than 700 meetings and a hundred designs. They started with foam, then moved to 3-D mockups. BiberÕs team proposed a myriad of schemes that were then edited down and elaborated upon. It was an intuitive process. They played a lot.
“Jim and I had a great rapport,” says Davidson. “We are visual people and we exist on that.”
When is the last time a museum was created by a collaboration between two designers? Though the process ultimately included lots of people, the vision of these two was crucial. “When Willie G. was happy, everyone in the room was happy,” Biber says.
The Harley-Davidson Museum is so Harley, it makes you wonder why there aren’t more buildings that fit so well in their skin.
Let’s start with the site – 20 acres of land on the eastern tip of the Menomonee River Valley at Canal and Sixth streets. It’s surrounded by water on three sides. There are trains and boats, two soaring bridges on either side and the High Rise Bridge to the west. The museum has landed right where it belongs, on a sacred urban industrial landscape.
In cities, great architecture usually brings out the best in other buildings. Miraculously, the post office, a long and brutal modernist hunk of rust-stained concrete, is the perfect counterpoint to the robust elegance of the museum.
The three-building Harley complex is nestled toward the back of the site along the water. Canal Street has been extended to a walkway along the river lined with tall grasses. All of the landscaping by Tom Oslund is so refined and graceful that it’s a shrine to minimalism. A new road crosses Canal Street and connects to two roads that also are places to park. They feel more like boulevards. It’s an elegant solution to the parking problem. The streets define two large rectangles of green.
The whole complex is built both outside-in and inside-out. Its fulcrum is an intersection, one of the most beautiful in the city. There are no permanent signs or other junk to detract from the simple power of two streets crossing. ThatÕs brilliant. On any given day, the streets naturally fill up with Harley motorcycles (the complex can accommodate more than 15,000 people), which become part of the museum experience.
Harley started in a shed in 1903. The museum buildings are really just sheds framed by an exoskeleton of galvanized steel. The materials are exquisite and the craftsmanship is flawless. The steel has a quiet patterning, a visual language that makes perfect sense.
Speaking of language, there’s a lot of it. “Harley-Davidson” and “1903” fill whole sides of buildings. Just like the first building in 1903, except this time the letters are expertly set in gray against black ceramic brick.
The museum is so dark, thick, heavy and rigid, you’d think it would sink. But the angularity of the frame soars.
Harley has its own colors – black, gray and orange – the palette of its bikes and apparel. You never see a Harley rider wearing a magenta T-shirt. There’s a lot of orange in the museum design, more than the company was comfortable with in the beginning, Biber says. But it sparks the buildings out of the shadows.
There are no gestures or grand entrances. The buildings are so basic, they appear to be facts. This is a very confident place that does away with all museum pretensions.
How did Harley’s almost gothic, skull-and-crossbones biker culture produce such an unadorned museum? The reality is that Harleys are medieval and modern, rough and refined, heavy-standing but with a lightness of being. They are gritty and polished, restrained and expressive. Harleys have the best curves and most voluptuous gas tanks of any bike, yet the culture is hyper-masculine. Cops and robbers both ride Harleys.
Inside the museum, you see a family resemblance between the very first motorized bicycle in 1903 and today’s water-cooled Sportster. Harley respects the past and uncannily finds a way to constantly bring the best lines forward. The sweep of the pipes suggests a line Matisse might have drawn and then refined over the years. “We spend every waking moment working on that,” Willie G. notes. “They are rolling sculptures.”
At one point, Biber had a brainstorm – cut the gas tanks in half and make them bathroom sinks. Harley rejected that, for obvious reasons. Well, obvious for Harley. The company articulated a machine with wheels into a work of art. Therefore, a gas tank cannot be a sink.
I should probably mention I am not a fan of Harley. I rode my bicycle to the museum and couldn’t find one bike rack. I am slightly allergic to the culture. I once asked the photographer Danny Lyon (in 1968, he did a famous book, The Bikeriders, on the Chicago and Milwaukee outlaw motorcycle gangs) how he felt about the irony of all the tricked-out, baby-boomer suburbanites being an outlaw for a day on their Harley. “It’s not my fault,” he said.
The museum taught me that it’s not Harley’s fault, either. I learned to appreciate the motorcycles through
the museum.
“You can’t tell if the owners are rich,” Biber says. “They are not showy or flashy. They are inherently modest, substantial, upright and loyal.”
From that loyalty to its own history and values, Harley created a museum that resonates with the idea that design matters.
