In Public

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…

Alterra’s coffee shop on Prospect was a transformative architectural event in 1997. Its owners weren’t the first to make an old building sing in Milwaukee. But they were the first to make it sing their song. They imagined a new place in the ruins of another. If they weren’t so passionate about the approach, it could feel like a formula. Believe in the character of the building, the virtue of handmade things. Don’t overpolish. Be a little funky, bring out the grain and stains. Add – and leave – whatever resonates. Don’t be afraid to be clunky, like Fred Flintstone.…

Let there be light. And God separated day from night, only to realize he made a mistake. Night was too dark. So on the third day, he created a “lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.” We have been adding more light to the night ever since. God made the calm and steady sun and moon. And we’ve created dizzy places like Times Square, Las Vegas and, courtesy of LED lighting, the newly lit Mitchell Park Domes. We can play God with LEDs because they are cheap (incredibly energy-efficient) and maintenance-free (they last more than 10…

It wasn’t so long ago that people who built housing in the city of Milwaukee were called “urban pioneers.” It was a utopian proposition. Not anymore. Now that people are making money on city real estate, Milwaukee is attracting all kinds of developers, even amateur architects. For example, River Renaissance, a new building in the Third Ward on North Water and East Erie streets. It raised the ire of neighbors and former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel architectural critic Whitney Gould. The usually mild-mannered developer Barry Mandel, one of the urban pioneers, posted Gould’s critique on his Web site in order to…

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…

“The voices rose again, and the music swept on again, like fire, or flood, or judgment. Then the church seemed to swell with the Power it held, and, like a planet rocking in space, the temple rocked with the Power of God.” Spirituality is remarkably spacious in James Baldwin’s autobiographical 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. But Baldwin wasn’t writing about a soaring pastoral church with a steeple pointing to the sky. He was describing a storefront church where his stepfather was a minister, a cramped building, perhaps, but one that loomed large in his memory and in…

Whole Foods didn’t so much come to Milwaukee. It landed. It might as well have arrived from another planet. As a huge grocery store with more than 140 places to sit – couches included – and two flat screen TVs, it’s a place where you can order a draft beer or glass of wine and just linger. There’s also an espresso bar, gelato station, pizza place, and a kitchen where you can order a meal for any time of day. Or you can just buy groceries. Whole Foods is a microcosm of the changing American city. It took decades to…

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…

Cities have a tough time. Moviemakers create apocalyptic visions of urban desperation, chaos and decay. The nostalgically inclined see cities as places where grandfather had his first store and mom and dad went to the movies Downtown. While Milwaukee’s suburbs grew over the past 50 years, few residential developers dared to build housing Downtown. Nothing new seemed to happen in the city center other than well-intentioned though hapless redevelopment projects like Grand Avenue mall. There was no reason for anyone to want to live in the city. So Milwaukee made laws forcing its employees to stay here. The virtues of…

Great art smacks you in the head. That’s what happened when composer John Cage came upon artist Marcel Duchamp. Then Cage’s 4:33 of silence opened John Ashbery to idea that anything could be in a poem. Picasso and Matisse were staggered by Cézanne’s retrospective in 1906. Chuck Berry stunned Keith Richards and awed The Beatles. Woody Guthrie shocked Bobby Zimmerman into becoming Bob Dylan. Art is an act of desperation. “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” Nietzsche wrote. Great art is more real than we are. That’s more or less the view that artist Terese…