Are you being stalked by Euroboxes? Are new, über-urban buildings – midrise apartments, mostly – staring at you from all over the city?
You’re not alone. The style – featuring straight lines and funky facades that alternate brick, metal and wood, often punctuated with color on the paneling or windows – broke big nationally in the 2010s and is going strong today. You know it, even if you don’t know it: The North End complex on Water Street, the new buildings on upper Kinnickinnic Avenue, and many riverfront spots.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Yet even now an agreed-upon name for the style is lacking. McUrbanism, developer modern, five-over-ones, stumpies and fast-casual architecture are among contenders. None of those satisfy.
We suggest Eurobox, as the facades lend a continental feel, like a kinder, gentler Bauhaus with a Scandinavian Lego vibe. A search on Eurobox to see if any untoward meaning occupies the term found no such encumbrance.
These boxy buildings are in part dictated by building codes requiring two staircases in most apartments, which often lead to designs containing hallways with apartments on both sides. Some are pushing to tweak codes to allow single stairs. “That allows the exterior form to change dramatically,” meaning more variety in building shapes, says Mo Zell, interim dean at the UW-Milwaukee School of Architecture & Urban Planning.
Outside the U.S. and Canada, less restrictive egress codes give architects more leeway on building shape, says Kyle Reynolds, UWM’s acting head of the school and co-owner of local firm Ware architecture. Stateside, what the architect “has left to play with is the exterior envelope,” says Reynolds. Enter some visual signatures of the Eurobox: corrugated metal and other visually interesting materials, bold colors, cool fenestration (windows).
Bay View has been the site of a slew of recent projects, and local architect Jim Piwoni of American Design cites Eurobox as “a way to do buildings that have that finer grain and fit into a more historic setting. More detail, color, trying to add the kind of visual interest that’s already there in the community. I think it’s a good approach. It’s not easy to balance these things,” says Piwoni, author of architectural review board design guidelines for the East Side and Third Ward.
Piwoni points to Mandel Group’s seminal six-building North End as an early project that “pushed the idea of surfaces, different materials and getting richness in.”
As aesthetic trends do, “in some cases, they get dumbed down,” says Piwoni. What can result are cookie-cutter projects, the target of cookie-cutter critics who go on about sameness. “America, the Bland,” The New York Times headlined a January 2023 story on the Eurobox style.
But is the Eurobox monotonous or is it just of an era? Milwaukee developers have built more than 22,000 new housing units in the past 20 years. And looking at the buildings, walking and driving this town today, can we not say that our developers and architects have done right by us? The metro is looking the best it has in decades. Build on.
