Features

Photos and story by Tom Bamberger

Today, 90 percent of people in metro Milwaukee drive to work. Consider how much parking this requires for just one structure, the 42-story US Bank building. Because it’s centrally located, some employees may walk or bus to work. Yet even if only 60 percent drive, the company would need about 12 football fields of surface parking – or a 54-floor parking tower with the same footprint as the bank – to provide parking for all employees.

The average midsized American city’s downtown must accommodate a lotof parking. Milwaukee city officials estimate there are some 43,674 off-street parking spaces Downtown. Checking the Google Earth image of Milwaukee, I’d estimate that as much as one-third of the area is devoted to parking complexes and lots.

Even cities with light rail or other forms of new mass transit still devote huge amounts of space to parking downtown. In short, if you want a beautiful city center, you have to think about what the parking complexes look like, because there are so many.

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The earliest ones in Milwaukee were real buildings. The parking complex at Mason and Water streets (1929) by Martin Tullgren & Sons has the decorum, grace and stature of any office building of its time. That was a first draft. We didn’t know any better, or hadn’t the time to imagine worse.

By the 1950s, vertical parking evolved into the familiar open-air deck structures of today. Some were better than others.

The First Wisconsin Bank & Trust’s garage (1973), recently torn down by US Bank, was made of the same luminous travertine marble as the base of its companion building. A linear pattern of elegantly framed openings flowed out of the building and squared off the slope of the site. The building was so transparent and airy that it cooled the sidewalk in the summer.

M&I Bank’s parking structure (1969) on North Water Street actually intensifies the bank’s dense vertical fins, which amplifies the overall design. The building and parking structure resonate at different harmonic frequencies.

Inspired by modernity, these were conspicuously ambitious buildings: They had something to prove, and naturally produced proud parking structures. So did the PAC (1969; now the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts). The MGIC Plaza (1972) chose the other noble alternative of the time and put its garage underground.

That was a high point. Then parking, like so many things in America, became its own business. Parking structures detached themselves from their buildings and became cheap afterthoughts, anonymous shelving systems with an all-too-familiar monofunctional form. Torture usually starts by throwing someone in a blank cell. Or just walk between the two parking structures on both sides of North Milwaukee Street just south of Michigan Street, where you’re pressed between two sheets of featureless architecture. Their straight horizontal lines mimic each other oppressively, managing to compress the space between them (the street and sidewalks) into what feels like a steel-paneled concrete cage.

Ironically, parking structures got uglier even as we built more of them. The advent of suburban malls, built with endless surface parking, made Downtown seem inconvenient for cars. The Grand Avenue Mall (1982) was an answer to only one question: Where am I going to park Downtown?

It featured a Walmart-sized parking structure: five levels covering two city blocks, with a corridor and skywalks linking the buildings on West Wisconsin Avenue. Worse than its uninspired design was its impact on Downtown: Five blocks of what was the center of retail commerce in Milwaukee became an indoor experience. West Wisconsin Avenue and West Michigan Street died. It wiped out the Plankinton and Antlers hotels (and the best pool hall anywhere), which made Michigan a street to somewhere else. On Wisconsin Avenue, the Riverside movie theater closed in 1982 and was going to be turned into another parking structure until a preservationist campaign saved it. The Centre theater down the street changed its name to The Grand (in honor of the mall) and then closed in 1995.

Private companies, meanwhile, became less concerned about how their parking structures looked. Consider the two sides of Northwestern Mutual’s parking structure (1989): It sports a handsome Frank Lloyd Wright-flavored concrete facade (filled with tulips!) on East Mason Street across from NM’s headquarters. It could be mistaken for a gracious modernist museum because of how its well-proportioned, layered setbacks and manicured line of trees create space. It’s a place.

But the structure’s East Wells Street side is a four-story wall made up of thick ribbons of concrete. It’s a penitentiary-like enclosure that consumes space. It has no streetfront because it was built like the back side of a building. In essence, NM turned its back to the world on Wells Street, plundering a pretty classy neighborhood. There are four elegant, two-story urban dwellings across the street. Next door is a venerable Congregational Church (1889), designed by Edward Townsend Mix (who also did the Mitchell Building and the Grain Exchange) and converted into the Scottish Rite Masonic Center (1936) by Herbert Tullgren.

Beauty often has an inverse relationship to speed. The Wells Street side is a drive-by structure that cars pass in less than three seconds. The front of the building on Mason Street was designed for NM’s workers, who saw the building when they walked from their offices across a small urban green space to their cars.

In the 1990s, you had to be part of a radical “New Urbanist” cult to see that cars were devouring their destinations. “Cities are for people,” then-Mayor John Norquist proclaimed. “A city is where people work, raise their families, spend their money and walk in the evening. It is not a traffic corridor.”

To that end, Milwaukee and many other cities furiously drew up New Urbanist “pedestrian-friendly” design guidelines and zoning codes based on two rules. First, fill in the blanks with more contextual architectural detail – which would have made NM’s garage on Wells dress more appropriately for its neighborhood. Second was a push for ground-level retail, the magic bullet that really brought streets back to life.

The Historic Third Ward garage (212 N. Milwaukee St.), built in the mid-1990s, has a wonderful Japanese restaurant on East Chicago Street, makes an interesting corner for itself, and has a large, gracious canopy on Milwaukee Street. The brick facade fits into the neighborhood and is topped off with four robust elevator/stairway towers with articulated cornices. It blends into the neighborhood and doesn’t look like a parking structure. It was a triumph for Norquist that became the model for the future.

But blending and embellishing isn’t always the answer. The new parking structure on North Downer Avenue occupies a striking triangular corner with five levels of parking. Its dynamic shape, location and towering height could have made it a signature building that frames the village. This site demanded clarity.

But nearby residents opposed the garage. There were countless meetings and arguments. Compromises were made to the building’s design, and the formula that worked in the Third Ward floundered. There is retail and detail, some of it very nice. The sharp prow of glass and white cast concrete is finished to a medium gloss, as are the columns that function like bookends to the building. The rest of the building is an ordinary, buff-colored, cast-concrete structure that by itself is probably just a tad more elegant than its pure function would dictate. The bays are articulated by simple, white railings with nicely proportioned screens and inset white poles that lighten the grid of concrete.

So far so good, but that added up to a “parking structure,” which many neighbors opposed. To mitigate this, slabs of idiotic concrete cutouts were haphazardly strewn across the building. If this had been done a bit better, it would merely be pretentious instead of preposterous. (This sort of slapped-on decorative “touch” – using tons of concrete – is what fell off the O’Donnell parking structure and crushed a boy).

The end result is nearly impossible to describe. There are two buildings here, a pro- and anti-parking structure (roughly representing the opposing ends of the conversation) that cancel each other out, producing the architectural equivalent of white noise.

The collective minds of the intellectual center of Milwaukee got the worst building Scott Kindness ever made. “It was built by committee. We ended up making something that was least

Real architecture has to be invented. Imagine something made with contemporary materials and technology we haven’t seen before.

That’s what Cathedral Place at 555 E. Wells St. (2004) did. The office building sweeps around the corner at North Jackson Street. The rectilinearity of the adjoining parking structure is a good counterpoint to its curvy partner. Grids of dashes – vents for the parking structure – add percussive tension to its glassy panels that are handsomely framed by the concrete facade.

It has a personality that stands out from its host and has continuous retail on the street. A well-tailored parking structure.

“It started with Norquist,” according to Joel Lee, the developer of the building. “He made demands. Then we hired the architect to do the whole project. And you can’t get an architect to do a bad parking structure next to their own building.”

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On Good Friday in 2008, a chunk of the roof of US Bank’s parking structure fell on a car (no one was hurt). After considering repairing their nearly 40-year-old garage, company officials decided to build a new structure.

Joseph Ullrich, the vice president in charge of the project, is a hometown boy who went to Custer High School and UW-Madison, then to work for First Wisconsin in the early 1990s. Bill Bertha, US Bank’s Wisconsin market president, grew up in Whitefish Bay and went to Marquette University. Milwaukee had been good to both of them, and if at all possible, they probably would have liked to return the favor.

But these pragmatic Milwaukee guys never considered an out-of-town architect or out-of-the-box idea. They were already working with veteran Milwaukee firm Kahler Slater, which had drawn up a rendering for a new skyscraper on the site. The old garage was three stories occupying a city block; the new one, company officials decided, could rise six floors and use half the space (the south end on East Clybourn Street), leaving room to build a new office tower. Kahler Slater’s first design for the parking structure was a lowball proposition just to start the dialogue with city officials.

US Bank started at the top. Ullrich and his lawyers from Foley & Lardner went to Rocky Marcoux, the commissioner of the Department of City Development. “Ultimately their argument was,” according to Ald. Robert Bauman, who initially opposed the project, “we are building a utilitarian building with no retail and a large surface parking lot because the freeway left us with no choice.” The idea being that the freeway was too ugly to build something beautiful just a half-block away.

The bank needed a zoning variance to build the structure without retail. Ullrich is a member of the BID 21 board, a business improvement district that just did a $400,000 study proving what everyone knows: We don’t need more empty retail in the wrong place when there’s so much empty retail in the right place – Downtown.

Instead, to “activate the street,” canopied window boxes with student work from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design were added to the parking structure’s ground floor, which could be converted to retail in the future. Then Bob Greenstreet and his team at DCD tweaked the structure, adding texture and verticality to the original design, “so it would read more like a building,” as Greenstreet puts it. The city also persuaded the bank to create a green space on the lot’s north side (though this may be nixed after the extra high-rise tower is built). All these small changes enhanced the six-story garage, taking it beyond the architect’s original conception.

I asked Aaron Ebent, the designer from Kahler Slater, if there was anything in the original design he felt passionate enough to fight for. Not really. As he explained it, this was “a process,” a negotiation with the city. And with the old parking garage falling apart, the bank had to move quickly.

The finished garage was a paragon of architectural efficiency. The base was poured in summer and fall of 2009, so its 986 pieces of precast concrete could be snapped together in winter and opened in time for Summerfest. According to Ebent and Greenstreet, the patterning of the building relates to its monumental host. But I can’t discern any gesture in that direction. Its sandy-white and sandy-gray concrete is a dull outfit compared to the sparkling travertine marble, bright-white painted aluminum and glass of US Bank’s tower.

The only way the two buildings resonate with each other is that both have grids. That’s a cruel irony considering Skidmore’s US Bank building is a descendant of Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece, the Seagram Building in New York. Both minimalist structures prove that a building can be nothing but a grid – but one with very particular proportions, one that makes a grid really matter. The parking garage has none of the US Bank building’s rigor or rhythm.

The ground floor is overmedicated with virtue. The window boxes, which are divided into six sections, are too quaint for the building and too complicated for art projects. Speaking of which, there’s a reason why MIAD (or any other art school I know of) doesn’t plaster its own buildings with student art. It’s the same reason the bank didn’t have students design its parking structure and why no one voluntarily reads student writing. This is hardly a design solution for a prime piece of Downtown real estate.

Finally, the elevator tower on Van Buren and Clybourn is inset to let the corner breath. But it’s impossible to make rewarding negative space on a building with no positive ambition to fill space. The elements don’t fit the building because there’s no building to fit into.

No one involved questioned the premise – or lack of it – behind the building. Ullrich, Greenstreet and Ebent all claim you couldn’t build anything really nice on that site because the freeway is a dead zone. With that sort of thinking, who would have thought to build a beautiful $75 million structure, the Harley-Davidson Museum, on a pile of bird feces in the Menomonee River Valley? Or a mix of high-end rowhouses on a stark abandoned railroad, as the Beer Line did? Milwaukee used to be a dead zone before we questioned the excuses for not reclaiming urban life.

Besides, East Clybourn is far from dead. All they had to do was extend it by one block to the richest architectural place in Wisconsin, which naturally grew on the best site in Milwaukee. The US Bank building itself is one of the engineering marvels of Fazlur Khan, who engineered the John Hancock and Sears (now Willis) towers in Chicago. Paul Graham, the lead designer, was a longtime Mies friend. The bank overlooks Eero Saarinen’s War Memorial and Calatrava’s addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, the only two buildings in town that are part of the history of world architecture. Jim Shields’ Discovery World, the most significant public architecture by a local architect in recent memory, is just down the block. Eschweiler & Eschweiler’s classic art-deco Gas Company building and the venerable headquarters of Northwestern Mutual by Marshall and Fox are across the street.

The city’s newly announced Downtown Plan doesn’t see US Bank’s parking structure as a dead zone but as something that will stand at the southwest corner of an “internationally recognized park and cultural campus” surrounded by four new high-rise towers!

“We ended up with something that respected the intent of the code,” Bauman laments of the new parking structure. “It’s a hell of lot more than what they originally wanted to build.” But you can have more water and still die of thirst. This should end the notion that you can follow the code, then dab “character” onto something that is not a real building.

Any successful design – from the Sistine Chapel to Levi jeans – arises from a core conviction that something vital is at stake. If this didn’t come from the bank’s executives or their architect, then someone else – the mayor, Marcoux, Greenstreet, the CEO’s best friend – had to say, “Wait a minute, Milwaukee is a place that makes things better. Let’s make it better together.”

What was missing, in short, was the kind of vision that made the soaring US Bank building possible in the first place.