9 June 2005
Bruce Jackson
Santiago Calatrava's extension for the Milwaukee Art Museum: 10 photographs
Industrial cities on the Great Lakes have one of two relationships with their waterfronts: they cherish them or they mutilate them.
Buffalo, New York, at the eastern end of Lake Erie, mutilated and isolated its waterfront: a branch of the New York Thruway cuts most of the city off from access to the shore; Frederick Law Olmsted's Front park with its adjacent Fort Porter at the mouth of the Niagara River have been destroyed by the truck-processing plaza around the Peace Bridge connecting New York to Ontario; and the prime piece of still-undeveloped waterfront land, the strip between the Buffalo river and Lake Erie locally known as the Outer Harbor, has been in failed development for decades and is currently being touted by the county executive as the site of a gambling casino—a joint which will, if it comes to exist, be like all other gambling casinos: a building with no windows to the outside world whatsoever. There are a few county-operated beaches near Buffalo, but they're all closed because they're no money to keep them open. The only city development connected with the waterfront in recent years has been a huge effort to get a sporting goods store located downtown; some $63 million in public funds have been poured into that project. For Buffalonians, the lake front, unless they're rich enough to live in one of the very few and very pricey lakefront apartments with adjoining docks, is something to be looked at from a distance.
Not so in Milwaukee, where the city and county have invested heavily in making the lakefront accessible and useful. A few years ago there was a plan to run a freeway adjacent to it, but the plan was killed before it wrecked the waterfront. Now there are walking and jogging paths along the entire lakefront, as well as beaches, parks and small boat harbors. Instead of fleeing the city's downtown and lakefront area evenings and weekends, people around Milwaukee pour into it. The most recent addition is a spectacular expansion to the city's art museum designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
"The Milwaukee Art Museum was housed in a 1957 structure designed by Eero Saarinen as a War Memorial overlooking Lake Michigan. The architect David Kahler added a large slab structure to the Museum in 1975. In 1994, the Trustees of the Milwaukee Art Museum considered a total of seventy-seven architects for a 'new grant entrance, a point of orientation for visitors, and a redefinition of the museum's identity through the creation of a strong image.' Santiago Calatrava won the competition with his proposal for a 27-meter-high glass and steel reception hall shaded by a moveable sunscreen (now baptized the 'Burke Brise Soleil'). Included in the new spaces are 7,500 square meters of new space, of which some 1,500 square meters are set aside for temporary exhibitions. Although Calatrava generally denies specific biomorphic inspiration in his work, the Quadracci Pavillion has a decidedly bird-like quality to it, especially when the 'wings' of the Brise Soleil are open. Calatrava is also responsible for the Reiman Bridge, a suspended pedestrian link between downtown and the lakefront. The noted landscape architect Dan Kiley designed public gardens for the complex." Philip Jodidio, Santiago Calatrava, Köln: Taschen, p. 102
Click here for more on Caltrava and the MAM project.
Copyright 2005 by Buffalo Report, Inc.