BLUEPRINT Building: Milwaukee City Hall Completed: 1895 Builder: Paul Reisen Architect: Henry C. Koch and Co., Milwaukee Biggest Fan: Charles Engberg, Engberg Anderson Design Partnership, Milwaukee

City Hall earns Engberg's
lifelong appreciation

As a child, Charles Engberg hopped off a downtown Milwaukee streetcar and wondered at the height and spectacle of City Hall.

Today, as a founding partner of Engberg Anderson Design Partnership, he is busy on a project to restore the building's exterior to its 1930s status.

"It always looks as if it is chugging down Water Street to the south with the tower kind of as the head of the ship of state," Engberg said. "They took the idea of creating a tower symbol, but they put a flag on top of it. I mean that's a very heroic, civic gesture."

Engberg's Milwaukee-based company is studying Milwaukee City Hall's exterior to devise a renovation plan for the building. His work on the building focuses on concerns such as restoring the exterior masonry, cracking after about 30 years of Wisconsin weather since its last restoration, but, at the same time, Engberg can't help but remember first walking into the building as a child.

"It had a special meaning to me even though I didn't know it at the time," he said. "I was just amazed because it goes up and up and up, and there's a skylight at the top and all of these balconies. I had never seen anything like that before."

Photos by Sean Ryan

The building, designed by Henry Koch after he won a city-sponsored design competition, was unique from the ground up because it was built on a wedge-shaped plot of land, Engberg said. The triangular building towered at its time of construction, with turn-of-the-century technology to support most of the structure with masonry but with structural steel for the tower.

"It sort of dominated the landscape the way a cathedral in France, like Chartres, dominated that landscape," Engberg said. "It represents to me the stability of this city.

It's had the same use for well over 100 years."

He said the building is packed to the corners with details that make it hard to encapsulate with a single viewing. And Engberg said the building's mileage as a house of government proves it is more than just a splendid form without function.

"There's nothing that is architecturally silent or quiet," he said. "It's hard for your eye to take it in and just say, 'Okay, I get it. I dismiss it.' It begs you to come back again and again."

- Sean Ryan