Designer of the Year

Black's designs find a wide audience

David W. Black Principal with Flad & Associates Inc., Madison

It’s the lack of a signature design element that makes David W. Black a talented architect.

At least that’s how Michael P. Eberle sees it. Eberle, a past president of the American Institute of Architects Wisconsin and Black’s colleague at Flad & Associates Inc. in Madison for 14 years, said Black’s work doesn’t include any bold gestures.

“I think that’s one of the exciting things about his work,” Eberle said. “It’s very much context-sensitive design.”

Eberle said Black’s ability to design buildings that fit with their surroundings is evidenced in work under way at the University of Indiana. At that project, Black, Flad’s principal in charge of academic buildings, designed school facilities to blend with limestone structures at the university, which is near a quarry.

“You’d think they’ve been there for 100 years, and not necessarily a brand new, modern science building,” he said.

Black’s designs might blend in, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get noticed. He designed such Madison buildings as the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, the Total Administrative Services Corp. facilities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s biochemistry and chemistry buildings and instructional greenhouses, all of which earned AIA awards.

He also designed UW-Madison’s Walnut Street research greenhouses, which added 36,150 square feet of greenhouses to the UW campus and modernized the 9,400-square-foot head greenhouse.

It’s Black’s knack for design excellence, whether it’s a building that stands out or a structure that blends in, that led Wisconsin Builder to name him its Designer of the Year.

And Black isn’t done working on the UW-Madison campus. He is now designing the largest UW-Madison project to date — the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, which will cover two city blocks between Johnson Street and University Avenue.

“It’s an extremely large project,” Eberle said. “I think the multiple phases of it are going to be a challenge.”

Black created a series of conceptual sketches to help UW-Madison announce the 750,000-square-foot project to the public, Eberle said. The project will create interior space that connects the buildings in the two blocks west of Charter Street in the heart of the UW-Madison campus.

The entire site will be gutted with two blocks of buildings torn down in two phases, and then the site will be reconstructed with buildings ringing the block and connected in the center with common space.

Madison work aside, Black has found his designs featured throughout the country. He has designed buildings at Purdue University, North Carolina State University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Northern Iowa and the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“He’s a very talented designer,” Eberle said “He’s got a really impressive vision to his designs.”

Talent and vision can make a great architect. But, Eberle said, it’s Black’s demeanor that has helped him become a successful designer.

“He’s a great guy to work with,” he said. “He really kind of rallies the team around his work.”