The eyes have it

Up-and-coming architects look to share their vision

Now it’s getting interesting.

That’s the same thing people might have said 10 or 15 years ago when the last generation of architects started making a mark on construction. They had innovative ideas, fresh philosophies and a new twist for an old profession.

Well, it’s getting interesting again. There’s a new crop of architects poised to introduce itself to the industry.

By the standards of architecture, these designers are young. People don’t graduate from college with a bachelor’s or master’s and immediately set fire to the industry.

It takes time to find your way, hone your talent and spot your weaknesses. But, for some, there comes a time to put their names at the top of the business cards and test their styles.

Success and accolades won’t fall from the sky at the completion of the first job. But slowly, project by project, the new generation will earn notice both for its respect for architecture’s tradition and its willingness to push the boundaries.

And this is Wisconsin Builder’s way of saying, “We’ve noticed.” In the following pages, we feature four members (six counting partners) of architecture’s next generation.

Some might be more established than others, but they all have confidence in their designs and the courage to share their vision.

Cramped spaces give Destree creative freedom

"We've been fortunate enough to have clients who support the idea of mending the fabric of the city, of making things pedestrian- and shopper-friendly." Melissa Destree Photos by Ray Guansing

By Jennifer Pfaff

Some of the toughest design challenges exist in the most crowded spots.

Developed urban areas are filled with spaces in need of renovation and vacant lots looking for life. They call out for an architect who respects the atmosphere of a neighborhood, works in cramped spaces and injects new, dynamic layers into the community.

La Crosse-native Melissa Destree has found her life’s work doing just that. At 35 years old, the owner of Destree Design Architects in Madison, which she opened with her husband in 2000, is fashioning herself into an urban architect who takes a pragmatic approach to design and building.

“It is not the old vocabulary where the architect is perceived as the true head of the project,” she said. “We don’t do that. We bring our expertise to a team project.”

She likes to get general contractors involved in the planning process, and she designs with specific builders’ strengths and weaknesses in mind. It’s a creative process she said her clients appreciate because it often saves them money in the long run.

“I like to value-engineer as I go,” Destree said.

Her firm works on commercial and residential projects, but it brings to both the same general philosophies.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to have clients who support the idea of mending the fabric of the city, of making things pedestrian- and shopper-friendly,” she said.

That means bringing living spaces outside to create a transition between sidewalk and home. It means incorporating a lot of windows to give a more spacious, illuminated feel to the street. It means creating productive buildings on vacant urban lots and renovating office and commercial spaces so they remain in use.

Melissa Destree and her firm’s design of the seven-unit West Gateway Condominiums acts as a buffer between the back of a grocery store and the Middleton Hills neighborhood in Middleton. Rendering courtesy of Destree Design Architects

One of her recent condominium projects in Middleton brought together all of the concerns typical in an urban environment. A newly built grocery store had a back wall facing a residential neighborhood, and planners conceived of West Gateway Condominiums, a seven-unit town home development, to serve as a buffer between the store and the neighborhood.

“We only had 80 feet,” Destree said. “The challenge was: How do you build something attractive — with parking — that people will want to live in?”

Construction is wrapped up on the units, and they’re selling for about $250,000 each.

“All seven are completely different,” she said. “The compartment apartment is a thing of the past, and I think everyone knows that. This gives people the identity they are looking for.”

Each home is built with a front door facing the street. The proximity to the grocery store wiped out the possibility of backyard space, so each unit has a balcony or an interior courtyard.

With the urban environment as her palette of choice, Destree keeps one eye open for opportunities to build with sustainable products. She said she is sometimes accused of “being a little granola,” but she said that particular leaning is kept in check. Still, she enjoys using products like Lyptus, a wood harder than hickory that looks like mahogany and grows quickly.

Destree received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a guest lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a professional mentor with the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

La and Dallman build on their vision

"We're looking for projects that are challenging, that look at the needs of a growing city that needs to work on its identity." Grace La Photos by Ray Guansing

By Jennifer Pfaff

It doesn’t matter what project they’re working on.

For Grace La and James Dallman — the wife-husband team that drives La Dallman Architects Inc., Milwaukee — the architectural privilege is the same for bus shelters and suburban subdivisions as it is for a high-rise condominium in downtown Milwaukee. They are helping define the way people see themselves and the world.
Each project is an opportunity to manipulate light and shadow to create the most beautiful and soothing place in which to live, work or play. Each also is a chance to add to the greater whole, to connect the components of a community to each other.

“We found that we wouldn’t be interested in doing architecture for the sake of building our practice,” said La, 35. “We’re looking for projects that are challenging, that look at the needs of a growing city that needs to work on its identity.”

With a staff of six, La Dallman is uniquely positioned to lead the city and state in creating a visual identity, she said. The firm is small enough to give personal attention to clients but energetic enough to take on large-scale, long-term projects.

La and Dallman are always looking for new opportunities, and they’re flexible enough to work cooperatively with other local architects when needed. Their work ranges from designing new residential buildings to renovating public places and work spaces. Their designs fit both urban and rural areas.

“The visual landscape deserves attention everywhere,” said Dallman, adding that too much growth happens without connection to the greater world. “There should be natural landscape in the density and density in the landscape.”

La and Dallman, 42, met in graduate school at Harvard. They married and worked with large architecture firms in Boston before moving to Milwaukee in 1999.

The 650-foot Marsupial Bridge hangs beneath the Holton Street viaduct in Milwaukee. La Dallman Architects teamed up with Bloom Consultants Inc. in Milwaukee, Lunda Construction Co. in Black River Falls and a variety of civic agencies and organizations to make the pedestrian and bicycle bridge a reality. Photo courtesy of La Dallman Architects Inc.

La joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — she was tenured this spring — and she and Dallman opened a studio in downtown Milwaukee. The going was bumpy as the pair struggled to establish clients, relationships with vendors and other professional contacts in the area.

But they found the community welcoming and open to new design ideas. Best of all, they discovered numerous opportunities for small firms.

“As an emerging firm, it is fantastic to demonstrate what you can do through competitions,” La said.

La and Dallman competed against four other teams for the chance to design Kilbourn Tower, a 33-story residential structure in Milwaukee. The building exemplifies the architects’ design philosophies and goals.

“Our approach is always, ‘Let’s study the site,’” La said. “What is it about the site we can maximize or expose? What should be honed inside and outside?”

Kilbourn Tower was a perfect opportunity to expose stunning views of the city and lakefront. It also presented a chance to create a signature building that integrates a neighborhood rather than dividing it, Dallman said.

“We wanted to avoid building an extruded sausage or a stack of pancakes,” he said. “It was integral that we studied the heights and sizes of the buildings around the site, the available views from the site, the light in the afternoon, evening and morning.”

Rather than using a solid rectangular core, La Dallman fashioned a Z-shaped core and twisted different faces of the building around that. It gave the exterior a “crystalline massing” with texture and dimension, and it gave every unit an exquisite view.

“Light is always the most essential component for human dwelling, both natural and artificial,” Dallman said. “It informs everything we do, in a poetic sense.”

La earned a bachelor’s degree in visual and environmental studies and a master’s in architecture from Harvard University. Dallman earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture at the UW-Milwaukee and his master’s at Harvard.

Johnsen and Schmaling stretch design concepts

"We're trying to extract beauty from everything we touch." Sebastian Schmaling Photos by Ray Guansing

By Jennifer Pfaff

As the architects fidget with a small display of beer bottles neatly stacked within a steel frame, their eyes shine with an amber light they’re anxious for the world to see.

Brian Johnsen, 33, and Sebastian Schmaling, 35, are working on the development of Milwaukee’s Blatz building, and the display is just a small version of the 1,600-bottle, center-pivot doors they plan for the space.

Closed, the doors will separate the lobby from the lounge, maintaining a tantalizingly blurred glimpse to the other side and bathing the area in soft light. Open, the oversized doorways will blend the two areas nearly into one.

“We’re trying to extract beauty from everything we touch,” Schmaling said, describing the architects’ guiding goal.

Johnsen Schmaling Architects Inc.’s work frequently features a concept the duo calls extended surface, a blurring of boundaries, particularly those between interior and
exterior. Whether it’s residential or commercial work, Johnson Schmaling designs turn tradition on its head. The duo seeks new forms and new functions for design.

“There are so many things we want to experiment with,” Schmaling said.

The pair spent hours studying the trees surrounding a new housing site in Green Lake. The house they were designing, and the people living in it, would interact in that environment every day, every night. The outside world couldn’t be seen as separate from the world of the home.

Johnsen Schmaling Architects' design of the 2,700-square-foot House in the Woods in Port Washington subtly blurs the boundaries between inside and outside. Photo courtesy of Johnsen Schmaling Architects Inc.

Photos showed the vertical patterns, the negative and positive lighting, the textures of leaves and colors of bark. Models made in the second story of Johnsen Schmaling’s office, a former Schlitz tavern on Milwaukee’s East Side, explored how those themes could transfer to the architecture of the house.

“We ended up with a panel system based on the color and texture of the trees,” Johnsen said. “There’s a rhythm or pattern with the paneling and the trees. We used a lot of cedar, which will age to a dark color matching the bark of the trees.”

The home’s front façade has only two horizontal elements: clean lines at the roof and floor. The windows and paneling all run from floor to ceiling, providing uninterrupted vertical views inspired by the forest.

“It’s layered with meaning,” Schmaling said. “We’re very proud of the continuity of thought.”

The idea of an extended surface is perhaps more vivid in Johnsen Schmaling’s rooftop garden, built at the Parts House Pavilion in Milwaukee. The owner wanted an outdoor living room, a dramatic space for evening cocktail parties.

The duo created a steel structure with moving acrylic, colored panels to serve as a wall of sorts. At night, the brilliant primary hues are projected on a back wall, the patterns changing as the owner rearranges the panels.

Johnsen and Schmaling began their firm in 2003 with a plan to enliven Milwaukee’s building scene with creative architecture based on the individual context of each site. Johnsen, a Chicago native, and Schmaling, a native of Berlin, Germany, met at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee while studying for their master’s degrees in architecture. Schmaling has an additional master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University.

They also serve as adjunct professors at the UW-Milwaukee School of Architec-ture and Urban Planning.

Cornelius lets culture guide his designs

"The city itself is a living organism, and it needs to progress and have contemporary statements of the culture." Chris Cornelius Photos by Ray Guansing

By Jennifer Pfaff

American Indian culture is passed from generation to generation through oral storytelling.

It’s a style of communicating that lets the way a story is told become as important as the spoken words themselves.

That communication of culture is what guides Chris Cornelius’ design work. Through his Milwaukee-based studio:indigenous LLC and as an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cornelius’ work expresses cultural values and belief systems without relying on iconography.

“Because I am Native American, I focus primarily on serving Native American clients, particularly in conveying the culture architecturally,” he said. “I try to create environments and architecture that leave [cultural expression] up to a good deal of interpretation.

“Building forms can be an analogue of culture, because the culture is oral tradition.”

Rather than relying on literal expressions of cultural references — designing a building in the shape of a bear paw, for instance — Cornelius’ work takes a more subtle, but comprehensive, view of telling a tale or stating a belief through design.

As a cultural design consultant for the Indian Community School now being built in Franklin, Cornelius, 34, worked with designer and architect Antoine Predock to integrate in elegant ways American Indian culture into the building’s design.

The building’s central hall starts at the student entrance and flows straight to the other end of the building. One outlet faces the bus loading area, and the other opens to a courtyard overlooking the site.

Chris Cornelius' representation of the design process for the Indian Community School in Franklin tests the design methodology against the design itself. It shows how cultural values are showing up in the design of the building. Image by Chris Cornelius

“The space itself is a space of migration, primarily for the students who will be passing through there, but also for the staff and community,” Cornelius said. “Not only do they pass through day to day while in school, but it is a place they will return to throughout their lives, coming back as adults.”

A pattern of bird flight is woven through the hallway, representing the idea of migration.

The majority of Cornelius’ Wisconsin work is on the Oneida Reservation. He was born in Milwaukee but moved to the Oneida Reservation when he was 10.

He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the UW-Milwaukee and a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia. In 2003, he was artist-in-residence at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and he completed a visual translation of the Oneida creation story.

On the Oneida Reservation, he designed a library addition, elder apartments and an elder-services building.

“The building is a contemporary artifact,” he said. “The building should reflect the culture.”

But Cornelius isn’t looking to be pigeonholed as an American Indian architect. Rather, he wants to be known as a great designer.

His philosophy of cultural experientialism translates to any culture, and that is something Milwaukee can benefit from, he said. The city is once again realizing the value of good architecture, and it’s doing so just in time.

“There is an upward trajectory,” Cornelius said. “Projects are starting to be realized that bring a more modern voice to the city and the state.

“The city itself is a living organism, and it needs to progress and have contemporary statements of the culture.”