Milwaukee Public Market

Bumper Crop

Project team gives Milwaukee a market

By Janine Anderson

The Milwaukee Public Market’s fund-raising campaign got off to a really rough start.

It had nothing to do with the project. It was just unfortunate timing. The first meeting with key fund-raisers was scheduled for 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. It was cancelled.

“That was just a blow to the solar plexus when we were just starting the project and this huge tragedy occurred, which moved people’s focus away from the building,” said Paul Rushing, the project’s architect with The Kubala Washatko Architects Inc. “Then it came back. People needed something to say, ‘Yes, things are OK in this country.’”

Rushing and Craig Coursin, vice president and project principal with construction manager CG Schmidt Inc., credited the many organizations involved in the project for keeping things on track even after fund raising took an early hit. The groups involved in the project included the Historic Third Ward Association, the Milwaukee Department of City Development, the Milwaukee Department of Public Works, Milwaukee County, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and the United States Economic Development Administration.

Without the collaboration of all the groups, Rushing and Coursin said, the indoor marketplace on Milwaukee’s Water Street never would have reached completion.

“The more complex a project is, and the more public a project is, the more entities will be involved,” Rushing said. “That’s just how it is, whether it’s a hospital or a public market. There’s a lot of complexity getting something like this off in the air.”

But fund raising and collaboration can’t do much without a solid plan for the project. So, in designing the market, Rushing said, the project team took inspiration from the European market tradition, specifically Les Halles in Paris.


	Project Name: Milwaukee Public Market Location: Milwaukee Submitting Companies: CG Schmidt Inc., Milwaukee, and The Kubala Washatko Architects Inc., Cedarburg Construction Manager: CG Schmidt Inc. Architect: The Kubala Washatko Architects Inc. Engineers: Harwood Engineering Consultants Ltd., Milwaukee, structural engineer; Powrtek Engineering Inc., Waukesha, electrical engineer; Fredericksen Engineering Inc., Mequon, mechanical engineer; National Survey & Engineering, a division of R.A. Smith & Associates Inc., Brookfield, civil engineer; Mike Utzinger, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architec-ture and Urban Planning, environmental engineer Owner: Historic Third Ward Association, Milwaukee Project Cost: $7.5 million Project Size: 21,600 square feet Start Date: June 2004 Completion Date: August 2005

“Les Halles was a beautiful public market,” he said. “It had a lot of cast iron and riveted-steel, truss-like shapes and was a light-filled space.

“It did so beautifully what we sought to do. We wanted to provide a platform, a forum for the sale of produce and other market wares. It had to have a rough-and-tumble feel. This was not intended to be a grocery store.”

When construction started, the original design had to change somewhat to accommodate the location and the quality of the ground beneath the structure.

“It’s like putting a building up with 85 feet of Jello underneath,” Coursin said. “It has no bearing capacity of any kind because it’s fill.”

The original design had columns in the center of the 21,600-square-foot building, but those were no longer feasible, Coursin said. So the project team removed the columns from the design and drove pilings deep into the ground to support the building.

The team also left the building’s trusses exposed in the interior.

“Structure is expressed very boldly in the building,” Rushing said. “It tends to make it a very strong-looking building.

“When you expose structure that way and see the load capacity of the building, it tends to be delightful. There’s something very satisfying about being able to understand so clearly what holds the building up.”