Beacon of hope

AG Architecture sets tone for Park East development

The Flatiron condominium and retail development is on a small triangle of land, only a quarter acre in size, but plans for the building are big.Real big.

The Flatiron, named because its shape resembles the flatirons once used to smooth wrinkles from clothes, serves as a gateway to Milwaukee’s Park East redevelopment corridor.

Its architecture is meant to inspire visions of what will one day come to exist in the neighborhood, said architect Eugene Guszkowski, president of AG Architecture.

Sitting at the point where three major streets merge, the building features street-level retail space with a soaring pointed-glass feature and is capped by a roof that slopes upward to the east.

“In doing that, we’re pointing to that larger building [that] will be built in the corridor,” Guszkowski said. “It’s meant to act like a beacon, saying, ‘You’re now entering the Park East corridor.’”

Guszkowski described the building as contemporary and “a strong piece of sculpture.”

It’s in a prominent location, serving as a gateway to Water Street’s bar district, and it was the first piece of real estate within the Park East Corridor that became available for development.

In a sense, it sets the tone for what will come.

“We were proposing it to attract a range of income levels,” Guszkowski said. “We wanted to spur economic development.”

The building sits on a sloping site so depending on vantage point, observers get a different sense of how many stories the building has. From the east, The Flatiron appears to be four stories and from the west, six.

The sloping site made for a design challenge but created the opportunity for two levels of aboveground parking for residents.

“The reason we were able to do it is because of the complex topography,” Guszkowski said of the parking levels. “It’s a big, warped plane and that allowed us to do two levels of enclosed parking.”

With about 10 units on three floors and eight units on the top, each condo has a unique floor plan. Two of the units have two stories. The building gets larger at the top, so the higher the condo, the larger the floor plan.

The design and construction of The Flatiron faced a few challenges, Guszkowski said, not the least of which was making sure the collection of neighboring cottages, leftover from historic Milwaukee, didn’t collapse into the site during work.

Although those homes will one day be replaced with a larger new development, Guszkowski said he wanted to respect them and other existing neighborhood structures in terms of style and size.

— Jennifer Pfaff