First and foremost it is important to understand the goal of a project. The goal of this project is to be an economic catalyst to bring food industry and small businesses into the Sherman Park neighborhood along the stretch of North Ave between 41st and 45th street. The catalyst, in this case is the site of the Old Finney Library which will undergo adaptive reuse to transform into the Finney Market Place at the intersection of North Ave and Sherman Blvd.
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APPROACH
My approach to design this semester was to retain some subtlety in design in order to serve the existing community. This subtlety is an important part of the design process. In recent years, developers have been going into neighborhoods that belong to lower-income residents, developing them and often displacing these and other longtime populations.(1) In recent years, Milwaukee’s succumb to more and more gentrification of its lower income neighborhoods, exasperating residents, and instead of addressing and working against segregation between neighborhoods, reinforcing it.(2) In fact, it is not just building development that can cause this displacement, but as Wolch, Byrne and Newell point out in their research on “Urban Green Space, Public Health, and Environmental Justice”, when working with a community that has been labeled low-income or “undesirable”, in order to truly benefit the existing community, sometimes the approach must address their needs and be “just green enough” (3) In the case of this project, the saying may be “just developed enough”. The objective of this project is to provide quality food in a food desert and to build up local small businesses within the existing community to do so.
Taking that stance, I recognized that the Finney Library’s position within the community has a prominent role to both the community surrounding, as well as those who frequently use these major arteries of North Ave and Sherman Blvd en route to elsewhere. This makes it a great location for a catalytic building type, but also a potentially dangerous location for gentrification and the ousting of local residents. Monumentalism, although tantalizing and exciting for most architects, need not apply here. Instead, transforming the interior, animating the windows by layering lighting and quality materials, and creating a warm and welcoming environment to suit the needs of the local community is the focus. |
1. Magiac, Mike. “Gentrification in America Report.” Governning magazine: Slate and local government news for America’s leaders. February 2015. Accessed December 12, 2017. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/gentrification-in-cities-governing-report.html
2. Murphy, Bruce. “Murphy’s Law: Is Milwaukee Becoming Gentrified?” Urban Milwaukee. March 15, 2015. Accessed December 12, 2017. https;//urbanmilwaukee.com/201503/19/murphys-law-is-milwaukee-becoming-gentrified/. 3. Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J., and Newell, J. P. 2014. “Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’.” Landscape and Urban Planning, 125: 234-244. |
LAYERING LIGHT
When I began to look at precedents for lighting strategies, Louis Kahn and Peter Zumthor became a source of major inspiration for me. Peter Zumthor, in his work in the thermal baths, talks about light as a tool to create atmosphere.(4) As Louis Kahn says in Licht und Raum (or Light and Space), “a room is not a room without natural night.” (5) He is also credited with saying “A plan of a building should be read like a harmony of spaces in light. Even a space intended to be dark should have just enough light from some mysterious opening to tell us how dark it really is. Each space must be defined by its structure and the character of its natural light.”(5)
This was the first thing I addressed within the project. As mentioned previously, the back addition suffered from lack of natural lighting. I proposed creating a new roof on the back addition that brings natural lighting into the space during the daytime, cascading it over the former exterior walls that were covered in Mayfair Buff stone. This move creates a stunning wash, creating a dramatic lighting condition for the new Beer Hall proposed in that space. There are two other lighting strategies implemented to subtlety bring people in and display the work of the community. The ribbon windows along North Ave are right up against the public street edge and therefore within plain sight of foot and street traffic. The building invites users from North Ave in, allowing them to walk along a beautifully slate-covered wall that wraps up a ramp and around the food kiosks. This creates a promenade up a ramp that lands at the base of the ribbon window on the North Ave edge. As customers sit and eat, they are in north-facing sunlight during the day time. At night, this space reverses, and people walking by on the street observe those sitting in the window as if they were perfectly framed within a TV screen, light gently cascading down onto the sidewalk, as inhabitants broadcast to passersby that Finney is thriving once again. Behind this layer is a layer of food prep, and a lower level of seating signaled by vaulted indirect lighting. The ribbon windows along Sherman Blvd have a different treatment. The edge of the building sits back off of Sherman Blvd. The inside programming functions as a store for local artisans within the community, showing their wares during the day time. As indicated by the site plan, these windows are protected by a layer of small trees, filtering in western light during the daytime, and concealing the vulnerable windows during the night time. Similarly, the building edge on the east façade of the existing building is layered with new ribbon windows and trees. The interior space adjacent houses brewery equipment and another layer of seating beyond. From the interior, people look though the brewery equipment to a layer of trees and sunlight. From the alley, people see glimpses of the brewery equipment and the crowd seated inside. |
4. Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres: architectural environments – surrounding objects. Basel; Birkhaüser, 2006.
5. Büttiker, U., Kahn, Louis I., Kang, Luyisi, & Schmuilowsky, Itze-Leib. (1994). Louis I. Kahn : Light and space / Urs Büttiker. |