So, lately the missus & I have been talking about how much we hate our jobs (just the generic hate, nothing specific) and how much we love our neighbor to the north. Sure, we'll have to drive everywhere, but the economy is better than michigan, and we might actually be able to afford a house someplace halfway decent. Theres just one job in archinect in wisconsin - though Monster, et al. seems to have enough that I could probably find one.
While its hard not to like a state whose biggest exports are cheese, beer and brats, is there architecture up there, or are people really wishing FLW was still alive and sleeping with all his clients wives.
I've heard all about the twintown. I'm wondering specifically about Wisconsin though, which seems to not exist architecturally between Chicago and Minn/St. Paul. It has great food (well, if you like meat & dairy, that is) and the great outdoors, socialists congregating in broad daylight, but I never hear about architecture from that state.
Are you cheeseheads being quiet to keep us fibbers out?
crowbert-
engineers and non-professional degrees are allowed to practice in the land of cheeseheads. these days calatrava seems to be the only starchitect they got...
beyond the Dells, you end up with either green bay, madison, or milwaukee. Can't be all that worse then the windy city. but you'll still have to change planes if you want to go somewhere interesting...
good luck. Just remember that most smart kids then to want to leave places where nothing really happens and the weather sucks. So if you don't mind the future spawn to fly away as soon as they can, then go!
i find it refreshing to hear someone who doesn't want to move to new york, l.a., pacific nw...[snore] i don't know of any architecture firms, but that doesn's mean you can't make architecture there yourself. i hope you make the move. it's a beautiful state.
Its not that we wouldn't move to nyc, but I did mention that we'd like to buy a house and not have to deal with self-imposed drama sometime in our near future. Chicago is bad enough and its nothing compared to all the crap people in NYC/SF/LA have to deal with - our heads would explode. Honestly, I think we'd both love to go to the big apple for 6mo. to 2 years, but more to soak up the "charm" of the place than to make it a home. Plus, as a midwesterner I want to look forward to summer, not dread it.
Wisconsin seems like a great place to live, without the overly-granola-flavor of the pacific northwest. I just don't know if there's enough good work out there, even if it seems like there's enough residents there that should "get it" (i.e. be willing to invest in their property and not just what they think the next buyer will want.) The fact that theres significantly less open space between the dells and madison now scares me quite a bit though. (we do love the driftless region)
I know a lot about Milwaukee and the architecture scene there. If you're coming from Chicago, the only other real city in Wisconsin I would consider is Madison because everyone else is very small and not happening. Unless, of course, you want to be really close to the northern outdoors, then you might want to consider some place in the Fox Valley. Madison is the fun liberal college city + state government, whereas Milwaukee is the real, big city with all of the good things and bad things about big cities. Milwaukee is basically like a miniaturized version of Chicago in that its of a similar historical era and has a similar relationship to Lake Michigan. Because it's so much smaller, Milwaukeeans are much more down to earth than Chicagoans but also lack that snobby urban cosmopolitain attitude. It's also big enough though that there's quite a bit of interesting stuff going on, lots of great restaurants and bars, tons of different neighborhoods.
As far as I'm concerned, there are only two firms doing really interesting work in Milwaukee.
(1) Johnsen Schmaling
Tiny firm doing mostly modernist stuff. Schmaling is a cool guy from Berlin who teaches at the university here.
(2) La Dallman
Small firm run by the only GSD grads in town.
Then there's the second tier, which are firms doing okay, often not so good work. They're all mid-sized.
(a) Vetter Denk
(b) Workshop Architects
(c) Continuum
In short, Milwaukee is quite a cool city, if your expectations are right. It's not New York, LA, or Chicago, but if you want a small city with a compact core and tons of life, this a place worth checking out.
Add more questions in response to this if you want more comments.
Then there's the big corporatey firms, doing generally boring, sub-par work, where you can expect huge projects (mostly in healthcare) that generally aren't all that interesting, but at least they're well funded. These are the people to work for if you care more about 9-5 and health coverage than doing really interesting work.
Where do I begin? If you're looking for good architecture I would have to agree that things get very thin the further from Beer town you go. I feel that the problem lies in a lack of education and too much stock invested into the "bigger is better" theory. To further complicate things, the realtors and builders have such a tight hold on things that even if a client is "adventurous" enough to want to build a piece of architecture, they are many times talked out of it through heavy use of the "you will never be able to resell" scare tactic before construction begins.
I could rant for hours but I'd rather summarize with this. To most here a scaled down version of a Gander Mountain or Bass Pro Shop store is ones idea of a dream home. There are glimmers of hope but they are far and few between. The bright side is that it can only get better from where we are now unless trailer homes become cool again. God forbid....
oh. also, Johnsen Schmaling and La Dallman are both quite good, as established previously in this thread, but they are also such small firms that it may be hard to get a job there.
robust84 already covered the good firms that i'm aware of... but i thought that i'd chime in on milwaukee in general...
my parents moved to milwaukee a few years ago and i've had the opportunity to visit a few times... my parents love milwaukee in the spring/summer/fall, but hate the winters... they lived in florida and georgia for the last 30 years, so it's a bit of a change... anyways, i've been really impressed by the city during my visits... la dallman and johnsen schmaling are doing some great stuff... there are some really good restaurants and some really cool neighborhoods that are walkable/bikeable... miller park is a great place to catch a baseball game if you like baseball... in general, i found that the baseline level of most of the new construction that i saw was pretty good... certainly much better than the baseline of crap that gets built down here in florida...
all in all it seems like it would be a cool place to live... i'm not sure that i'd ever move there permanently... but i definitely wouldn't mind living there for 5 years or so...
kubala washatko is high-quality in certain respects. they get a ton of commissions and thus do tons of work small and medium scale work. if you worked there you could get a lot of good, diverse experience. they are quite thoughtful and artful but they are generally very derivative of the vernacular in their work (and not in a pomo/ironic kind of way). they make nice, feel-good buildings that i'm sure their inhabitants love but would never get taken seriously in the academic architectural establishment. also, they're all the way up in cedarburg, which is a cute small town that's turning into a suburb of milwaukee, about a 30 minutes drive from downtown milwaukee.
i came across some kind of AMAZING wisconsin firm about a year ago and have never found it since... argh. i think it was in milwaukee. if i find it again, i'll let you know...
personally i found madison to be a very cute town, but you'd have to like small towns. i'd probably be bored of it in about 2 weeks max, but that's me.
wow. yeah, madison is most definitely a small town. milwaukee is a small city. haha, i come from a place that didn't even become incorporated as a city until it had well over 60,000 people! we're definitely coming from different perspectives :)
I don't really have a sense of how he is as a designer, but I saw Thomas Hirsch give a lecture at Archeworks in 2005, and it was the most intellectually substantive discussion I've ever heard come from the mouth of a practicing architect.
Madison can be cool. It definately has its moments but overall I would have to classify it as a small city in denial. We have all the problems of larger cities but we try to sweep them under the rug and deny them in order to maintain some status on the best places to live list. ...its a joke.
My favorite things would be that the people are nice, the festivals at the capital are pretty cool, the motorcycling community is great, and there are a good number of mircobreweries in the area to keep a beer snob occupied when the weather is too cold to ride.
Wisconsin is beatiful and grossly underated as a place to live. The people are great - they drink and smoke like the world is ending but they are almost all histerical - theres a midwest comedic vein running through the blood up there.
The good thing about the state is its affordable, its close enough to Milwaukee and Chicago to get the high end vaction houses ( Wisconsin is Chicago's Hamptons) and you can live decently. The downside is the winters - unless your really into ice fishing, hockey, snow mobiles etc - than its a winter wonderland. Plus - look at the market as wide open for high design - not too saturated. Theres a lot of manufactures in Wis with a lot of $$. My guess is theres a quiet demand for good desin on those betiful rolling wisconsin hills.
there are no 'cow towns' in the upper midwest. cheese towns, lumber towns, and steel towns are common, but no cow towns. for the moo, you gotta head out to the great plains - denver, KC, OC, or anywhere in texas - those are cow towns with a cowboy past.
Why does everyone get hung up on the perceived notion of how good the quality of work coming from arch firms in a certain city/state/region? Wouldn't the better question be in regards to the quality of the workplace environment? While it's nice to work on cutting edge engaging work, shouldn't the priority be to have a stable job, good paycheck, benefits, etc. Just my 2 cents.
Wisconsin is a great state. Have a lot of family living there and visit often. Milwaukee is the "big" city in the state, but I'd argue people don't move to WI to be cosmopolitian. Most of the population lives relatively close to Chicago anyway...and the other half close to the Twin Cities, both of which Milwaukee can't really compete. I'd look to Madison or the smaller college towns in WI. They are all relatively vibrant with stable higher ed money and plenty of local businesses picking up the rest. All are very beautiful towns. Madison is very nice as well places like Eau Claire, Menomonie, Oshkosh, LaCrosse, etc.
Or locate all the small cheese factories and pick a town close to one. I know of a killer good one near Wausau. Same goes for micro-brews.
Madison is one of the best cities in America - awesome place. Much more high tech than anyone realizes. Biogen, internet and space tech businesses out there.
Trust me, I'm not looking for snazzy titanium covered mcmansions but rather work that is varied enough not to get boring and a work life that is not insane and/or filled with drama queens. Wisconsin is affordable and a good place to live, I'm just wondering if the architecture there is the equivalent of cuisine in England:
i.e. "its a beautiful countryside, its a good thing they can't cook it."
i know nothing about your aesthetic and interests, crowbert, but as people said, there's a few great firms in milwaukee worth looking at while the rest are pretty average. it's a big state so maybe it's ripe for some high design interventions?
We try to get up there 3-5 times a year for long weekends (this last year has been bad though) and, like I said, we love the driftless region, Monroe, New Glarus, Madison, etc... Next time we get a day off to go up there I'll swing through an office or two...
Cheese, beer... architecture?
So, lately the missus & I have been talking about how much we hate our jobs (just the generic hate, nothing specific) and how much we love our neighbor to the north. Sure, we'll have to drive everywhere, but the economy is better than michigan, and we might actually be able to afford a house someplace halfway decent. Theres just one job in archinect in wisconsin - though Monster, et al. seems to have enough that I could probably find one.
While its hard not to like a state whose biggest exports are cheese, beer and brats, is there architecture up there, or are people really wishing FLW was still alive and sleeping with all his clients wives.
if you are thinking wisco, you might have more luck w/ minneapolis...
I've heard all about the twintown. I'm wondering specifically about Wisconsin though, which seems to not exist architecturally between Chicago and Minn/St. Paul. It has great food (well, if you like meat & dairy, that is) and the great outdoors, socialists congregating in broad daylight, but I never hear about architecture from that state.
Are you cheeseheads being quiet to keep us fibbers out?
crowbert-
engineers and non-professional degrees are allowed to practice in the land of cheeseheads. these days calatrava seems to be the only starchitect they got...
beyond the Dells, you end up with either green bay, madison, or milwaukee. Can't be all that worse then the windy city. but you'll still have to change planes if you want to go somewhere interesting...
good luck. Just remember that most smart kids then to want to leave places where nothing really happens and the weather sucks. So if you don't mind the future spawn to fly away as soon as they can, then go!
i find it refreshing to hear someone who doesn't want to move to new york, l.a., pacific nw...[snore] i don't know of any architecture firms, but that doesn's mean you can't make architecture there yourself. i hope you make the move. it's a beautiful state.
Its not that we wouldn't move to nyc, but I did mention that we'd like to buy a house and not have to deal with self-imposed drama sometime in our near future. Chicago is bad enough and its nothing compared to all the crap people in NYC/SF/LA have to deal with - our heads would explode. Honestly, I think we'd both love to go to the big apple for 6mo. to 2 years, but more to soak up the "charm" of the place than to make it a home. Plus, as a midwesterner I want to look forward to summer, not dread it.
Wisconsin seems like a great place to live, without the overly-granola-flavor of the pacific northwest. I just don't know if there's enough good work out there, even if it seems like there's enough residents there that should "get it" (i.e. be willing to invest in their property and not just what they think the next buyer will want.) The fact that theres significantly less open space between the dells and madison now scares me quite a bit though. (we do love the driftless region)
I was in Milwaukee for the AIAS Forum back in December and know of a couple firms that do decent (not great) design work:
Vetter Denk
I met a principal several months back, interesting design/develop delivery model.
Kahler Slater
Package themselves as 'Specialists in the design of experiences'
...plus I think Milwaukee's a pretty fun, mid-sized city (f you can stand living in the frozen tundra).
I know a lot about Milwaukee and the architecture scene there. If you're coming from Chicago, the only other real city in Wisconsin I would consider is Madison because everyone else is very small and not happening. Unless, of course, you want to be really close to the northern outdoors, then you might want to consider some place in the Fox Valley. Madison is the fun liberal college city + state government, whereas Milwaukee is the real, big city with all of the good things and bad things about big cities. Milwaukee is basically like a miniaturized version of Chicago in that its of a similar historical era and has a similar relationship to Lake Michigan. Because it's so much smaller, Milwaukeeans are much more down to earth than Chicagoans but also lack that snobby urban cosmopolitain attitude. It's also big enough though that there's quite a bit of interesting stuff going on, lots of great restaurants and bars, tons of different neighborhoods.
As far as I'm concerned, there are only two firms doing really interesting work in Milwaukee.
(1) Johnsen Schmaling
Tiny firm doing mostly modernist stuff. Schmaling is a cool guy from Berlin who teaches at the university here.
(2) La Dallman
Small firm run by the only GSD grads in town.
Then there's the second tier, which are firms doing okay, often not so good work. They're all mid-sized.
(a) Vetter Denk
(b) Workshop Architects
(c) Continuum
In short, Milwaukee is quite a cool city, if your expectations are right. It's not New York, LA, or Chicago, but if you want a small city with a compact core and tons of life, this a place worth checking out.
Add more questions in response to this if you want more comments.
Then there's the big corporatey firms, doing generally boring, sub-par work, where you can expect huge projects (mostly in healthcare) that generally aren't all that interesting, but at least they're well funded. These are the people to work for if you care more about 9-5 and health coverage than doing really interesting work.
(a) Kahler Slater
(b) Plunkett Raysich
(c) HGA
(d) Eppstein Uhen
(e) Engberg Anderson
both johnsen schmaling and la dallman seem to be doing amazing work...
js
la d
Madtown here....
Where do I begin? If you're looking for good architecture I would have to agree that things get very thin the further from Beer town you go. I feel that the problem lies in a lack of education and too much stock invested into the "bigger is better" theory. To further complicate things, the realtors and builders have such a tight hold on things that even if a client is "adventurous" enough to want to build a piece of architecture, they are many times talked out of it through heavy use of the "you will never be able to resell" scare tactic before construction begins.
I could rant for hours but I'd rather summarize with this. To most here a scaled down version of a Gander Mountain or Bass Pro Shop store is ones idea of a dream home. There are glimmers of hope but they are far and few between. The bright side is that it can only get better from where we are now unless trailer homes become cool again. God forbid....
Madison
http://www.alexandercompany.com/
That's a funny simulacra, rottnme, right, because isn't a Bass Pro Shop a scaled up version of the kind of house your clients are looking for?
oh. also, Johnsen Schmaling and La Dallman are both quite good, as established previously in this thread, but they are also such small firms that it may be hard to get a job there.
robust84 already covered the good firms that i'm aware of... but i thought that i'd chime in on milwaukee in general...
my parents moved to milwaukee a few years ago and i've had the opportunity to visit a few times... my parents love milwaukee in the spring/summer/fall, but hate the winters... they lived in florida and georgia for the last 30 years, so it's a bit of a change... anyways, i've been really impressed by the city during my visits... la dallman and johnsen schmaling are doing some great stuff... there are some really good restaurants and some really cool neighborhoods that are walkable/bikeable... miller park is a great place to catch a baseball game if you like baseball... in general, i found that the baseline level of most of the new construction that i saw was pretty good... certainly much better than the baseline of crap that gets built down here in florida...
all in all it seems like it would be a cool place to live... i'm not sure that i'd ever move there permanently... but i definitely wouldn't mind living there for 5 years or so...
Another firm worth researching.
Kubala Washatko
Looks like their website is under construction, but there is a link to their old one.
Milwaukee is a great town with a lot of fun little neighborhoods.
kubala washatko is high-quality in certain respects. they get a ton of commissions and thus do tons of work small and medium scale work. if you worked there you could get a lot of good, diverse experience. they are quite thoughtful and artful but they are generally very derivative of the vernacular in their work (and not in a pomo/ironic kind of way). they make nice, feel-good buildings that i'm sure their inhabitants love but would never get taken seriously in the academic architectural establishment. also, they're all the way up in cedarburg, which is a cute small town that's turning into a suburb of milwaukee, about a 30 minutes drive from downtown milwaukee.
i came across some kind of AMAZING wisconsin firm about a year ago and have never found it since... argh. i think it was in milwaukee. if i find it again, i'll let you know...
personally i found madison to be a very cute town, but you'd have to like small towns. i'd probably be bored of it in about 2 weeks max, but that's me.
that's funny that you consider madison a small town... i would say it's a small city. a small town would be like, waupaca or wisconsin rapids.
Minneapolis:
http://www.juliesnowarchitects.com/
wow. yeah, madison is most definitely a small town. milwaukee is a small city. haha, i come from a place that didn't even become incorporated as a city until it had well over 60,000 people! we're definitely coming from different perspectives :)
madison metro area was 543,000 people.... not huge but it's no cow town
I don't really have a sense of how he is as a designer, but I saw Thomas Hirsch give a lecture at Archeworks in 2005, and it was the most intellectually substantive discussion I've ever heard come from the mouth of a practicing architect.
Madison can be cool. It definately has its moments but overall I would have to classify it as a small city in denial. We have all the problems of larger cities but we try to sweep them under the rug and deny them in order to maintain some status on the best places to live list. ...its a joke.
My favorite things would be that the people are nice, the festivals at the capital are pretty cool, the motorcycling community is great, and there are a good number of mircobreweries in the area to keep a beer snob occupied when the weather is too cold to ride.
wisconsin rapids!! that's my hometown!
[sorry, carry on.]
Wisconsin is beatiful and grossly underated as a place to live. The people are great - they drink and smoke like the world is ending but they are almost all histerical - theres a midwest comedic vein running through the blood up there.
The good thing about the state is its affordable, its close enough to Milwaukee and Chicago to get the high end vaction houses ( Wisconsin is Chicago's Hamptons) and you can live decently. The downside is the winters - unless your really into ice fishing, hockey, snow mobiles etc - than its a winter wonderland. Plus - look at the market as wide open for high design - not too saturated. Theres a lot of manufactures in Wis with a lot of $$. My guess is theres a quiet demand for good desin on those betiful rolling wisconsin hills.
Plus artisan cheese - yum
there are no 'cow towns' in the upper midwest. cheese towns, lumber towns, and steel towns are common, but no cow towns. for the moo, you gotta head out to the great plains - denver, KC, OC, or anywhere in texas - those are cow towns with a cowboy past.
Yeah maybe no "cow towns" but I still say that happy cows come from Wisconsin.
The commercials have it all wrong...
Funny story... when I lived out east I actually kinda missed seeing the big black and white moo machines as I would drive through the countryside.
I used to date a girl from Wisconsin, we met in uni in Canada. She moved to Canada to study b/c it was warmer than Wisconsin.
Also.....good American beer??!!!??? I don't believe it!!!
(hehehe I just had to throw a jab across the border).
Why does everyone get hung up on the perceived notion of how good the quality of work coming from arch firms in a certain city/state/region? Wouldn't the better question be in regards to the quality of the workplace environment? While it's nice to work on cutting edge engaging work, shouldn't the priority be to have a stable job, good paycheck, benefits, etc. Just my 2 cents.
Wisconsin is a great state. Have a lot of family living there and visit often. Milwaukee is the "big" city in the state, but I'd argue people don't move to WI to be cosmopolitian. Most of the population lives relatively close to Chicago anyway...and the other half close to the Twin Cities, both of which Milwaukee can't really compete. I'd look to Madison or the smaller college towns in WI. They are all relatively vibrant with stable higher ed money and plenty of local businesses picking up the rest. All are very beautiful towns. Madison is very nice as well places like Eau Claire, Menomonie, Oshkosh, LaCrosse, etc.
Or locate all the small cheese factories and pick a town close to one. I know of a killer good one near Wausau. Same goes for micro-brews.
Madison is one of the best cities in America - awesome place. Much more high tech than anyone realizes. Biogen, internet and space tech businesses out there.
Trust me, I'm not looking for snazzy titanium covered mcmansions but rather work that is varied enough not to get boring and a work life that is not insane and/or filled with drama queens. Wisconsin is affordable and a good place to live, I'm just wondering if the architecture there is the equivalent of cuisine in England:
i.e. "its a beautiful countryside, its a good thing they can't cook it."
i know nothing about your aesthetic and interests, crowbert, but as people said, there's a few great firms in milwaukee worth looking at while the rest are pretty average. it's a big state so maybe it's ripe for some high design interventions?
Maybe you should take a visit.
We try to get up there 3-5 times a year for long weekends (this last year has been bad though) and, like I said, we love the driftless region, Monroe, New Glarus, Madison, etc... Next time we get a day off to go up there I'll swing through an office or two...
oh did you see the profile of the Driftless area in the recent NYTimes travel special?
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