AEC News You Can Use Blog

UW-Madison is leveraging swaths of experience across departments — and across the University of Wisconsin system — to meet student demand for an architecture program.

UW-Madison launched its first general architectural certificate, located in the College of Engineering, in late August. Three weeks later, in mid-September, 52 students had signed on — a tiny portion of the university’s 50,000 student population, but large enough to make architecture the College of Engineering’s third-largest certificate program. With the engineering college’s second-largest certificate program at 64 students, architecture is poised to take the second-place spot within a year.

“Certificate” is UW-Madison’s word for “minor.”

UW-Madison has had many of the pieces of a robust architecture certificate for years. The College of Engineering offers civil and environmental engineering, which includes design for infrastructure such as roads and bridges and land surveying. The School of Human Ecology has programs in design studies that look at how spaces can be designed with human needs in mind. The landscape and urban planning department teaches students about sustainable land use. And UW-Madison’s art history courses already teach about historical architecture from Wisconsin and around the world.

What was missing, though, were the introductory courses. UW-Milwaukee has stepped in to provide those online. While those classes are taught by UW-Milwaukee faculty, the classes are considered native to UW-Madison and eliminate the need for students to transfer credits between institutions.

UW-Madison’s lack of a broad architecture program has cost the university prospective students in the past, architecture certificate director and civil engineering professor Greg Harrington said.

“We routinely get high school students interested in our (civil engineering) program who say, ‘I’d come here if you had something in architecture, but you don’t.’ And so that was a motivation for us to increase opportunity for students here,” Harrington said.

The certificate, though, is open to students across campus, not just those in the College of Engineering, so the classes are showing broad appeal. In a 400-level architectural design class this semester, there’s a cohort of College of Business real estate graduate students designing Italian cuisine restaurants for East Washington Avenue alongside psychology and structural engineering majors. Read more here

It’s rare that a building’s design can become so immediately iconic – an attraction unto itself. Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona comes to mind. It is a visual feast – a sculpture that takes the shape of a building. Many architecture critics are already claiming the same for the newly opened Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Officially named the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, the addition to AMNH is the icing on a very prestigious cake. AMNH boasted five million visitors in 2019 (the most recent year the TEA/AECOM Theme Index ranked museums). It is the ninth most-visited museum in the world, and in North America it is second only to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (also in New York City).

The Gilder Center is a 230,000 sq-ft addition that boasts 33 individual connections across four levels to 10 other buildings on the AMNH campus. In addition to helping unify the museum, Gilder houses impressive exhibits including an insectarium, the Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium, new collection displays and the immersive Invisible Worlds experience, a projection-mapped environment that takes guests to scientific and natural realms nearly impossible to see under normal circumstances.

Also capturing attention, of course, is the building itself. Designed by Studio Gang, the building is curvaceous and flowing, or in architect-speak, it’s nonrectilinear. The west- facing exterior features glass windows peeking out from undulating smooth pink granite forms. The 80-foot-tall interior atrium lobby, evocative of a canyon, is made from a material that coats nearly every surface, applied in novel ways. Openings into exhibit spaces and bridges spanning the atrium are amorphous – no shape is repeated in the design. The finish is off-white, and although the primary material is concrete, the effect is organic, almost like looking at bone on a microscopic level, with its crevices and tendons stretching across the space. Read more here

Neighboring Frank Lloyd Wright homes, the Eppstein House and the Pratt House, are for sale in Kalamazoo County with a reported asking price of $4.5 million.

The original Wright-designed furniture in the homes, however, is extra.

"I refer to it as a piece of artwork that you can live in," Fred Taber of Jaqua Realtors told the Free Press, adding that "it's better than a painting" because you don't just hang it on a wall and look at it, you can go inside, walk around, sleep in it and "stay there."

Wright, an American architect, who designed more than 1,000 structures during his lifetime, aimed to create spaces that were in harmony with their natural surroundings, a philosophy he called organic architecture, but it is rare, if not unique, to have two of them next to each other.

 Boeing plans to begin testing a full 3D-printed main rotor system for the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter in the spring of next year as part of an effort to cut out long-lead times and improve the overall supply chains for parts that are typically forged, according to company officials.

At the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference last week, a Boeing and ASTRO America team displayed its first 3D part, a main rotor link assembly, printed on what is currently the world’s largest 3D metal printer at Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois.

ASTRO, a nonprofit funded by the U.S. government, won a $95 million contract from the Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center to provide engineering support to develop additive manufacturing capabilities of large-size, large-scale parts including entire hulls for tanks and other combat vehicles as well as other prototype parts, explained ASTRO engineer Emma Gallegos.

That effort, called the Jointless Hull Project, involves a machine that is big enough to print an entire, single-piece M1 Abrams tank hull, she said. Read more here

Willie Nelson—folk legend, guitarist, outlaw, chain smoker, freedom fighter, town planner?

That’s correct. The pop-up town of Luck is a short drive from Austin, Texas designed by Nelson for a 1986 full-length film he produced and starred in, Red Headed Stranger, that was never torn down after production ended. Luck is an Old West Potemkin Village of sorts that can easily be confused with the fictional town of Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles starring Mel Brooks, Cleavon Little, and Gene Wilder.

In the film, Willie Nelson plays a shotgun-toting pastor who’s come to Luck to restore order in the lawless abode. Nelson’s Texas utopia features a dirt road for dueling with six-shooters, a Saloon where cowboys with ten-gallon hats smash glasses over each other’s heads, a general store, a jail, a chapel where Nelson delivers sermons, and Opry House, a fictional music venue.

A home builder is accused of faking his own disappearance in an elaborate plot to steal money from clients, a Texas lawsuit says.

When Barbara and Robert Elsner bought a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in 1955, they wrote the famed architect to ask if he had designed any landscaping for the house. Wright responded that he hadn’t, but told them that their 1917 home was “a good house of a good period for a good client.” 

Since then, the Elsner family has carefully preserved the Milwaukee house, returning the interiors to their original paint colors and buying back the home’s custom-made furniture.

Now, however, the family is ready to hand the house over to a new steward, according to the Elsners’ daughter Margaret Howland, who lives in the home. They are putting the property on the market for the first time in 68 years, asking $1.5 million.

The five-bedroom, roughly 6,700-square-foot home is a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan in the historic North Point neighborhood, said listing agent Melissa LeGrand of @properties-elleven Christie’s International Real Estate. Read more here

The best structural elements are easy to install and safer to touch.

Lawsuits are piling up against architects as they lock horns with owners over a several-year stretch of project delays, local construction attorneys said.

In the aftermath of the pandemic’s many construction sector interruptions, there’s a battle over who should take the blame for long-delayed projects. Those eager to recoup costs associated with those delays are sometimes pointing the finger at their contractors, as well as design professionals.

That’s being seen increasingly often by Andrew Carlowicz Jr. and Lawrence Powers, co-chairs of the Construction Law Department at New Brunswick-based law firm Hoagland, Longo, Moran, Dunst & Doukas LLP.

The duo has handled many disputes over the years on behalf of architects and engineers. The civil lawsuits that have emerged from this most recent trend are what they describe as interesting and definitely some of the most complicated.

“Because, when a project finishes late, there are some instances where a delay issue was clearly the responsibility of either the design team on a project or the contractor but, that’s rare,” Carlowicz said. “Usually, it’s many different issues caused by different parties concurrently that lead to delays.” Read more here

The building would stand out in even the biggest of cities.

But here, amid a sea of nearly ripe corn, a solar field and wetlands in northeastern Kenosha County, the Pritzker Military Archives Center overshadows the rural landscape.

The building’s shape resembles a World War II landing craft. Its steel girders and columns are painted a bright red.

Its founder is a retired colonel who happens to be a billionaire with a passion for military history. The building’s architect is world renowned, and the project serves as a unique gateway to this village of just over 9,000 people in southeastern Wisconsin.