To reconnect Wisconsin Avenue’s west and east sides is the goal of the Creational Trails Campaign, and to do so successfully requires creating places in which people want to spend time.
Currently, the parking lot between 4th and 5th Streets is not a friendly space. People come to the site, courtesy of the 11 bus routes nearby, but there is no reason for them to stay. It is devoid of the human scale: comfortable awnings, urban furniture, anything that would make it feel like the public square it should be (even though the location is prime for one. The site is located adjacent to a mall, hotels, and conference centers, but the mall is failing, the conference center attracts only a temporary population, and the skywalks create a psychological barrier between active cross-streets when there is nothing to draw people to the other side.)
The goal of this project is to showcase the potential of the parking lot as a public plaza while reconnecting east and west by installing an iconic element that serves to identify programmed events that will occur along West Wisconsin Avenue throughout the summer.
The temporary solution takes form as a pavilion influenced by the Moiré Effect, a pattern that occurs when two parallel sets of lines rotate by only a few degrees to create an interference pattern which is at once complex, yet immediately understandable.
Steel, glass, concrete, and brick are all plentiful construction materials west of the river, so an infusion of warm wooden tones was chosen to differentiate the pavilion from its surroundings. Once cut to proper size and holes drilled 3” from each end, the pieces are installed quickly and efficiently, its modular system was able to be simply assembled by a group of volunteers.
The Moiré Effect is seen when two or more concentric rings of rippling water meet, or when lines extended from the city’s two urban grids overlap. This pavilion is a similar point of convergence, where the activity from the street’s east and the potential in the west finally meet once again. The space that once punished people for choosing to be pedestrians becomes the congregation point for all of Downtown Milwaukee.
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