Milwaukeeans may have noticed the new public museum, at West McKinley Avenue and North Sixth Street, gaining height over the past few weeks, as the columns and decking for the first of the building’s five floors have been built and progress has started on the second floor.
At a Dec. 19 media event, Kurt Theune, vice president and general manager for Mortenson construction company, said that vertical construction will continue through the winter, with the structure starting to be enclosed by spring of next year.
After the new museum’s groundbreaking in May, construction workers with Mortenson worked through the summer to build the foundation; Theune said the first floor’s concrete pour started around Thanksgiving.
Construction continues on the new Milwaukee Public Museum on the northeast corner of Sixth Street and McKinley Avenue in Milwaukee on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. The new museum is scheduled to open in 2027.
Theune also noted that construction is on schedule, and Katie Sanders, museum’s chief planning officer, said the museum is on track to be completed by late 2026 and open to the public by early 2027.
Sanders also called attention to the building’s unique design as it starts to take shape.
“When we were planning for the design of the new museum, we took a seven-day journey through Wisconsin, and one of the stops was Mill Bluff State Park,” Sanders said.
The design team decided to pay homage to the state’s geology by designing the building’s exterior to resemble Mill Bluff’s ancient rock columns.
New museum’s rounded corners presented a construction challenge
Theune noted that those rock columns have rounded corners, which presented both a challenge and opportunity to the architecture and construction teams.
Because “there aren’t a lot of right angles” in the building design, Theune pointed out, the construction team is utilizing void-form construction, which creates spaces within the concrete structure. More than 70,000 prefabricated plastic bubbles are set in each floor’s deck, then surrounded by rebar before the concrete is poured. According to Theune, this type of construction gives the craftspeople more flexibility to create the rounded walls that resemble Mill Bluff.
Bee Bluff (the square bluff in the foreground) is among the prominent landforms visible at Mill Bluff State Park near Camp Douglas.
“In a building like this, craftspeople get to exercise a different level of intellectual creativity, and it makes them excited to work on the project,” Theune said. “There are people clamoring to work here; most of them visited museums as kids, and now they get to build the next one.”
Sanders also confirmed that museum president Ellen Censky’s most recent report on the museum’s fundraising remains accurate. At a Dec. 3 meeting of the County Board’s Committee on Parks and Culture, Censky declined to give a specific number regarding where the museum is in achieving its $108 million goal in private fundraising toward the new museum’s $240 million price tag. But she assured committee members that they’re “on track” and “will not have a shortfall.”
At the Dec. 19 event, Sanders said there would likely be a more specific fundraising update “after the giving season.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: New Milwaukee Public Museum building on track for 2027 opening