Work/Milwaukee Limnology Center
Landscape Architecture|Architecture|Speculative

Milwaukee Limnology Center

Illinois Institute of Technology|Milwaukee, Wisconsin|2007
A polluted industrial site becomes a working landscape where research, public experience, water treatment, and soil repair are part of the same architecture.

I developed the Milwaukee Limnology Center as an individual graduate student project at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The studio asked architecture and landscape to address a 25-acre former industrial site at the confluence of Milwaukee's Menomonee River, three historic neighborhood grids, and an extensive subsurface chloride plume.

The proposal makes confluence an organizing idea. The grids of Kilbourntown, Juneautown, and Walker's Point extend into the site, while a system of planted canals and working wetlands draws polluted river water through a visible purification process. Research, exhibition, conference, housing, farming, and community programs gather around that water infrastructure rather than sitting beside it.

The chloride plume becomes the project's most consequential space. Contaminated soil is excavated and bioremediated on site inside weathering-steel containers. The resulting void holds the visitor center and a settling pond for site wastewater, bringing visitors close to the ecological cost the institute is studying. Over a proposed 50-year life cycle, the soil is repaired, returned to the void, and the steel is recycled into new public elements, allowing the site to rejoin Milwaukee's urban fabric.

Academic Context
Individual graduate student project at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Spring 2007. Instructor: Professor Thomas Oslund.
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Milwaukee Limnology Center entrance at the remediation void
Main entry at the remediation void
Project program and regional watershed context
Project program and watershed context
Historical, neighborhood, industrial, and watershed analysis
Confluence analysis
Three Milwaukee neighborhood grids extending into the site
Confluence of neighborhood grids
Urban and historic topography with landscape approach diagrams
Urban and landscape topography
Research, community, housing, remediation, and water-treatment plan
Program organization
Sequence for excavating, remediating, using, and refilling the chloride plume
Sustainable void strategy
Aerial view of planted canals, research buildings, and remediation void
Site aerial
Main entrance descending beside water and weathering-steel walls
Main entry sequence
Aerial and sectional views of the toxic remediation void
The toxic void
Research buildings and community spaces around planted canals
Research community
Experimental research tanks along the waterfront
Research tanks and waterfront
Physical model showing the project at the river confluence
Site plan model
Oblique physical model view across the site
Physical model from the southwest
Physical model showing canals, buildings, and river edge
Physical model from the waterfront
Physical model view toward the central remediation void
Physical model from the north