Milwaukee's many faces

Due to a family reunion in rural Wisconsin, we had the chance to make another visit to the midwest, a region of America I have been wanting to see more of.

I started out our trip to Milwaukee with a solo run around the city. What I saw took my breath away. As I ran north on 2nd street, I ducked under a low rusting steel rail bridge as cars whizzed past in a sunken roadbed below me. Railways and rivers form a net across the city, creating vertical layers of bridges and overpasses on a flat landscape.

The run served as a preview of what I would see in the days to come — a mix of old and new, artistic and industrial.

Harley-Davidson Museum

One of the American cultural icons tracing its roots back to Milwaukee is Harley-Davidson. Located in an industrial part of town on the site of a former factory, it’s surrounded on three sides by the Menomonee river.

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The architectural concept is derived from industrial vernacular and motorcycle culture. Three rectangular buildings are separated by roads running across the complex. The exposed steel girders and stark rectilinear forms honor Harley-Davidson‘s and Milwaukee‘s manufacturing heritage.

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If I didn’t know it was a museum, I would’ve thought it is a factory.

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Inside, like Munich’s BMW Museum or Nagoya’s Toyota Techno Museum, is a treat both for the newcomer like me or the lifelong fan.

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The entirety of Harley-Davidson’s history is presented – Everything from motorcycles, ephemera, to graphic design. Famous bikes formerly owned by people like Evel Knievel are spotlighted as if artifacts of antiquity.

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As I walked the museum, I was taken aback by the restrained touch of the architects, designers, and curators. Harley-Davidson conjures images of loud bikes zipping past, leather jackets billowing in the wind. This museum portrays a subdued, yet no less powerful brand.

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My favorite exhibit was the massive wall of gas tanks portraying all manner of Harley-Davidson designs. In the spirit of how constraints lead to creativity, these tanks show just how vast the visual language of Harley-Davidson has come to be. I had assumed that Harleys always featured flames, skulls, and intricate lettering.

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I was surprised to find the modernist designs from the 70s when they were part of AMF. The simple geometry, clean crayon-like color palette, and logo set in Helvetica scream European modernism. It made me realize how Milwaukee has been absorbing global influences for decades.

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My second favorite exhibit was one with all manner of bikes from recent years. There’s my favorite modern Harley, the V-Rod with its Porsche derived engine. There were many customs with flowing, organic fairings. Each one in this exhibit showed just how wide Harley-Davidson culture flows.

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Before visiting the museum, Harley-Davidson was a brand that I admired from afar. Everything I knew of it was based on the motorcycles I saw on the road. Experiencing its history and its many phases of development, I have come to see why it is such an important facet of motoring culture.

Milwaukee Art Museum

For those in the world of art and culture, there may be no other more prominent icon of the city than the Milwaukee Art Museum, specifically the Quadracci pavilion.

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Though this museum has a storied history over the decades, I wouldn’t blame you if you forgot that and focused on its most recent addition. The Quadracci pavilion opened to fanfare in 2001 and quickly won numerous architectural awards. Its mastermind is Santiago Calatrava — best known for New York’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub. Both buildings feature his signature touches – organic fish bone-like structures bathed in white.

The main entrance is accessed by a long narrow bridge spinning over Lincoln Memorial Drive. It too features one of Santiago Calatrava’s signature touches – the cable-stayed bridge.

We first entered through what is by far the most charming parking lot I have ever seen. The underbelly of the birdlike pavilion is no less beautiful than the atrium above.

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Taking the circular elevator up, we were greeted with the sunbathed atrium. It’s here in this open space that I realized that this museum is quite different than others I have visited. It is a work of art on its own that rejects ideas of optimizing the space used.

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The galleries are housed in a large bridge like structure adjacent to the massive atrium. It ends sharply at the David Kahler building, which houses the permanent collection.

This large rectangular building is far more in line with other museums in its utilitarian design and efficient use of space. Though it was renovated in 2015, It can easily be forgotten in the presence of the Santiago Calatrava addition.

Right above the David Kahler building sits another masterpiece of architecture – the Milwaukee County War Memorial penned by Eero Saarinen. This building, formed mostly of rectangles, is able to hold its own alongside the extravagant Quadracci pavilion.

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Both architects are connected not just by having designed buildings within this museum complex. Eero Saarinen designed the TWA Terminal in New York’s JFK Airport, another building with an organic, avian quality.

Of the many details in the permanent collection, one I loved is the end grain flooring that looked almost as if wood grain was duplicated across the floor.

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The work on display helps the Milwaukee Art Museum punch far above its weight. It reminded me a bit of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

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I loved my time at this museum not for what I saw within, but for how it made me feel. Being on the bridge as the massive wings moved, taking in the etherial light as it traverses the internal volumes, I was awash with the sublime appreciation that I felt at Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia or Saarinen’s TWA Terminal.

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Each biomorphic building stands apart from the rigid, box-like structures in which I spend most of my life.Each is a portal into another time and place, allowing me to escape the urban fabric that surrounds it.

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The surprising part was that I was not in Barcelona or New York, but in Milwaukee. The quiet rustbelt city known for beer, motorcycles and other industry continues to stay relevant by placing a white birdlike structure among the rusting industrial grid.

Hinchley’s Dairy Farm

An hour drive west on the way to Madison lies Hinchley’s dairy farm in Cambridge, Wisconsin. This multigenerational dairy farm opens its doors to show all who are interested the incredibly complex process of creating the milk that we enjoy day-to-day.

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As we parked on the gravel lot outside the farm’s office, we were struck by the serenity of the site. The corn in the distance gently swayed in the wind, the moos of the cows echoed in the distance.

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Our tour was led by Tina Hinchley, the main person running the entire operation. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the business meant that not a single question was left unanswered. She showed us firsthand how the dairy farming processes is as much rooted in the land and traditional ways of working as it is full of modern technology.

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Farming like many other traditional professions is an incredibly low margin business, requiring optimizing every stage of the process. The way Tina described each step, I came to understand that she lives out of a spreadsheet as much as she does in tall boots or on a tractor.

Of particular interest to me were the machines used on site, such as the the Lely milking machines. Each one can automatically read the cow being milked to understand her unique production target, find her udders using a laser, milk her, and then clean up afterwards. Their software interfaces are surprisingly polished, making much of the enterprise software I have used look downright shoddy.

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There was even a droid-like robot in one of the barns whose sole job was to drive back-and-forth, pushing the feed back to within reach of the cows. Clearly automation is already changing the world, but you have to get up close to see it.

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Staring into the eyes of the cows, petting the heads of the calves, stepping through the mixture of mud and excrement, I began understand just how little of the world I know. Milk is a commodity that I can find easily in a supermarket or convenience store anywhere I am. Yet, it is created using an incredibly complex process.

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The people involved are strong and adaptable, staying true to living off the land while adopting technological advances. Milk may not have changed biologically very much in the past few centuries, but it sure has in how its produced, distributed, and sold. Tina showed us that the barns dotted across the green pastures are not just symbols of America’s agrarian past, but emblems of its technological present.

Three views of Milwaukee

What these three places have in common is that they not just invite but almost force the visitor to stop and observe. The understated yet powerful atmosphere in the Harley-Davidson museum allowed me to find an aspect of the brand that I have come to love. The cathedral of light that is the Quadracci pavilion acted as a portal to the otherworldly. The immaculate fields and beautiful animals allowed me to feel a more human and natural part of life.

Together, these three places painted a vibrant and diverse picture of Milwaukee. This is a city where past, present, and future are always in conversation.

The steel bridge I ran under wasn’t merely a relic of the past, but the foundation upon which the futuristic Quadracci pavilion sits. It’s this powerful juxtaposition of old and new, urban and rural that defines Milwaukee’s identity.

Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this.