The Calatrava Wings: What a City Decides It Is For

Santiago Calatrava is a Spanish architect and engineer whose work tends toward the structural extreme of what buildings can do: bridges that look like bones, train stations that look like birds in mid-flight. In nineteen ninety-four, Milwaukee's art museum selected him to design a new pavilion on the lakefront. It was his first built project in the United States.

The Quadracci Pavilion opened in two thousand one. What made it immediately famous were the wings. The Burke Brise Soleil is a moveable sunscreen mounted on the pavilion's roof with a wingspan of two hundred seventeen feet. When it is open, the building looks like it is about to leave the ground. When it is closed, it looks like a ship at rest on the lake. Both interpretations are intentional. Calatrava said he wanted the building to be responsive to the culture of the lake, to boats and sails and always-changing light.

The wings open every morning and close every evening. When winds exceed twenty-three miles per hour for more than three seconds, sensors close the wings automatically. It takes three and a half minutes for the full movement to complete.

Milwaukee in two thousand one was not obviously a city at the top of American architectural ambitions. Steel mills had closed. Schlitz had closed. The manufacturing base was contracting. The Calatrava was a declaration about what the city wanted to be instead: a lakefront city of culture and public gathering. Whether that declaration has been fulfilled is a conversation Milwaukee is still having.

The museum has its wings. The lake is still there.