Shoehorning athletic facilities and a 50-space parking garage into the Milwaukee School of Engineering's Kern Center took plenty of creative thinking from designers and builders.

The 210,000-sq.-ft., $31 million complex fills three-quarters of a city block on the edge of soon-to-be-redeveloped Park East Freeway. Construction began in April 2003 and is slated for completion in October. Hunzinger Construction Co. of Brookfield is the general contractor.

The college athletic complex will include hockey and basketball arenas, all-sports gymnasium, indoor running track and a fitness center.

The project's lead gift came from the Robert and Patricia Kern Foundation, and the building is named for MSOE Regent Robert Kern, who is founder, chairman and CEO of Generac Power Systems of Waukesha, Wis. The Kerns also provide significant scholarship money for the school.

advertisement

On Brewery Site

Early on, the site's previous life as the original Blatz Brewery, which was demolished in the mid 1980s, added to the construction drama. Local geology and a neighboring structure also played into the equation.

"We were aware that it was a used site, as are all sites downtown," said John Anderson, Hunzinger project manager. "But we were not aware, nor was the owner aware, of the extent of what was still there."

In addition to concrete foundations and brick walls, an old, intact brick vault was found underground.

"Fortunately we found that with the bucket of the backhoe rather than with the backhoe itself," Anderson said.

The site also presented some natural obstacles.

"There's a river under there, basically a field of cobbles that flows from the east side toward Market Street," Anderson added. "It's part of the geological history of Milwaukee, when all of downtown used to be a swamp."

Pointing out that most of the downtown area is built on fill, he said, "Whenever we deal with downtown we have to take into consideration deep foundations. If you go shallow you are sitting on the water table of the Milwaukee River."

He said the underground water required "a great deal of pumping" during excavation and waterproofing of the underground ice rink walls.

Next-Door Church

Another concern during excavation was the depth of the dig immediately adjacent to traffic on Broadway, a busy downtown street, and Grace Lutheran Church on the site's southeast corner.

Preserving the church's fragile stained glass meant treading lightly throughout excavation, earth retention work and construction - a significant challenge while putting a hockey arena nearly 40 ft. below grade.

"Working within 7 ft. of the church annex foundation and going down about 40 ft. required underpinning and a special earth retention system," Anderson said.

Eric Bahner, senior engineer and estimator for the Edward E. Gillen Co. of Milwaukee, designer of the earth retention system for the project, said safeguarding the street and adjacent church required "some pretty specialized engineering."

"We used a drilled-in-place soldier wall, with high-capacity tie-back anchors," he added. "At the church we had to put in a permanent system because the loads there cannot be taken by the new structure itself. We had to adjust the design parameters there."

He added that careful execution of the plans in the field was also essential.

A constant eye was kept on the church and its fragile glass throughout the process.

"We took great pains not to create unnecessary and avoidable ground vibrations," Anderson said, explaining that the drilled pier system was chosen over a driven pile system for the sake of the church.

"We established benchmarks in several locations on the church and checked surveying data periodically throughout the project," he added. "We were able to demonstrate that it didn't move."

The construction project has presented, and will continue to present, a wealth of educational opportunities for students at MSOE.

"We have interns employed by Hunzinger working on the management of the project," said Kenneth McAteer, vice president of operations for MSOE. "We have also had a lot of student involvement in planning the project, getting their input in what the facility might include and helping us with the project statement.

He added that students tour the facility on a regular basis, looking at the fire protection system, HVAC components and structural elements of the building. Contractors working on the project give presentations to the students and interested faculty members.

"After the building is constructed, it will remain something of a teaching laboratory," McAteer said. "Students will be able to go in and see how systems function. We are labeling things within the building and using color schemes to show how systems work together."

Architects Burn Midnight Oil

Fitting the various required components onto a 63,000-sq.-ft. site was accomplished through a series of intense design workshops, according to David Uihlein, president of Uihlein Wilson Architects of Milwaukee.

"It was a very laborious design effort with our partners at RDG Sports in Des Moines," Uihlein said, giving RDG the lion's share of the credit. He added that an original plan called for a field with a 200-meter track. The hockey rink component was added to the project during the design process.

"Our partners from RDG would fly in and we would meet with the building commission, which included members of the MSOE community and the donors, to talk over concepts," he said.

Design team members would then employ a "charrette" process to put the results of those discussions on paper within hours of the meeting.

Uihlein said "charrette" is French for the carts used by Beaux Arts students in the mid-19th Century, and in modern times it has come to mean a process of architects burning the midnight oil.

The charrette found team members gathering to draw within hours of the meeting, while discussions were still fresh in everyone's minds. Then next day they would take the drawings to the building commission to make sure they had addressed all of the previous day's concerns and ideas. This design workshop process was repeated six times to hone the building's design.

"We took big blocks of space and moved them around, turned 90 degrees, stacked them up and hung them over the street in some places," Uihlein said. He added that the bit of the 160-meter indoor running track that protrudes from the building's north facade is a remnant of an earlier design in which the building overhung the street in a fairly bold fashion.

"It's really a simple building that took a long time to coalesce and gel," Uihlein said. "It is big boxes of space that are arranged in a way that I think is fundamental, understandable and efficient."

The building's most striking architectural feature is the 2.5-story elliptical glass facade of the fitness pavilion, which faces north, overlooking the former Park East Freeway.

"We like to think of it as a beacon to the northern entrance to downtown Milwaukee," Uihlein said.

The Kern Center is effectively the first structure in the Park East corridor, the several-block strip of cleared land created by the recent demolition of the Park East freeway spur. Development plans for the corridor are under way.