Trifter

Tourists from around the world and any resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the US is familiar with the Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum located on the Lake Michigan shore. Most people love it and some ridicule it but no one is indifferent to this magnificent structure.

It is an addition to the older, grayer Milwaukee Art Museum and some say it isn’t a good match. It may not  blend and merge as a part of the older building; it sets itself apart as a glowing white masterpiece reaching out and up. It scoops up the fluid lines of nature and gives wing to Santiago Calatrava’s expression of mother earth.

The original buildings known as the Milwaukee Art Museum were designed by an architect named Eero Saarinen in 1957. In 1994 the director of the Milwaukee Art Museum commissioned Calatrava to design the new addition. This was the famed architect’s first project to be built in the US. The pristine whiteness of his creation is like a winged structure poised and ready to fly out over the blue expanse that is Lake Michigan. It not only enhances the shore but connects the lake to the city itself by way of the Reiman Bridge. This pedestrian bridge leads visitors from the downtown area consisting of hotels, restaurants and shopping to the Lake Michigan shore and the entrance to the Calatrava addition.

The sheer beauty of the distinctive “fins” set on top of the addition have been called both wings and waves. Either term connects them to nature. Wings to the clouds or waves on the lake, they are a breathtaking vision to all visitors.

But they extend beyond aesthetics, they are a movable construct made of 72 steel fins. They can be adjusted to control temperature and light inside the entrance hall to the museum. The Brise Soleil is 217 feet wide and weighs in at 90 tons.

An architect will see the Brise Soleil as a masterpiece of form and function. An artist will  be overwhelmed by its beauty. A small child will look up at his mother and ask, “Mommy, do you think it might fly away?”

Santiago Calatrava’s early career as a builder of bridges is exhibited all over Spain, the rest of  Europe and the world. Naturally, when plans were being made in 1999 to raise funds to build bridges spanning the Trinity River, his name came up. He was awarded the  design project in 2004 and a ground-breaking ceremony took place in 2005.

Now, four years later we find that the necessary steel has been shipped in from Italy and is awaiting inspection procedures. This first bridge in a planned parcel of three will have a center arch with the equivalent height of a 40 story tall building. What a marvelous addition to the Dallas skyline it will be – whenever it is finished.

As of April 2009 it hasn’t been started therefore it obviously it won’t be finished by July 2009 although that was the original projected date of completion.  As Murphy’s Law dictates – stuff happens. In this case the “stuff” was a lack of steel plus safety concerns over sandy deposits on the river bottom into which construction crews planned to embed the pilings. The delay in building the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge seems advisable and necessary. 

The current completion date is expected to be sometime in 2011. Santiago Calatrava’s “Bridge over Dallas Waters” will definitely be a sight worth waiting to see.