Carpenter Tower

skyscraper
art-deco
WI
Milwaukee

About the Carpenter Tower in Milwaukee
Architect and team
Architectural style
Spaces and uses
Structure and materials

The Carpenter Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by A. Keymar & G.W. Mack, and built in 1930 in Milwaukee, WI.

Carpenter Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The Carpenter Tower is also known, or has been known as, Catholic Knights Insurance Society Hotel, or Catholic Kights Tower.

Its precise street address is 1040 W Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, WI. You can also find it on the map here.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1951 and 1960.

Building's timeline

Construction completed

1930

Restoration

1951

Restoration

1960

years ago

2024

Architect and team

A. Keymar & G.W. Mack was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Architectural Style

The Carpenter Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.

Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.

The Carpenter Tower was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

Spaces & Uses

It has a total of 16 floors.

When it opened its doors to the public in 1930, the Carpenter Tower was primarily used as Commercial space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Residential space.

Materials & Structure

The Carpenter Tower uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features limestone slabs and polished granite slabs in the base, decorative bricks in the walls, and limestone trim on the two uppermost two.

Another material found at the Carpenter Tower is aluminum, used for the window frames.