Faison Building

The Faison Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Clark, Tribble, Harris, & Li, in association with LS3P Associates, and built between 1987 and 1989 in Milwaukee, WI.

Faison Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as 100 East Wisconsin.

Its precise street address is 100 East Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, WI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Faison Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Milwaukee and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Postmodernism style. Because of that, the Faison Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on March 16^th 2025, and was also included in the Milwaukee Register of Historic Places on November 15^th 2024.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2016.

Clark, Tribble, Harris, & Li was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with LS3P Associates.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Faison Building a reality:

• King Guinn Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• M.A. Moretenson Construction Company as the Main Contractor

The Faison Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Faison Building was completed in 1989. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The Faison Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Faison Building uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete columns and beams.

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 of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features cream-toned Texas limestone, bronze-tinted glass windows, and metallic spandrels with ornaments. The building is topped with equal-span arches and crowned by gabled roofs adorned with ornamental spheres and gilded disks.

At street level, the building is fully clad in precast concrete panels, organized by three multi-story arches.