Hilton Milwaukee City Center

The Hilton Milwaukee City Center is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Holabird & Root, and built in 1927 in Milwaukee, WI.

Hilton Milwaukee City Center 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Schroeder Hotel between 1928 and 1966.
• Sheraton-Schroeder Hotel between 1966 and 1995.
• Hilton Milwaukee City Center from 1995 until this day.

Its precise street address is 509 West Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee, WI. You can also find it on the map here.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2000. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Kaler Slater Architects.

Holabird & Root was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Otis as the company in charge of the elevators system.

The Hilton Milwaukee City Center can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Hilton Milwaukee City Center was completed in 1927, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Hilton Milwaukee City Center 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 red-colored bricks.

Another material found at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center is light-colored limestone, used for the cladding the first three floors of the building.