The University Club Tower is a Contemporary skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Peter Ellis as lead architect, and built between 2004 and 2007 in Milwaukee, WI.
Its precise street address is 825 N Prospect Ave, Milwaukee, WI. You can also find it on the map here.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Peter Ellis as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
Commonly known as SOM, the firm was founded in Chicago in 1936 and has grown to be one of the largest architecture firms in the world.
Even long after its founders passed away, SOM has remained at the top of worldwide architectural excellence by attracting visionary architects. Amongst their most notorious partners we find names such as Gordon Bunshaft, Bruce Graham, Walter Netsch, Adrian Smith, Myron Goldsmith or David Childs.
SOM has also managed to grow and evolve to tackle the architectural challenges of each time, whatever those might be, and today is committed to aspects as important as efficiency and sustainability, as core values of their designs.
With a legacy spanning decades, SOM continues to shape the skylines of cities around the world, and is a usual contestant in any competition or selection process to design large-scale or iconic buildings and structures.
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 University Club Tower a reality:
The University Club Tower can be categorized as a Contemporary building.
Contemporary style architecture builds on top of the principles of Modernism and Postmodernism, but incorporates other variables which might not have been that important in the past, but certainly are today, such as technology, sustainability, inclusivity, and others.
From a historical point of view, it is hard to categorize things from a not-so-distant time, and therefore we choose to categorize most buildings built after the year 2000 as "Contemporary". It is possible that as time goes by and we, as a society, gain perspective on the things happening today, we'll be able to look back and recategorize all these buildings into more concrete subsections, some of which might not even exist today.
That being said, and even thought being a contemporary building, probably taking advantage of modern materials, construction techniques, and technology, the design of the University Club Tower is inspired by the postmodernism style.
The University Club Tower reaches an architectural height of 446ft (136m), with the last accesible floor being 377ft (115m) off the gorund. It has a total of 35 floors, 34 above ground and 1 basements.
In regards to parking space, the building has a total of 106 spots available, which roughly equals 3 spots per floor (above ground).
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 2007, the University Club Tower has mainly been used as Residential space.
The building features luxury residential floors, some of which include private elevators. Residents enjoy amenities such as a fitness center, a rooftop garden, an indoor pool, a meeting room, parking, and a wine cellar.
The University Club Tower has a total of 53 residential units throughout its 34 floors.
The University Club Tower 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 white precast concrete in prefabricated panels with floor-to-ceiling windows.
On the South and East facades, the residential units also feature large recessed balconies.
At ground floor, residents access the building through a four-story entrance portal, highlighted by columns clad in white and gray stone and glass canopies.
