Wisconsin Gas Light Building

The Wisconsin Gas Light Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Eschweiler & Eschweiler, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Milwaukee, WI.

Wisconsin Gas Light Building 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 Wisconsin Gas Light Building is also known, or has been known as, Gas Light Building, or Milwaukee Gas Light Building.

Its precise street address is 626 East 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 1950 and 2005.

Eschweiler & Eschweiler was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Wisconsin Gas Light Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Wisconsin Gas Light Building 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.

The Wisconsin Gas Light Building 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 bricks of different tones, with the darker ones being used at the bottom to create the illusion of the building being taller than it actually is.

Other materials found at the Wisconsin Gas Light Building include, marble, used for the cladding the first two and a half floors of the building, cream city brick, a light yellow colored brick made of clay from the area was used to crown the building and complete the dark to light gradient that the facade fetures as you look at it from bottom to top, terracotta, used to incorporate some art-deco ornamentation to the facade at certain levels, and copper, used to adorn the spandrels with typical art deco motives.