Wisconsin Tower

The Wisconsin Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Weary & Alford Company, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Milwaukee, WI.

Wisconsin 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 building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Mariner Tower between 1930 and 1939.
• 606 Building.

Its precise street address is 606 West Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee, WI. You can also find it on the map here.

At the time of its completion in 1930 the Wisconsin Tower incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included electronically controlled elevators, which did not require an operator.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2005 and 2006.

Weary & Alford Company 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 John W. Mariner as the Main Developer.

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

The Wisconsin 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.

The Wisconsin 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 bedford stone.

Other materials found at the Wisconsin Tower include, brown marble, used at the front entrance, and levanto marble, which was brought from Italy and can be found covering the walls of the main lobby.