The Milwaukee Art Museum released designs for a proposed 17,000-square-foot, two-story building that would give the museum a new entrance on a prime spot of neglected lakefront and more gallery space for its permanent collection. Credit: Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum released a new design for a previously proposed addition that would give the museum an entrance on a prime, if sorely neglected, spot of lakefront.

The new building, designed by Milwaukee architect Jim Shields, of HGA Architects and Engineers, will be 17,000 square feet and is part of a larger $15 million project to renovate and reorganize the museum's permanent collection galleries,said Vicki Scharfberg, the museum's communications director.

The museum has been able to move forward with its plans after reaching a long-term agreement over the operation and public support for the War Memorial Center and Milwaukee Art Museum, which received unanimous backing from the Milwaukee County board in July.

Major repairs and renovations have been put off while the museum and War Memorial Corp. spent years negotiating the deal. The museum has raised about $13 million toward its $15 million goal, Scharfberg said.

The height and footprint of the new design are similar to the earlier MAM proposal in 2012, but the look and feel of the new addition is quite changed. The new design includes both solid and glassy massing on the exterior, two floors inside (rather than one) and cantilevered areas outside.

Initially conceived of as a soaring atrium with a cafe, seating areas and a transparent ceramic silkscreen on the exterior, the new plan calls for more functional exhibition space for art, including a 5,000-square-foot gallery for feature exhibitions and a dramatic sculpture gallery that will be visible to passers-by. The shift in design buys the museum about 8,000 square feet of additional gallery space and expands the footprint by about 1,000 square feet.

"I love it," said Dan Keegan, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, who said that the idea for making the changes surfaced when museum officials started looking at scale models and realized how much they could accomplish with the extra space. "I think it's the right solution at the right time."

Keegan said he and his team started out thinking of the new building "as the sunglasses" for the 1972 David Kahler addition.

"When we really realized that that was going to be an open 8,000-square-foot space, that was the moment at which we realized there are some other possibilities here," he said. "That was the moment of collective sea change."

The museum's new building will also provide a new entrance where the museum's front door once was before the opening of the Santiago Calatrava-designed addition in 2001. Since the Calatrava opened, the old entrance has become an unused and deadened space, with cracking concrete and weeds outside.

As it stands now, museum visitors have to walk the length of about four football fields to reach the museum's galleries from the largest parking lot on the north side. The new lakeside entrance will give visitors a second and much closer point of entry — and places to sit by the lake as well.

The southeast corner of the new building will also cantilever out over the walking path on the lakefront, which is Keegan's favorite moment, he said.

"It's this nice interactive moment for the building," he said.

The overall project also includes major renovations of existing space, which will bring galleries in the War Memorial complex that the museum occupies up to art-world standards for environmental controls. It has been plagued for several years with leaks. The museum is also reclaiming existing space for exhibiting art for an overall growth of 21,000 square feet for art.

The rethinking of the galleries will do several things. It will bring the American art collection, which is in several places now, into a "single presentation" on the second floor, Keegan says. It creates a new photography and new media gallery in the lower level and it expands the space for modern and contemporary art on the main floors.

Shields had previously described a need for a structure that won't enter the "pitched battle of the two masters on the lakefront," referring to Calatrava and Eero Saarinen, one of the great modernist architects of the 20th century, who designed the cruciform shaped and cantilevered War Memorial building that is adjacent to the museum.

Shields, an award-winning architect who also designed nearby Discovery World, was responsible for the museum's current two-story, cantilevered concept but left the project team in February. UrbanMilwaukee.com first reported Monday that Shields had left the project; the architect confirmed that information during a phone interview.

"Yes, I was involved in that scheme, yes," Shields said. "I was hoping to just quit the project," he added, declining to say why. He referred questions about the parting to the museum.

"In my role as the museum's director, I didn't want to delve too deeply into that," said Keegan, who said the team at HGA is moving forward with Shields' ideas.

The new design represents the fourth addition on the site. The new structure will extend the east end of the Kahler building by about 200 feet. In addition to the new art spaces, there will also be a coffee shop and a place to purchase tickets in the new building.

"I think it's much more in harmony with the architecture that's there," Keegan said, adding that the rhythms of the new building correspond with Saarinen's aesthetic vocabulary behind it.

The $15 million project is part of a larger $25 million plan being executed with Milwaukee County. The county will spend $10 million toward the repairing of the Saarinen and Kahler buildings, which are owned by the county and house the museum's collection galleries.

The museum will close the permanent collection galleries in the fall for construction and the renovations, but the museum will remain open and its major events — such as the Lakefront Festival of Art, MAM After Dark, Yoga and Art in Bloom — will continue. Feature exhibits will continue in the Calatrava wing. A grand reopening of the museum is slated for October 2015.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. Follow her coverage on Twitter (@artcity), Facebook (www.facebook.com/artcity) and Instagram (marylouises). Email her at mschumacher@journalsentinel.com.