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It started when a few women’s groups had the notion of a “victory memorial,” when lives were still being claimed by the deadliest war in history. People went door-to-door to raise funds. A movie was produced to promote the campaign. Everyone gave, it seemed, from high school students to unions, from department store magnates to beer barons.

The local paper published the names of the war dead, spanning several pages, asking the public to help ensure no one was left out, that no name was left misspelled.

When the War Memorial, designed by Eero Saarinen, one of the great architects of the 20th century, was finally complete with a modest-sized art gallery set inside its pedestal, it was hailed as the symbol of the city by Time magazine. Milwaukee would no longer be known for “Schlitz alone nor that old combination of Miller to Blatz to Pabst,” wrote Arts magazine.

In 1957 it was the Calatrava of its time, snagging headlines around the world.

Milwaukeeans queued up in wake-like procession, streaming into the void at the center of Saarinen’s cruciform-shaped building, to see those correctly spelled names engraved in granite.

Today, that void is more than metaphor for the losses of war. It is a literal condition. As the number of still living World War II and Korean war veterans diminishes, the memorial is used less. Worse, it is visibly crumbling. Our state’s most important memorial, upstaged by the Calatrava, the new icon on the block, is in a shameful state of disrepair, as we’ve recently reported.

After more than a decade of tension about who should have operational control of the War Memorial Center – which now includes a 1975 addition, is owned by Milwaukee County and is largely occupied by the Milwaukee Art Museum – decisions about what happens next at this lakefront spot may be close at hand.

There are lots of decisions to be made, in fact, about the museum’s plans for a glassy atrium and urban park, about millions of dollars in deferred maintenance that’s endangered the buildings and the art inside, about city and county plans for nearby lakefront area improvements.

With all of this planning and change afoot, with institutions necessarily concerned for their own needs, where will the War Memorial fall on the list of priorities? Will anyone champion it again, as Milwaukeeans did a half century ago? Or will our city’s first modernist building continue to deteriorate into an icon of disregard?



MY FAVORITE BUILDING



People are sometimes surprised when I tell them that the War Memorial is my favorite Milwaukee building. They assume, understandably, that the museum’s 2001 expansion or City Hall might top that list. Some say it’s a second-rate Saarinen, an architect best known for the TWA Terminal at New York’s Kennedy Airport and the St. Louis Arch.

For me, though, it is the Saarinen that has burrowed its way into my psyche most deeply. Part of that is to do with its content.

It is a War Memorial. It is not a tribute to peace, victory or even veterans, though it certainly serves those purposes. It is a hard and plainspoken gesture about the most devastating of human conflicts.

Consider its era, that postwar moment when human annihilation from the bomb became imaginable, economic collapse possible and the stark reality of liberated death camps visible in the pages of glossy magazines. Everywhere, American cities busily went about constructing “living memorials,” public plazas, parks and cultural centers that were embedded within the midcentury building boom.

While art serves a lot of purposes, I think it really comes down to two. It either connects us to the human experience or anesthetizes us against it. The proliferation of memorials after World War II, with their flags and quotations, were sometimes the latter, more about the sense of meaning than actual meaning. They were a salve.

Here in Milwaukee, the War Memorial effort was an incredible act of civic will but also a willful act of hope. Still, Saarinen’s memorial addresses a full range of responses to war, then and now, whether we’re seeking to be unsettled or consoled.

With straightforward materials – concrete, steel and glass – he created a place of contradictions. The most dominant feature of the memorial is the hole at its heart, a place of absence. But that exposed courtyard is flanked by a superstructure of monumental presence, of brute force, cantilevered outward.

This weighty structure seems impossibly buoyant, lightly touching the polyhedron-shaped piers that support it. Large rectangular volumes thrust out, while smaller ones sink into the block-like forms, creating inset windows and a dynamic push-pull tension of sliding forms.

Designed to be the critical link between the city and the lake, the building is translucent at street level, with views straight through to water. The front elevation features a glinting mosaic by Edmund Lewandowski.

Inside and outside are barely bounded. A staircase of origami-like concrete forms, enclosed in a jewel box-like glass case, rises above the reflecting pool outside. People passing between floors are brought out into the courtyard as a matter of course.

There is a fine line between the kind of Minimalism that provokes an instinctual reaction and the geometric abstraction that is just sort of blank. Saarinen created one of the most visceral examples in the country two years before Maya Lin, whose Vietnam Veterans Memorial is considered the exemplar of an abstract memorial, was even born.

Beneath it all, was the art.

Milwaukee’s first art gallery, founded by meatpacker Frederick Layton, and a friendly rival, the Milwaukee Art Institute, merged and moved in together, creating the Milwaukee Art Center, what would later become MAM. The inaugural show featured masterpieces on loan from around the country, works by El Greco, Rembrandt, Goya, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso.

People who had never stepped foot in an art gallery were seeing the masters on the lakefront, according to news clippings from the time.



VISION FOR LAKEFRONT DEVELOPMENT



We owe much to the War Memorial, which takes as its charge, “To honor the dead by serving the living.” It changed Milwaukee’s cultural landscape considerably. The art museum owes its very existence to the project.

It also created a broad and coherent vision for lakefront development, starting out as a plan for a collection of buildings set into a memorial park.

The artist’s sketch that appeared in The Milwaukee Journal in 1953 included a music hall, an art gallery and a memorial building all flanking a central court. A large promenade stretching to the water’s edge and an elegant combination of formal and meandering landscape designs were also part of the plan.

In truth, there was a great appetite for the memorial then. Most of the $2.7 million needed for the project was raised with relative ease and, unlike with the Santiago Calatrava-designed museum expansion, was less dependent on the large donations of a few donors.

The cultural centers were a harder sell then, though, and the project was downsized. The art center was tucked in the basement and the plan for a performing arts building would wait until 1969, when the Performing Arts Center went up along the Milwaukee River.

Since the War Memorial opened, that vision has been largely lost. Lakefront development has been haphazard, too focused on individual buildings and ambitions of institutions.

The context of the Saarinen and the connection it knit between city and lake was greatly diminished by the David Kahler addition in 1975. The memorial no longer appeared propped on a bluff like a table, and the fledgling museum had a door near the lake that no one could find. Later, the Calatrava wing was inelegantly joined to the Kahler and created an additional low-slung hurdle between the urban fabric and lakefront.

Now, the museum hopes to build a modest atrium entrance right where those hard-to-locate doors are now shuttered. There are a lot of good -- and urgent -- reasons to do this. It would reconnect the museum’s galleries and the lake, preserve gallery space and solve considerable and urgent water infiltration problems.

I’d be more inclined to support the idea if the plan addressed the overall problems of the site and was integrated into a larger plan for the lakefront. The messy north side, where people park and enter the campus confused about where to go, particularly needs to be addressed.



(The museum has, since the Calatrava was under construction, indicated an interest in doing another expansion to the north at some point. )

In the meantime, here is my request, which goes out especially to a new generation of preservationists and design-minded Milwaukeeans. Let’s not neglect one of the best buildings – if not the best building – in Milwaukee. For the men and women who serve in the military, past and present, for the Milwaukeeans who expended themselves to get the thing built, let’s move this tragedy-in-the-making to the top of the list of priorities.

If need be, let’s go door to door.

Earlier in the week, I posted an image of the War Memorial to Facebook, which prompted many readers to share their impressions and stories (I won't be able to get Betty Blexrud-Strigens' wonderful Viewfinder analogy out of my mind for years to come!). Images in this post courtesy the Milwaukee Art Museum's institutional archives.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. Follow her coverage on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.