Photo by Virginia Small
Zilber Park
On a recent weekday morning, Dyionesious Flagg lingered with her dog Tony in Zilber Park in Milwaukee’s Brewery District. Flagg, a social worker, has come here nearly every day before work for the past three years.
Photo by Barrett Doherty courtesy The Cultural Landscape
Julie Bargmann
Julie Bargmann
“It’s a peaceful spot. I love it,” she said. She likes the grassy hill that anchors one end and the contrasting gray gravel. She appreciates the shade provided by tall maple trees and the low concrete benches and seat walls. “The sculptures [of Joseph and Vera Zilber] give a bit of history about where this all came from. You can tell everything was really well-thought-out, very intentional,” Flagg said. The park was a key factor in her moving nearby.
Zilber Park, on 10th Street south of Juneau Avenue, was designed by Julie Bargmann, the founding principal of D.I.R.T. studio (“Dump It Right There”) dirtstudio.com in Charlottesville, Virginia. In October, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announced Bargmann as the winner of the inaugural Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.
This “pocket park” was one of the first projects within the redevelopment of the 21-acre former Pabst Brewery complex, which became a pilot for pursuing the highest levels of environmental sustainability. https://thebrewery.org/
Urban Edge Award
Bargmann spent time Milwaukee in 2007 upon receiving the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Urban Edge Award from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP). Bob Greenstreet, dean emeritus of SARUP, recently explained: “After the Marcus Prize [for architects] was created, attorney Bruce Block expressed interest in establishing a comparable award focused on the urban, rather than architectural, scale.” Block helped fund the new biennial prize, which was called the Urban Edge Award uwm.edu/sarup/make/partners/urban-edge.
“We held a jury comprised of international jurors and selected Julie Bargmann as the first recipient,” Greenstreet continued. “She was wonderfully enthusiastic, and selected the Pabst Brewery area, then under consideration for development,” as the focus of her studio classes.
“It was a requirement of the prize that the winner come to Milwaukee, work with our students, meet our community and lead a studio dealing with Milwaukee urban development,” said Greenstreet. After that design work was presented, representatives of Towne Realty/Zilber Ltd. asked Bargmann to design the park. “This was always our hope—for the prize winners to undertake work in Milwaukee and leave their mark.”
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Industrial Strength Beauty
D.I.R.T.’s website describes the Brewery District’s design aesthetic: “The Brewery redevelopment captures the working spirit brewed at the Pabst complex since 1844. Being careful not to water down the industrial-strength beauty of the historic site on the edge of downtown, the landscape armature accentuates the long cavernous streets while reinterpreting workyards as public parks. Built over time, The Brewery will evolve as a new community, celebrating the industrial heritage of PBR within a contemporary city.”
The Brewery District ultimately has achieved platinum certification—the highest level—through the international Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Design and development guidelines have focused on historic preservation, brownfield reclamation, storm water management, environmental sustainability, and principles of New Urbanism. https://thebrewery.org/ Green infrastructure was implemented throughout the district.
Jack Lundeen, manager of Best Place Coffee and Spirits at the Historic Pabst Brewery, appreciates how the new district is steadily becoming “a true neighborhood, as more and more diverse housing attracts residents and more businesses get established.”
The neighborhood was inaugurated in 2008 with Zilber Park. It is dedicated to the late Joseph J. Zilber and his wife Vera. Zilber undertook the Brewery’s ambitious redevelopment after an earlier proposal for an entertainment district with national chain venues failed to win support from Milwaukee’s Common Council. That plan would have demolished most of the historic buildings and was opposed by local businesses and community groups. Instead, 60 percent of the original Pabst structures have been preserved and repurposed, and other buildings were constructed.
Mike Mervis, who served as vice president for Zilber Ltd. during the Brewery’s development, said that Zilber told his staff, “We need to innovate. We need to take risks and to know the risks we’re taking.” Mervis said that Bargmann and her team at D.I.R.T. “were nothing short of amazing” in guiding options and parameters for the project.
Environmentally Sound
In addition to a complex drainage system beneath Zilber Park, all streets within the district drain into bioswales planted with native plants, meaning that storm water is all managed on-site. Bioswales and permeable pavement were completed under Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewerage District oversight and working with Zilber staff, said MMSD spokesperson Bill Graffin.
Zilber Park is located west of what eventually became the Brewhouse Inn & Suites, which showcases the building’s brewing history, including massive copper brewing vats.
“The pocket park is small but built tough to hold up to the giant grain elevators looming over it,” the D.I.R.T. website explains. “This landscape registers the extremes of the northern climate, the seasons marking the cumulative phases of … this Great Lakes post-industrial city,”
The park’s back perimeter is a “gabion wall” that encases rocks recycled from the site and serves as a waterfall or ice sculpture, depending on the season. Many people visit the park, including for wedding photos, said a Brewhouse employee. Zilber Park received a Mayor's Design Award from the City of Milwaukee in 2010.
A Forward-Thinking New Prize
The Oberlander Prize, which includes a $100,000 award, two years of public engagement activities focused on the laureate’s work and landscape architecture more broadly and is named for the late landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, is bestowed on a recipient who is “exceptionally talented, creative, courageous, and visionary” and has “a significant body of built work that exemplifies the art of landscape architecture.” The prize jury said of Bargmann: “She has been a provocateur, a critical practitioner, and a public intellectual. She embodies the kind of activism required of landscape architects in an era of severe environmental challenges and persistent social inequities.”
Bargmann, a native of Westwood, NJ, is a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and the founder of D.I.R.T. studio. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (1987). In 1989-90 she was a Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.
According to Dorothée Imbert, chair of the seven-person Oberlander Prize Jury, qualities that made Bargmann stand out include: “her leadership in the world of ideas, her impact on the public landscape, her model of an activist practice, and her commitment to advancing landscape architecture both through teaching and design.” As Bargmann has said of herself: “The two ends of my barbell are designer-artist and political animal.”
Creating Anew on Post-Industrial Sites
For more than 30 years as a teacher and a landscape architect, Bargmann has principally focused on contaminated, neglected, and forgotten urban and post-industrial sites. “Unearthing the raw ingredients of design from waste and wastelands defines my life’s work,” she told TCLF. “Both … my teaching and my methodology as a designer address the social and ecological imperatives to reclaim degraded land. Integrating regenerative technologies with design propositions and built landscapes embodies my contribution to the discipline of landscape architecture.” Since the 1990s, she has created alternatives to counter the limitations of typical remediation (defined as “correcting a fault”) by offering more dynamic modes of regeneration by “creating anew.”
For many of her recent projects, Bargmann and D.I.R.T. have acted as the conceptual design lead, working with other experts throughout the planning and design process, and sticking with many projects through construction. Multi-disciplinary collaborations with architects, historians, engineers, hydrogeologists, artists, and, most importantly, the residents of the area in which she is working, are hallmarks of her approach. Artistically, she is strongly influenced by the work and writings of Robert Smithson, the American artist known for his land art installations including Spiral Jetty, and the American artist Eva Hesse. Bargmann describes her approach as “rigorous intuition or intuitive rigor.”
Today, Bargmann is “increasingly drawn to seek a larger canvas, namely, post-industrial cities and regions. There exists massive potential and sublime beauty in places that may seem, at first blush, to be trashed. Sites, neighborhoods, entire cities—they are full of energy waiting to be recognized, released, and given new form.”
Addressing Environmental Justice
In “Justice from the Ground Up” from the book The Just City Essays - 26 Visions for Urban Equity, Inclusion and Opportunity, Bargmann wrote about the “toxic imprint” of industry on most of the sites she’s worked on. “It’s a byproduct of the human pursuit of greater material wealth and a more convenient and comfortable life,” he continued. “In other words, it’s the legacy of progress, for better or worse.” Redressing that legacy is a matter of social justice.
Bargmann’s interest in industrial and toxic sites dates to her early childhood. TCLF described her influences: “Crammed into the family station wagon with her seven brothers and sisters, she was transfixed by the refineries and other industrial complexes visible from the New Jersey Turnpike. Bargmann was also taken with the design of the planned community of Radburn in Fair Lawn, NJ, by landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley, notable for its shared common spaces. Of Radburn’s ‘collective backyard,’ Bargmann said: ‘Maybe that’s where I got one of those first moments of feeling that design made a place inclusive.’”
Bargmann’s visionary design legacies in Milwaukee exemplify the continuing relevance of the long-established “Wisconsin Idea.” This cornerstone concept was first articulated in 1904 by University of Wisconsin President Charles Van Hise. He declared that he would “never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state.” Since then, the Wisconsin Idea has helped frame and foster Wisconsin’s public universities, with research applied to solving problems and improving health, quality of life, the environment, and agriculture for all citizens of the state.
Bargmann’s early role in helping to envision the regeneration of the abandoned Pabst brewery--and the subsequent efforts by many forward-thinking collaborators--showcases how landscape architects can take a leading role in collaborative solutions that meld science and art.
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