密尔沃基攀岩体育馆及公寓综合体 美国威斯康辛州，密尔沃基

业主：曼德尔集团

建筑面积：88 600 平方英尺

项目类型：攀岩体育馆及住宅

竣工时间：2018 年

摄影：约翰·J·麦考利

Client: Mandel Group

Building Area: 88 600 sf

Program: Rock Climbing Gym and Housing

Completion Year: 2018

Photography: John J.Macaulay

攀岩体育馆及公寓综合体是位于密尔沃基市中心北部边缘的一个多功能开发项目，该建筑外形保守，包括一个18 000 平方英尺的室内攀岩体育馆和46 个小公寓单元。该项目位于一个被称为“洪堡庭院”的城市扩建场地，直到20 世纪70 年代初，“密尔沃基路”铁路的修理厂就设在这里，现已不复存在。在闲置了几十年之后，洪堡庭院近年来出现了零星的建设活动，以缓解该市快速增长的市中心人口压力。

相比慢慢渗透到这一地区典型的开发商风格——毫无创意、千篇一律的建筑，每一幢建筑都涂上了无数的覆层材料——攀岩体育馆及公寓综合体被认为是一个有意建造的坚固的庞大建筑，一个大胆的原生态建筑，旨在反映真实的规模和朴实无华的工业建筑肌理，这些建筑用来定义洪堡庭院的肌理。

建筑的外立面——耐候钢，辅以纤维混凝土板、铝和玻璃进行加强——反映了场地的内在矛盾，它深刻地塑造了密尔沃基作为“世界工厂”的历史角色，同时也反映了一个快速转变的城市吸引了白领工作的愿望，和对迷人的城市环境感兴趣的年轻人。缓慢变化的氧化波纹钢板几乎覆盖了整个建筑体量，其风化表皮经过精心改造，与铝型材和混凝土面板清晰、精确的线条呼应。

混合建筑方案被组织成一个简单的四层矩形体。在这栋建筑的南侧和东侧，模块化的公寓利用了邻近社区绿地的开阔视野，进入了最近重新归化的密尔沃基河流域。60 英尺高、大跨度的体育馆空间本身向北延伸，以容纳建筑末端的两堵垂直玻璃墙——高高的开口，向北大道上的行人展示并有效地宣传室内的攀岩活动。北大道是一条繁忙的东西走向的大道，连接着密歇根湖和密尔沃基西郊。体育馆的北墙没有窗户，最大限度地利用了内部的攀岩面，它变成了一个高度铰接的、有节奏的平面，由一系列倾斜的铝制翅片组成。翅片逐渐变化创造了一个动态的垂直纹理，根据光线条件和观看角度的不同而变化，这是对内部起伏的攀岩表面的抽象呼应。横向光条将翅片隔开，绿色的丙烯酸有机玻璃透镜为墙壁增添了意想不到的色彩，在黑暗后可进一步活化墙壁。在顶部，北墙折叠成一个水平屋顶平面，漂浮在主建筑体量上方五英尺的地方，以容纳一个连续的长廊，为健身房全天提供充足的自然光。夜晚，长廊赋予建筑一种标志性的存在感使其成为一个柔和发光的社区灯塔，照亮了洪堡广场阴郁的城市天空。

Belay MKE is a mixed-use development at the northern edge of downtown Milwaukee, a formally restrained building that combines an 18,000-square-foot indoor rock-climbing gym with 46 small apartment units. The project occupies an urban brownfield site known as Humboldt Yards, where the repair shops of the now-defunct “Milwaukee Road” Railway were located until the early 1970s. After sitting idle for decades, Humboldt Yard has seen sporadic construction activity in recent years to absorb some of the pressure from the city’s rapidly growing downtown population.

Contrasting the typical developer fare slowly pervading the area – uninspired, bromidic buildings, each plastered with a myriad of cladding materials – Belay MKE was conceived as an intentionally solid,monolithic block, a defiantly raw building designed to reverberate the physical scale and muscular presence of the unpretentious industrial structures that used to define the fabric of Humboldt Yards.

The building’s restrained exterior palette – weathering steel, accentuated by fiber concrete panels,aluminum, and glass – reflects the inherent contradiction between a site profoundly shaped by Milwaukee’s historic role as the “Workshop of the World” and the aspirations of a swiftly transforming city attracting white-collar jobs and young people interested in an engaging urban environment: A slowly transforming skin of oxidizing corrugated steel panels wraps almost the entire building volume,its weathering skin in a carefully edited dialogue with the crisp, precise lines of aluminum extrusions and concrete panels.

The hybrid building program was organized as a simple 4-story rectangular volume. Lining the south and east edges of the building, the modular apartments take advantage of expansive views of the adjacent community greenspace and into the recently re-naturalized Milwaukee River basin. The 60-foot high long-span gym space itself projects out to the north to accommodate a pair of vertical glass walls at the end of the building – tall apertures that expose and effectively advertise the climbing activities on the inside to the passers-by on North Avenue, a busy east-west thoroughfare connecting Lake Michigan to Milwaukee’s western suburbs.

The gym’s north wall, required to be windowless to maximize the usable climbing surface inside,transforms into a highly articulated, cadenced plane organized by a series of oblique aluminum fins.The fins’ gradually shifting shapes create an animated vertical texture that changes depending on light conditions and the angle from which they are viewed, an abstract echo of the undulating climbing surfaces inside. The fins are spaced by horizontal light strips, their green acrylic lenses adding an unexpected splash of color that further activates the wall after darkness. As it reaches the top, the north wall folds into a horizontal roof plane floating five feet above the top of the main building volume to accommodate a continuous clerestory that provides the gym with an abundance of natural light throughout the day. At night, the clerestory gives the building an iconic presence, transforming it into a softly glowing neighborhood beacon illuminating Humboldt Yard’s somber urban sky.