The Art Institute of Wisconsin

After The Art Institute of Wisconsin (AI), a school of the visual and practical arts, selected a 1922 industrial building listed on the National Register of Historic Places to be its Milwaukee home, the design team was challenged with the goals of accentuating the historic character of the space while meeting the programmatic requirements common to all Art Institute schools.

The design team was able to transform 35,000 sf of space and an additional 15,000 sf of reworked adjacent tenant space, common public spaces, and building utility/infrastructure space into a higher education facility that balanced the modern and the historic. In addition, the team worked under an expedited project schedule in order for the doors to be open for the first-ever class of incoming students in the fall of 2010.