EDITORIAL: Architecture should not look backward in Port’s modern era

Thomas Kinkade, the artist whose saccharine renditions of old-timey small-town main streets and neighborhoods drip nostalgia from millions of calendars and prints on kitchen and living room walls all over America, never painted a Port Washington scene, but his spirit seems to abide here in a reverence for the city’s traditional architecture.

The problem with that is that the city’s traditional architecture is a myth.

Even so, the Plan Commission recently withheld approval of a townhouse building featuring a creative design to be built into the bluff along Jackson Street in part because it is not “classic” enough and thus is too modern for the city.

The community has a number of historic buildings, properly designated as such through the efforts of the Port Washington Historical Society, the State Historical Society and the National Register of Historic Places, but they are historic mainly because of their age and reason for existence, and not their design.

The city’s downtown architecture is a hodgepodge representing different eras and styles. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s an agreeable mix that makes for a welcoming city center.         

The east side of the downtown area, however, is bookended by a massive power plant and municipal water treatment plants, and needs buildings that exhibit distinctive architecture to complement the aesthetic advantages of Port Washington’s fortunate place on the edge of Lake Michigan. The development surging in the marina district is an opportunity to fill that need.

The developers of the Jackson Street townhouses, John and Jan Lanser, are attempting to do just that by retaining a Milwaukee architectural firm that has received deserved acclaim for its smart, contemporary designs for urban residential projects, including townhouses and lofts, and two striking buildings on the UWM campus, the Lubar Enterprise Center and the School of Freshwater Sciences.

The firm, Continuum Architects and Planners, has designed the townhouses to be built in the space between the Jackson Street public stairway and the Ozaukee Interurban Trail with features that fit the nature of this pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, including street-level entrances and balconies overlooking the street. The plan shows living units not in a monolithic mass, but behind a textured facade with a variety of materials that gives each townhouse a distinctive look.

Is the design modern? Of course it is, and it should be. This is a 21st century building that will add its visual vitality to a new era of Port Washington lakefront development. What’s more, if it were not modern, it would be out of place, located, as it will be, a scant half-block from another stunningly modern building, the Newport Shores condo and restaurant complex planned by Ansay Development.

For its building, Ansay also chose one of Wisconsin’s leading architectural firms, Rinka, which produced the lauded design of The Couture building planned for Milwaukee’s east side, among other projects across the country. Its design for the Newport Shores building, with its vast expanses of glass and soaring eaves and balconies, will add drama to the beauty of the Port Washington waterfront.

As for the townhouses, we hope Plan Commission members can set aside their quibbles over what they view as an insufficiently dated look and not inhibit the refreshingly original thinking that is evident in the architects’ work (and that the Design Review Board, which will weigh in on the final plan, agrees).    

The developers of both the Lanser and Ansay buildings are, of course, banking on the financial success of their projects, but on their way to that goal they are gifting their city with something it has long needed—outstanding architecture.