As part of this morning’s Third Thursday meet-up, Juli Kaufmann, of Fix Development, gave the Local First Milwaukee members a tour of the Clock Shadow Building at 130 W. Bruce St. This building, man, I’ll struggle to recall all the neat, creative, imaginative, sustainable, and responsible things her company did in developing and constructing this building. Really, this thing should be a MODEL for future construction in Milwaukee.
Here are the highlights as I remember them….
+the building is already at 100% occupancy!
+Fix Development spent about a year in pre-prod and a year in construction on the Clock Shadow.
+the building has the FIRST “regenerative” elevator in the country (the second one is going in the Empire State Building soon). Really, this thing actually generates power when in use.
+as nifty as the elevator is, the building is actually designed to make the stairs a more attractive route. The stairs are made from locally-sourced ash, from trees that were affected by the emerald ash borer disease and had to be harvested. The stairs curl up inside the east end of the building – open from ground floor to the 5th floor, and have a cloth mural hanging down the center of the stairwell.
+The building was constructed with 50% recycled materials, and 90% of the construction waste was recycled or repurposed. Many of the doors and windows inside the building are recovered or recycled – check out that photo from inside one of the women’s bathrooms! The recovered/repurposed doors and windows add a lot of character to the building’s interior.
+The building has a geothermal heating system.
+The roof is covered with a vegetable and flower garden, so it’s decorative and food-producing. Look at the Clock Shadow’s roof in the photos below. Compare that to its neighbors rooftops. Why don’t we have more “green roofs” in Milwaukee? It seems to just make good sense.
+All the rain-water that hits the roof is flowed to an underground cistern, where it is then used in the flushing of the building’s toilets!
-Here is the Business Journal‘s write-up of this morning’s event. 🙂
-Here is Part One of this blog entry.
