adventure rock - milwaukee, wisconsin

Adventure Rock is a community climbing gym carved out of a defunct industrial warehouse located in the Fifth Ward, a demographically and economically diverse neighborhood on Milwaukee’s south side. The original building, an introverted, utilitarian structure from the 1940s, was entirely gutted and built back to its structural bones, turning the existing interior labyrinth of cramped production and storage areas into one large, undivided space that facilitates its new purpose as a bouldering center. The project exemplifies how the carcass of a functionally obsolete and urbanistically inadequate building can be reinvented and transformed into a vibrant neighborhood anchor, one that activates the sidewalk and engages with the surrounding community both visually and programmatically.

In an effort to give the building an inviting presence along the street and maximize natural light within, a sizable stretch of the foreboding, nearly opaque concrete-block perimeter wall was removed. In its place, a tall, angled glass curtainwall carves into the original footprint of the warehouse―an assertive formal gesture creating an oblique colonnade that spatially mediates between exterior and interior and forcefully choreographs the entry sequence. A bright-red plane articulates the colonnade’s wedge-shaped ceiling, folds down at its narrow end, and then turns into a continuous horizontal ledge below the glass curtainwall. At the opposite end, the ceiling plane pierces through the glazed vestibule and leads visitors to the check-in counter inside.

The gym’s support program―changing rooms, lockers, bathrooms, community classrooms, a weight room, and a yoga space―were located along the building perimeter, leaving unencumbered an expansive open hall that exposes the building’s deep steel roof girders. A large, amoebous climbing vessel occupies the center of the space like a sculptural object, its folding, slanted walls juxtaposed against the orthogonal grid of the muscular ceiling structure above.

Framed by the large glass curtainwall and highly visible from the street, the climbing vessel acts as Adventure Rock’s billboard that advertises the gym’s principal purpose to passers-by and imbues the boxy CMU warehouse with an unmistakable, subtly iconic identity. At night, the illuminated bouldering surfaces come alive, washing the dark sidewalk with light and broadcasting into the neighborhood the roving silhouettes of aspiring alpinists as they strive to reach the top.