mantel ortho - cedarburg, wisconsin

Located at the outskirts of Cedarburg, a rural town 30 miles north of Milwaukee, Mantel Ortho is a small clinic that reinvents the exhausted typology of conventional medical offices and their introvert, fluorescent-lit ambience. The owner, a young orthodontist, decided to relocate her rapidly growing practice to a new state-of-the-art facility on an empty lot at the boundary between town and farmland. Highly visible form the nearby county road, the project’s success relies on an architecture that conveys the very ethos and high standards of her own professional work – uncompromising purity, flawless efficiency, and rigorous precision.

Keeping a deliberately minimal profile to reduce its visual impact on the existing wall of mature trees along the site’s eastern edge, the building is composed of two complementary forms, their volumetric overlap visually moderating the perceived length of the building. The programmatic heart of the clinic, a spacious, open treatment bay with central lab and sterilization rooms, occupies a light-gray volume that brackets a low-slung, dark-clad base volume, where the reception, waiting room, and other support spaces are located. A continuous roof perimeter beam embraces a grouping of exterior spaces carved out of the base volume – a trellised forecourt, a covered entry walk, and a small courtyard that connect to the waiting room inside. A row of thin aluminum fins supports the roof plane and acts as a brise-soleil protecting the generously glazed entry area from the harsh western sun.

Along the street, where lab and sterilization rooms were mandated to be windowless, the light-gray volume protrudes from the charcoal base and frames a long, striated green wall, its animated and robust texture a stark contrast to the building’s otherwise smooth surfaces. Alluding to the banded pattern of adjoining farm fields colored by their competing crops, the green wall functions as an abstract billboard, a deliberately artificial and somewhat wistful vestige of the area’s vanishing agricultural past.

Inside, a wood-slatted ceiling plane guides patients to the reception desk and cradles the adjacent, light-flooded waiting room. Optimized procedural flow strategies informed the clinic’s overall program layout, with a central circulation spine connecting to the five treatment stations in the open-bay operatory, a tall space with exposed roof beams and a glass curtainwall that frames generous views from the clinic’s treatment areas into a small meadow of native grasses.