How time passes! The next installment of the “‘What Milwaukee Is Made Of” series aired earlier today on WUWM-FM Radio’s popular Lake Effect program. And it’s already been posted on our podcast webpage (see link at bottom). This is the show I’ve been particularly looking forward to doing, because it’s devoted to the Cream City’s Art Deco masterpiece, the Wisconsin Gas Building.
And that means we’re also featuring the two beautiful building-stone varieties displayed on the exterior of this magnificent 1930 skyscraper.
Higher up on the building, the main expanse of handsome but unsourced ocher-tinted brick is trimmed by southwestern Minnesota’s Oneota Dolostone.
But the real show-stealer is the much more flamboyant metamorphic rock used to face the bottom two stories. This is the Morton Gneiss. Also hailing from Minnesota, it is in fact a migmatite or “mixed rock” that is actually a composite of several types that formed during the far-distant Archean eon. With its earliest constituent isotopically dated to more than 3.5 billion years ago, the Morton is not only the oldest building stone you’ll see in Milwaukee, it’s the oldest used architecturally in any quantity over the entire planet.
In this episode, host Sam Woods and I discuss the origin and significance of both the lovely Oneota and the chaotically patterned Morton, discover the geologic origins of the beautiful bronze sunburst adorning the entrance, and also explore the immense role played by Art Deco design in the history of American architecture
To listen to the new Wisconsin Gas Building segment—and to its three predecessors—pay a visit to the Milwaukee Public Radio webpage devoted to our series.