In Milwaukee, where manufacturing is the city’s economic backbone, it’s natural that Harley-Davidson, one of its most celebrated hometown companies, would honor the city’s industrial heritage in its archival home-The Harley-Davidson Museum.
Located on 20 acres (8 hectares) along Milwaukee’s Menomonee River near the factory district, the museum is a vision of how architectural metal is used creatively to reflect the industrial tradition Harley-Davidson helped to build.
Museum Director Stacey Watson puts the museum’s design in simple terms: “Harley-Davidson designs and manufactures motorcycles. When we looked at the design for the museum, we looked to the forms and shapes and materials of factories.”
Guided by the architectural team, museum planners explored a myriad of unique ways to incorporate architectural metal products into the building’s features, often in unexpected ways.
“You see it in big ways and small ways,” Watson said. “Our primary focus was to portray the strength and honesty of the Harley-Davidson brand and industrial heritage of the area.”
From the exterior steel skeleton to the galvanized close-mesh bar grating in the interior grand staircase, flooring and pedestrian bridge, metal is the prevailing material used for its form and function.
Some metal components, like the counters, railings and other trim elements, were put through a chemical blackening process, instead of a traditional paint, to fully express the natural roughness associated with a factory environment.
Strategically placed throughout are specialty metals from Tampa, Fla.-based McNICHOLS’ Designer Metals, a collection of designer-quality products that were familiar to the museum’s design architect, Pentagram Architects, New York. Pentagram had used McNICHOLS’ architectural metal in its home office, as well as in other client projects over the years.
Assisted by HGA Architects and Engineers, Milwaukee, the architect of record, the design team chose a variety of McNICHOLS’ metals to complement the building’s array of exhibits that showcase Harley-Davidson’s 106 years of manufacturing its acclaimed motorcycles, engines and accessories.
While some of the metal features were custom fabricated, most were created from standard shapes of rolled, punched and fabricated steel, “so it feels more like a real factory and less like a custom building,” said James Biber, FAIA, of Pentagram, who led the museum’s design team.
The outside structural columns are constructed of exposed steel I-beams. The inside metal was created as an extension of the same rough metal look to maintain the industrial authenticity throughout.
Galvinized metal bar grating, popular as platforms in commercial settings, comes in varying hole sizes. The close-mesh variety, McNICHOLS GCM-1, was chosen as the primary accent metal for the museum’s interior pathways because it is a comfortable walking surface for high traffic areas, and is ADA compliant.
The bar grating is most noticeable from the lobby where it is used as the treads and landing on the entry staircase. The staircase leads to a suspended pedestrian bridge-also fabricated from bar grating-that links the motocycle gallery to the engine exhibit room.
To produce and install the metal features, Pentagram and HGA turned to Milwaukee’s Grunau Metals, the metal fabricator responsible for helping select, construct and finish the metals.
Grunau Metals applied a chemical blackening process to some of the galvinized steel parts to produce the time-honored patina found in the decades-old factories that have operated in Milwaukee since the turn of the 20th century.
Many of the complex fabrications, like the pedestrian bridge, were built in Grunau Metal’s Milwaukee steel fabrication shop workshop and assembled and welded on-site. Unique to the bridge is the use of the bar grating as handrail panels to match the walking surface, a design decision that required the two elements to link like hinges on a door.
“We loved the idea of using the same material on the handrails, treads and walkway, because it gave a transparent, yet rough industrial look,” Biber said.
“The challenge for us was fitting the handrail panels and walking surface together,” said Brad Landry, operations manager at Grunau Metals. “It was like lacing your fingers together. The bar grating came in 3-foot- [1-m-] wide panels, so we had to piece the bridge together panel-by-panel.”
Even the most subtle finishes involved hundreds of decisions by the entire team, including Maltbie, Mount Laurel, N.J., the museum’s exhibit specialist, and Mortenson Construction, Brookfield, Wis., the general contractor. “Each decision had its own set of considerations, from aesthetics to the cost of the fabrication to scheduling, so it was a fluid process,” Biber said.
Other creative uses of metal bar grating abound. In some locations, like the glass-enclosed corridor linking the main museum to the building housing the site’s restaurant café and retail shop, bar grating is used to cover the air vents along the floor.
The same close-mesh bar grating was installed as guardrails on the observation deck. Placed upright in 3-foot-wide panels, this metal application required a custom-welded handrail cap to cover the raw edge of the “up-ended” metal.
One of the most intriguing uses of bar grating is on an exhibit itself, where the bar grating was made to simulate a hill climb. Installed at a significant pitch, the bar grating supports several motorcycles that appear to be motoring uphill.
Like the bar grating, perforated metal is featured in novel ways, such as accent walls and lighting fixtures. Eye-catching in the museum’s café, Cafe Racer, are walls of perforated metal panels that are gray powder coated. The panels wrap around an elevator shaft that is painted in Harley-Davidson orange, so the color shows through the holes. The perforated metal wrap doubles as a backdrop for large photo murals featuring famous Harley-Davidson racers.
Similarly, light fixtures in some areas are covered with long cylinders of perforated metal to resemble motorcycle exhaust pipes where light glows through tiny holes without the need for diffusers.
On the grounds of the museum, McNICHOLS carbon wire steel mesh is used as infill panels on the guard rail along the river’s edge for safety and aesthetics. Fabricated by Atlas Ironworks of Milwaukee, the wire mesh is powder coated in black, another nod to factory chic.
Compared to the 106-year storied history it represents, the Harley-Davidson Museum is still in its infancy, but it is fast becoming a legend of its own, a place where motorcyles reign and metal meets the road-in more ways than one.
Mary Estes is principal of Estes and Co., Tampa, Fla.
