FreelandBuck
Alive and Coarse and Strong
Alive and Coarse and Strong depicts Milwaukee’s physicality through its architecture. The piece recalls the city’s historical dedication to work by creating an overlay of images of three notable Milwaukee buildings; City Hall, the Alverno College Chapel and the Milwaukee Museum of Art.
“The name of the piece is taken from a poem by Carl Sandburg first mentioned by a panel of WCD user groups. The poem was written about Chicago, but seems to apply to Milwaukee also. He called it the “City of Big Shoulders” and we thought that reflected the strength of the labor that went into creating the fabric of the city. By collaging together these three buildings, we really tried to evoke the space of the city collectively.”
The piece does not overlay exact images of the buildings, but instead we blurred the layers that exist in the digital realm so they are different than in the physical realm. This creates a mixed reality between the two realms.
“We explored different techniques when compositing the images for printing. So, we used the qualities of wood and number 8 stainless steel and its mirror-like properties to create a varied material substrate.”
FreelandBuck also gives a nod to Milwaukee’s future as a high-tech manufacturing center in Alive and Coarse and Strong by using precision manufacturing to evoke the cutting-edge manufacturing common in Milwaukee today.
About FreelandBuck
FreelandBuck is a Los Angeles and New York City-based architecture and art practice founded and led by Brennan Buck and David Freeland. Established in 2010, the office makes buildings, spaces, and objects that engage the public through layers of meaning, illusion, and visual effect.
With each project, FreelandBuck aims to create distinct spaces that contribute to a more stimulating, aesthetically engaging, and challenging world. The firm’s architecture and public artwork is notable for its visual richness, intricate spatial sequences, and use of drawing and imagemaking at an architectural scale.
FreelandBuck is a winner of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices Prize in 2019. They were named a finalist for the 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, a member of Architectural Record’s 2017 Design Vanguard, and a winner of the 2017 AIA LA Next LA Award for their project, Second House. Other recent projects include Stack House, a residential project in Los Angeles that was both designed and developed by FreelandBuck; Down the Block at the MRT Health Center in LA, Parallax Gap, an installation originally commissioned by the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum that will be exhibited at HALO in downtown LA later this year; and the LA headquarters of Hungry Man Productions, among other residential, commercial, and cultural commissions.
Brennan Buck is licensed architect and academic based in New York. Prior to co-founding FreelandBuck, he was assistant professor in Studio Greg Lynn at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. He has worked in the offices of Neil M. Denari Architects and Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles and Walker Macy in Portland, Oregon.
He is a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, CT and he has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt Institute, Syracuse University, and the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. His writing on technology and representation within the discipline of architecture has been published in numerous academic and professional journals. Buck is a graduate of Cornell University and the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design.
David Freeland is a licensed architect in the State of California and New York with over 15 years of experience practicing architecture. He has worked on award winning residential, commercial, urban and institutional projects with FreelandBuck, and previously with Michael Maltzan Architecture, Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design, RES4, and AGPS. He is a frequent collaborator with developers and planners, with a focus on projects in Los Angeles including his public prize-winning entry for the 2006 Prop-X competition.
Freeland is a faculty member at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) in Los Angeles and has taught design studios at UCLA, and USC. From 2006-2012 he was faculty at Woodbury University where he was instrumental in the design of the digital fabrication lab. He is a graduate of University of Virginia and the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design where he received his Masters of Architecture.
Q&A with FreelandBuck
