Behold: The new home for the Milwaukee Public Museum — to be renamed the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin — in downtown Milwaukee. Kind of looks like four laundry hampers, though the official PR says “the rock formations at Mill Bluff State Park in central Wisconsin served as design inspiration.” Credit the architectural firms of Ennead Architects (New York), with Kahler Slater (Milwaukee).

Like many state museums, this one is a hodgepodge of history, nature (what used to be called natural history), ethnography (i.e., Indians), DEI nonsense (hey, it’s Wisconsin), and a miscellany of artifacts and freakish stuff that was the stock-in-trade of old-time Midwestern raree shows: a stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker (extinct). . . the William J. Uihlein Postage Stamp Collection. . . a deck of “Apache playing cards”. . . the skeleton of a mammoth found by farmer John Hebior in Kenosha County. . . costumes from Deakin's Lilliputian Comic Opera (a theater company of midgets circa 1880s). . . The DeFlores Collection of Disney Memorabilia, 1965-1987. . . and a clay seal imprinted with a hieroglyph signifying the name Tutankhamen (a.k.a. King Tut). Heck, I’d pay ten bucks to see all that!

Below is an artist’s rendering of the lovely public plaza attached to the laundry hampers — as usual in American landscape design, an ambiguous zone with no formal elements, arbitrary tree plantings, and apparently no seating (homeless magnets). It’s how we roll!

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