A "Milwaukee in Stone and Clay" Companion, Part 10: A Different Kind of Metamorphism | Quadracci Pavilion, Milwaukee Art Museum (2001)
This series complements my recently published guidebook, Milwaukee in Stone and Clay: A Guide to the Cream City's Architectural Geology. Henceforth I'll just call it MSC.
The MSC section and page references for the building featured here: 5.40; pp. 113-116.
In the Pavilion's Windhover Hall reception area. Facing eastward and toward Lake Michigan.
The premium-grade Carrara Marble used for this building's flooring and baseboard skirting began as Triassic-to-Jurassic limestone deposited as carbonate-shelf sediments in the great Tethys Ocean. But it was not until the Oligocene and Miocene epochs, almost 200 Ma later, that it was metamorphosed into true marble. The compressional tectonics then in play caused a large fragment of the crust, the Tuscan Nappe, to override it and subject it to immense heat and pressure.
Under those conditions the Carrara was cooked into a finely crystalline rock ranging from pure white to vein-streaked and heavily brecciated. All those varieties have been quarried in the Apuan Alps, just a short way up the Italian coast from Pisa, since at least the final decades of the Roman Republic.
The flooring pavers you see here are the pure-white form of the stone that has been polished to a high-gloss shine. And this is the result on a grim December day, when the slate tones of the lake and diffused glare filtering through the nimbostratus deck above it combine weirdly and fill this space. The marble undergoes metamorphism of a different kind.
This splash of aquamarine and pinkish-gray tints across its surface speaks strongly of an aqueous realm quite alien to the one just beyond these windows. Milwaukeeans outfitted in sweaters, down coats, and stocking caps are bathed in the tones of a tropical sea—perhaps the Tethys itself.
Ironically, all one has to do to remove oneself from this dreamlike play of light is to rotate one hundred and eighty degrees and look at the hall's interior. There all is chaste whiteness again. As we'll see in the next post of this series.
This site and many others in Milwaukee County are discussed at greater length in Milwaukee in Stone and Clay (NIU Imprint of Cornell University Press).
The other photos and discussions in this series can be found in my "Milwaukee in Stone and Clay" Companion album. Also, while you're at it, check out my Architectural Geology of Milwaukee album, too. It contains quite a few photos and descriptions of Cream City sites highlighted in other series of mine.
A "Milwaukee in Stone and Clay" Companion, Part 10: A Different Kind of Metamorphism | Quadracci Pavilion, Milwaukee Art Museum (2001)
This series complements my recently published guidebook, Milwaukee in Stone and Clay: A Guide to the Cream City's Architectural Geology. Henceforth I'll just call it MSC.
The MSC section and page references for the building featured here: 5.40; pp. 113-116.
In the Pavilion's Windhover Hall reception area. Facing eastward and toward Lake Michigan.
The premium-grade Carrara Marble used for this building's flooring and baseboard skirting began as Triassic-to-Jurassic limestone deposited as carbonate-shelf sediments in the great Tethys Ocean. But it was not until the Oligocene and Miocene epochs, almost 200 Ma later, that it was metamorphosed into true marble. The compressional tectonics then in play caused a large fragment of the crust, the Tuscan Nappe, to override it and subject it to immense heat and pressure.
Under those conditions the Carrara was cooked into a finely crystalline rock ranging from pure white to vein-streaked and heavily brecciated. All those varieties have been quarried in the Apuan Alps, just a short way up the Italian coast from Pisa, since at least the final decades of the Roman Republic.
The flooring pavers you see here are the pure-white form of the stone that has been polished to a high-gloss shine. And this is the result on a grim December day, when the slate tones of the lake and diffused glare filtering through the nimbostratus deck above it combine weirdly and fill this space. The marble undergoes metamorphism of a different kind.
This splash of aquamarine and pinkish-gray tints across its surface speaks strongly of an aqueous realm quite alien to the one just beyond these windows. Milwaukeeans outfitted in sweaters, down coats, and stocking caps are bathed in the tones of a tropical sea—perhaps the Tethys itself.
Ironically, all one has to do to remove oneself from this dreamlike play of light is to rotate one hundred and eighty degrees and look at the hall's interior. There all is chaste whiteness again. As we'll see in the next post of this series.
This site and many others in Milwaukee County are discussed at greater length in Milwaukee in Stone and Clay (NIU Imprint of Cornell University Press).
The other photos and discussions in this series can be found in my "Milwaukee in Stone and Clay" Companion album. Also, while you're at it, check out my Architectural Geology of Milwaukee album, too. It contains quite a few photos and descriptions of Cream City sites highlighted in other series of mine.