See Construction Progress at New Natural History Museum

Milwaukee Public Museum future museum construction. Photo taken Dec. 19, 2024 by Graham Kilmer.

At the corner of N. 6th Street and W. McKinley Avenue, the future Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) building is taking shape.

“So the first floor went up pretty quickly, and now, we’re already working on the second floor,” said Katie Sanders, MPM chief planning officer, during a media walkthrough Thursday.

MPM broke ground on the $240 million project, which it’s calling the future museum for now, in June. The foundation is finished and the footings are installed, and the concrete structure is beginning to rise out of the ground. Once finished, the new museum will be five stories and 200,000 square feet.

Construction is running on schedule and is expected to finish by late 2026, in time for opening in 2027.

“The construction process is long,” Sanders said. “It’s not a simple endeavor to build a new museum; it’s also not a simple endeavor to build such a uniquely designed construct.”

The building— designed by architects from New York-based Ennead Architects and Milwaukee-based Kahler Slater — is supposed to resemble rolling bluffs, with a ground floor based on the convergence of the three rivers that create the Milwaukee estuary: Menomonee, Milwaukee and Kinnickinnic.

This creates a “really, really interesting geometry problem,” for the construction crews led by Mortenson, according to General Manager Kurt Theune.

“There’s also not a lot of right angles in the building,” Theune said.

The project is funded with $45 million from Milwaukee County and $40 million from the state. MPM is attempting to raise another $150 million in private donations and $5 million in federal grants. Ellen Censky, MPM president and CEO, recently said MPM had raised nearly 75% of its $150 million goal.

The new building will replace the existing museum at 800 W. Wells St. Millions in deferred maintenance at the existing facility were a primary reason MPM pursued a new building.

Built in 1962, the building is more than double the size of MPM’s future museum. The new building will be smaller than the Wells Street museum, driven, in part, by a decision to store some of the 4 million items in the museum’s collections at an off-site storage facility.

Some of the existing exhibits will be transferred to the new museum. However, others, like the Streets of Old Milwaukee will not. The popular streets exhibit is being replaced with a new gallery called “Milwaukee Revealed” that will offer an immersive gallery experience designed to resemble various Milwaukee streetscapes, with exhibits based on the city’s commercial history and neighborhoods.

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