Associate Professor Jim Shields, FAIA has won two AIA Wisconsin Design Awards working with HGA Architects, awards which were presented at the May AIA State convention in Madison, WI.
The recent renovation of the glass “Bird Cage Stairs” in the courtyard of the Eero Saarinen Milwaukee War memorial building received a Merit Award for the careful historic preservation of a Mid-Century Modern glass wall using a new technology: 1/4″ thick vacuum insulated glass that added no additional weight to the thin steel fins and did not alter the original detail sightlines.
A new nursing home designed by Shields received the highest level award, an Honor Award, for Juliette Manor in historic Berlin, WI. Asked by the clients to make a huge nursing facility feel “as much like an intimate home as possible”, Shields studied the local vernacular wood-frame single-family homes in Berlin that dated to the post-civil war period. He then used their steeply pitched gabled roofs, white clapboard walls and tall double hung white windows to create a “village” of intimate houses for both resident rooms and for common spaces, connected by a flat-roofed system of passageways and services. “‘Dignity’ is the word that best describes the project,” the jury of experts from outside of the state said in their comments.
