Two recent UW-Milwaukee graduates poured time and energy into a 3D model that brings to life the impact of the School of Architecture & Urban Planning on Milwaukee’s built environment.
The results of their labor, an 8-foot by 12-foot model of downtown Milwaukee, is on display in the advising office of the Architecture & Urban Planning Building.
Architecture students Anika Gingle and Aime Rabadan began working on the model in fall 2023, funded by a Support for Undergraduate Research Fellows grant. Over the next two years, they each spent more than 500 hours on the project, studying maps and photos of the city, creating detailed digital models of individual buildings and printing each one on a 3D printer. The assembled model includes nearly 400 buildings.
Another student, Quinn Fister, created a key showing which buildings and other infrastructure — such as pedestrian and bike trails — involved work by faculty or graduates of the School of Architecture & Urban Planning. The project left the students impressed by UWM’s influence.
“Seeing how UWM alumni have impacted Milwaukee’s downtown is really inspiring and motivating,” Rabadan said.
The power of 3D
Making 3D models is an important exercise for architecture students, said Karl Wallick, professor of architecture and department chair, who first proposed the project to Gingle and Rabadan.
“When you are looking at a physical model, all of the sudden everybody understands what you’re talking about,” Wallick said. “I like physical models as a teaching tool for students to understand the scale of a building they’re proposing,” as well as other details, such as how daylight will reach a structure.
The Milwaukee model was inspired by an existing model of Chicago, created by the Chicago office of architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, said Kyle Reynolds, professor of architecture and head of school, who also helped supervise the Milwaukee project. The Chicago model expanded to include many more buildings over time, and today it is on display at the Chicago Architecture Center.
UWM’s School of Architecture & Urban Planning is the only accredited architecture program in Wisconsin. The school expects to have 900 students enrolled this fall, an 80% increase over the 500 students enrolled in 2020.
Building the city from scratch
The Milwaukee model began with a simple printout of the city map, which Gingle and Rabadan circulated to faculty members, asking them to mark any structures that they or alumni or retired instructors had helped design. They used the map to determine which part of the city to include in the model: from the lakefront west to about Sixth Street, and from State Street south to roughly Jefferson Street in the Third Ward.
The next step was to choose the model’s size and scale. After creating several prototypes, Gingle and Rabadan settled on a 1-inch to 50-foot scale, “which allowed us to incorporate window openings and additional architectural details, enhancing the accuracy, depth and just overall visual quality,” Gingle said.
Throughout her time at UWM, Gingle was employed in the school’s rapid prototyping lab. Her deep experience with 3D printers and laser cutting tools gave the project a head start, but it was still labor intensive. Rabadan and Gingle laughed when they described the hectic late nights spent printing 3D buildings and painting the chipboard that became the model’s streets and curbs.
They completed the model by the time they graduated in May 2025. Both were immediately hired by Milwaukee architecture firms — Gingle as a design coordinator for HGA, and Rabadan as an architectural designer for Dan Beyer Architects.
A source of alumni pride
Most of the buildings in the model are dark gray, but if a building was designed by people with UWM connections, Gingle and Rabadan painted it off-white. Orange numbers on the model link to the nearby key, which names the building and the people who worked on it.
As instructors and alumni have visited the model, they have pointed out additional buildings with UWM contributions. Staff are keeping a spreadsheet of those additions, and the buildings are gradually being painted off-white.
During a recent campus visit, Gingle and Rabadan talked about returning one day soon to paint off-white the buildings that they will work on in their new professional roles.
Wallick and Reynolds hope to engage students in expanding the model, to include additional areas of Milwaukee and more structures with UWM connections.
“Milwaukee’s built environment is really exciting because of the projects our alumni are doing,” Reynolds said.
