Jim Wasley: A passion for designing urban waterscapes

Meet Jim Wasley, a professor of architecture at UW-Milwaukee who describes himself as an ecological designer. He is one of three artists or designers who will engage the public along E. Greenfield Avenue.

For more than a decade, Jim has studied and promoted green stormwater infrastructure across Milwaukee from the UWM main campus to the Harbor District. His urban design work has spanned scales from individual buildings to whole neighborhoods. His current work zooms out even further to the citywide scale, considering post-industrial redevelopment opportunities that integrate water across multiple Great Lakes port cities including Buffalo, Cleveland, and Toronto.

Jim considers cities as tapestries whose design benefits from a balance of elements—including nature-inspired green space and smart water management—at multiple scales.

“It’s more about the city as a whole, and the desire to re-weave ecological processes into the city, to make rivers healthy. The idea of rivers being fishable and swimmable—which was articulated in the 1970s and [is] still a kind of dream we're marching toward and still haven't achieved in cities like Milwaukee...”

Jim served as local environmental liaison to Mary Miss when she designed Milwaukee’s Riverwalk in the 1990s. When Mary returned to Milwaukee for WaterMarks, Jim advocated that she focus on the inner harbor area.

From 2010 through 2013, Brico Fund supported Jim's work exploring how Milwaukee’s inner harbor could be transformed in the spirit of post-industrial port cities like Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Malmö, Sweden. He led UWM architecture students in design activities that culminated in architectural conceptual designs intended to inspire green redevelopments. Jim’s work laid the groundwork for the public Water and Land Use Plan subsequently developed and promoted by Harbor District, Inc., the city-aligned nonprofit whose mission is to catalyze a world-class revitalized harbor integrating triple-bottom-line benefits.

“This is what the best of urban design work is doing: solving these stormwater problems, building on these brownfield sites in ways that create ecological habitat,” Jim says. “Where we think it’s only contaminated land it’s suddenly a lush environment. There’s nothing to me more exciting than thinking about that transformation. And the whole harbor should be that way. I think what the Harbor District has accomplished, with their public process master plan and what they got through City Hall, pushes in that direction.”

Jim also got the opportunity to collaborate with preeminent “ecological waterscapes designer” Herbert Dreiseitl to co-teach a studio considering how to integrate water into urban design along E. Greenfield Avenue. Dreiseitl’s design for Potsdamer Platz in Berlin served as the inspiration for Wasley’s design for the fountain at Freshwater Plaza, which marks the northeast corner of First and Greenfield as a gateway to the “Harbor Campus” consisting of the School of Freshwater Sciences at the water’s edge. Both systems are designed to make stormwater present to the public and to clean it without chemical means.

Jim grew up in Boulder, Colo., surrounded by an environmental ethos. The architecture bug bit early. He remembers when visionary architect Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller—father of the geodesic dome—gave a memorable lecture in high school. Jim’s father was a university professor and he found himself hanging around academic settings before embarking on an academic career himself. He arrived in Milwaukee in 1993 and chaired the architecture department from 2011 to 2014.

He says he loves teaching as much as designing and involves his students in hands-on projects when possible. Jim has also enjoyed collaborating with John Janssen, scientist at the School of Freshwater Sciences, whose research includes exploring fish habitats in urban harbors, which are “turning into a great biological reserve of food for fish...” Jim says. “That's a real paradox that I find fascinating.”

Jim’s architecture students also collaborated with John’s freshwater sciences students to design, among other things, a stream to convey treated wastewater from the school’s aquaculture facilities along the front of the new building. “There would be a fish ladder. Fish could spawn and have sex at the front door of the building. I always thought that was a great introduction to freshwater sciences,” he says.

One student vision even had the water pouring from a large fish tank visible at the entryway. It would have been stocked with native fish, with species rotated seasonally according to their temperature tolerance.

While the constructed configuration of Harbor View Plaza puts the possibility of a stream in doubt, there are still plans to install a second aquaculture water fountain at the west entry of the school.

Did you know? Jim convinced his father to install solar panels on their family home with support from a federal grant under the Carter administration in 1978. “It was the most empowering thing I did as a freshman in college,” he recalls with a smile.

A Tale of Two Fountains…

The fountain at First & Greenfield was intended to have a sister built outside the School of Freshwater Sciences. The two fountains would symbolically connect the two ends of E. Greenfield Avenue divided by the railroad bridge. They would also illustrate the “One Water” concept as articulated by German designer Herbert Dreiseitl, who Jim Wasley celebrates as the world’s premier ecological waterscapes designer, responsible for Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. The Freshwater Plaza Fountain recirculates stormwater captured from the adjacent building roof and stored in an underground cistern. The fountain designed for the west entry at the School of Freshwater Sciences is intended to continuously discharge water from the school’s aquaculture facilities into a habitat pool.