cc image from alumroot on flickr

As painful and divisive as the recent events in Madison, WI have been, I’ve been overcome by the openness and civic use of the Wisconsin State Capitol and the adjoining Capitol Square.  Mammoth recently posted an excellent piece on observations of the social action and public space as they’ve intersected at Tahrir Square in Cairo.  In that same vein, I’d like to highlight the civic spaces and public buildings  in Madison as another interesting case.

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Madison is a planned city, home to the state’s capital and the state’s flagship university.  James Doty, a territorial judge passing through the area in the 1830s loved the site so much, he purchased land, platted streets and lots, and convinced the territorial legislature to designate his paper city as the new capital.  Doty selected a site on the natural isthmus between lakes Mendota and Monona for the city, designating the highest ground for a capitol building and public square.  Influenced by Washington, DC, Doty planned a rectilinear grid of streets, augmented by radial avenues emanating in all directions from the new Capitol Square.  The narrow nature of the isthmus cut most of those radial avenues short,  but the natural setting more than made up for the truncated corridors.

image from Madison: A Model City – UW history collection

Several buildings served as Wisconsin’s capitol, occupying the same square.  The state looked into expanding their current building when it was destroyed in a fire in 1904 – just five weeks after the legislature voted to suspend the Capitol’s fire insurance policy.

A new capitol arose soon thereafter.  The current building was constructed between 1906 and 1917.  Keeping in line with the grandiose ambitions of the city itself, the planned building would have eclipsed the US Capitol in height – though the final design brought the dome to a height of 284 feet – three feet shy of the US Capitol.  The Capitol has four wings, oriented to the cardinal directions.  Each wing looks towards one of the radiant streets from Madison’s original plan.  The building is grandiose, ornate, and inspiring – keeping to the City Beautiful movement of the time.

cc image from kern.justin on flickr

Around the same time as the new capitol’s construction, the City enlisted the help of John Nolen, an aspiring planner and landscape architect to help beautify the city’s parks and public spaces.  Nolen crafted a plan to improve Madison’s parks, connect the city to the surrounding lakes, and generally improve the city’s civic spaces.

images from Madison: A Model City – UW history collection

Nolen also offered improvements for State Street.  State Street was the one radial avenue that cut across Madison’s grid without interruption from one of the city’s lakes.  State Street also served as an important link between Madison’s two key institutions – the State Capitol on the eastern end, and the University of Wisconsin campus on the western end.

image from Madison: A Model City – UW history collection

Many of Nolen’s ideas, like those of many City Beautiful plans, were never fully implemented.  Nevertheless, the Capitol Square remains a key civic space in Madison.  State Street is still the key link between the Capitol and the University, lined with bars, restaurants, and shops.  The terminal view of the Capitol Dome is a constant one for anyone in the city.

cc images from the queen of subtle and BoonLeeFamPhotography on flickr

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Given the nearly constant expansion of the security impulse, the most remarkable thing about Madison’s plan, civic spaces, and public buildings is just how public and civic they remain.  The Capitol Square hosts numerous events, from weekly outdoor orchestra concerts to Madison’s weekly farmer’s market.

Even the mundane daily uses are exemplary of the Capitol’s civic nature.  Due to the city’s location on the isthmus, often the fastest way to get from one side to the other on foot is to walk through the Capitol.  Unlike far too many civic buildings in Washington, DC, the Wisconsin Capitol remains open to the public, not fortified and protected like so many other civic buildings.

Nothing made this openness more apparent than the nearly constant protesting taking place over the past week and a half on the Capitol grounds and within the Capitol itself.

cc image from Lost Albatross on flickr

Two videos from Matt Wisniewski capture the spirit and the civic use of this particular space.

Protesters continue to occupy this public space, designating one corridor as a sleeping area, neatly organizing sleeping bags along corridor walls.  They’re surviving on generous pizza donations from around the world.  Obviously, the Capitol wasn’t designed as a residential structure and the constant use is taking its toll – however, police officers dispatched to move the protesters out of the public space so janitorial staff could clean decided to join the masses in the civic space instead.

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I can’t imagine a similar event taking place in any of the public buildings in DC.  None of them remain as open as the Wisconsin State Capitol.  Philip Kennicott warned of the implications of closing the Supreme Court’s main entrance, symbolic of a larger issue with our civic and public buildings:

All across Washington, the doors, terraces and plazas of our essential public buildings have been closed off to the public, likely forever. But the closing of this front door, which will now be used only for exiting the building, is not just another front door lost to paranoia. It is the loss of what may be the nation’s most important portal.

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By a thousand reflexive cuts, architecture loses its power to mean anything. The loss to the citizens of the United States is enormous. We are becoming a nation of moles, timorous creatures who scurry through side and subterranean entrances. Soon, we will lose our basic architectural literacy. The emotional experience of entering a grand space has been reduced to a single feeling: impatience in the august presence of the magnetometer.

Madison’s alt-weekly newspaper (appropriately titled for the city as The Isthmus), like many weeklies, has had some of the best coverage of the ongoing political saga unfolding in Madison.  Bill Lueders stepped back on Thursday, offering perspective on the past two weeks, and their implications on the future of life and politics in the state of Wisconsin:

But as a lifelong resident of Wisconsin, I’m saddened — truly and deeply saddened — by what Walker has set in motion. It will change the state forever, causing profound and lasting damage, no matter how the budget stalemate plays out.

Scott Walker’s declaration of war against Wisconsin’s teachers, nurses, social workers, 911 operators, prison guards, park rangers, sanitation workers, snowplow operators, engineers, police officers and firefighters — and their inevitable decision to join the battle — could be for Wisconsin what the attacks of 9/11 were for the nation. It will create a deep before-and-after divide, between a time of relative innocence and a time of perpetual conflict and insecurity.

The difference is that the attacks of 9/11 were external, and stirred a sense of national unity. What has been fomented in Wisconsin is a rupture among ourselves, one that will ensure acrimony and contention for many years, perhaps decades. The dispute will be not just between Walker and his tens of thousands of newly impassioned enemies, but between the state’s citizens — worker against worker, neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member. (Personally, I think a colonoscopy without anesthesia might be less painful than the next get-together of my extended family.)

Regardless of how the Wisconsin budget situation plays out, how the political winds shift in response, I hope these events have not provided the security apparatus with the opportunity to restrict access to the Wisconsin State Capitol.  I hope these events are not the first reflexive cut of many that Philip Kennicott warned of.  The scars from this particular budget fight will last for a long time in Wisconsin, but I hope this “perpetual conflict and insecurity,” as Lueders puts it, does not claim the openness and civic purpose of the Wisconsin State Capitol as one of its victims.

The direct damage will be bad enough.