The Stream saves the tree

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The Stream, Edgewood College

The builders of The Stream, Edgewood College’s new visual and theater arts center in Madison, relied on an arborist, an archeologist and an architect to get the job done right.

The arborist kept crews from getting too close to a 200-year-old oak tree. The archeologist marked American Indian effigy mounds.

Both helped preserve pieces of campus history while letting the college proceed with plans for a collection of classrooms and gallery spaces first imagined nearly 60 years ago.

“This building has been in mind for the college since the ’50s,” said Doug Hursh, director of design with Potter Lawson Inc.

Planning for the project started in 2001. But the economic decline that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and, later, changes in the college’s administrative staff delayed the project until 2006, when it was resurrected and transformed to include the 125-seat Black Box theater.

Adding the theater improved the odds of raising money for the project. But it also threw a curveball to the design team, which had to find an extra 7,000 square feet in an already tight site.

The mounds, the tree, an adjacent library and the nearby neighborhood of single-family homes had all but landlocked the site, which is on the shore of Lake Wingra.

Luke Hutchins, project manager with J.H. Findorff & Son Inc., said crews solved the space problem by working around the tree’s protective fence and scrapping plans for a boulder retaining wall because it threatened the oak’s root structure. Instead, they installed a living wall filled with soil and seeds. Crews also used a pump to pour concrete to avoid driving over the mounds.

The mounds, which legally could not be touched, not only determined site traffic, but they also dictated where the building could be placed.

The tree, at first, was not as well protected. There was debate about whether to remove it, but that discussion was short-lived, partly because the college already had built a 200-bed residence hall around trees elsewhere on campus.

“The building kind of focuses on the tree,” said Hursh, who split the building and created a recessed common area to allow space for the oak tree.

The building’s sloped roof was a nod to the neighbors, who had worried about lighting, landscaping and building scale.

And the building’s geo-thermal heating and cooling system, which improved energy efficiency, not only removed a potential eyesore of an exposed mechanical system, but also made space for the Black Box.

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