The Couture

Milwaukee, WI
Spread across a two-acre site, The Couture is a 44-story, 750,000-square-foot, ellipse-shaped apartment tower. The $190 million tower includes retail space, 322 apartments, tenant amenity space, and a public park. It is the tallest residential building in Wisconsin, and also includes a multi-modal transportation concourse and pedestrian walkways.

More than a decade in the making, The Couture welcomed its first residents in Spring 2024. Each of the apartments has some amount of curving that reflects the ellipse shape of the slender tower, with units ranging from 576-square-feet to 2,350-square-feet with floor-to-ceiling windows. The tower also features 42,600-square-feet of restaurant and retail space.

The tower was designed as a key thoroughfare connecting Milwaukee’s lakefront and cultural amenities with downtown, which includes public plazas and parks, pedestrian bridges, and a new lakefront stop for the streetcar. The Couture replaces an underused transit center with a multi-modal transit hub for the community.

Precast concrete was a cost-effective solution for the cladding system of The Couture, as all 44 stories utilized the same forms.

PRECAST ELEMENTS

708 Precast Pieces (62,120 square feet)

The pieces feature a white, acid-etch finish.

PARTNERS

GC: Findorff
Architect: RINKA
EOR: Thornton Tomasetti