Wisconsin English Second Language Institute (WESLI)
Project Scope: New education space
Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Designer: InteriorLogic
WESLI began teaching English nearly four decades ago and has earned an excellent reputation with universities, educational agencies, and students from all over the world. They pride themselves on their individualized teaching, small class sizes, and diverse student population and have fully taken advantage of their location in Madison to offer their students the best educational experience possible. With a new redevelopment planned for the corner of East Washington Avenue and North Pinckney Street, dramatic changes were needed for the WESLI space. Through the years, WESLI had occupied most of the first, second, and third floors of 19 North Pinckney, and parts of the second and third floors of 23 and 25 North Pinckney. WESLI’s owner, Carlos Osorio, also owns the three buildings that housed not only WESLI, but also The Old Fashioned Restaurant (a project that the Friede team completed several years ago), Harvest Restaurant, and several commercial office spaces. WESLI would need to consolidate its operations into two floors of 23 and 25 North Pinckney and create a new entrance to its operations.
For Friede, it meant tearing apart 150-year-old buildings that had been renovated numerous times and had been reconstructed on many occasions as cheaply as possible, including after an apparent fire that occurred sometime in the buildings’ history. It also meant matching floor heights in two buildings that had not been designed with common elevations. It also meant creating new openings between the buildings through masonry walls that hadn’t been exposed to the environment for decades and would require not only new steel beams to be installed but also tuckpointing and cleaning since these walls would become the new finished interior finishes. With these challenges in mind, and literally dozens of unknown ones ahead of them, the Friede team began demolition the first week of October 2019.
Over the next six weeks, the demolition crew found hidden walls, covered skylights partially removed structural beams, and in one area, inches of concrete and gypcrete topping that needed to be removed before reconstruction could begin. Adding to the challenges the demolition efforts faced, was the fact that all the material that needed to be removed by hand—all told, nearly 60 tons of it! After the start of the year, Friede teams constructed a bridge through the middle of the atrium that would connect the third-floor classrooms and provide a student lounge area. New bathrooms, operable meeting room walls and a second-floor break room were also constructed.
This project was recognized by the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) of Wisconsin as a 2020 Gold Project of Distinction.