Built For
Community

Lapham Peak: Building without the state

Wisconsin is one of the only states in the country that does not fund its state parks with taxpayer dollars. Parks run on sticker sales and admission fees. The DNR's backlog of capital projects and deferred maintenance continues to grow. The Evergreen Shelter had been in the master plan for replacement for years. Everyone knew it was too small. The state could not replace it.

So the Friends decided to build it themselves. They had an advantage most organizations don't: three architects and a civil engineer on their volunteer board — Sam Edwards, Mark Herr, and Bruce Wydeven — who could produce conceptual drawings without billing hours. Their ability to show people what they were building before they had the funds to build it made the grant application possible and unlocked the entire funding chain.

Mark Herr submitted a $1.3 million application to the EDA's Travel, Tourism, and Outdoor Recreation Initiative in February 2022. He called it scary. The EDA let him work with one of their professional grant writers, which he described as a godsend. They won in September 2022. Nine contractors bid, and the winning bid came in under budget — freeing funds for solar panels that had been on the cut list. DNR design review took six months and cost the project a full construction season — an exhausting delay — but the Friends stayed with it.

From foundation to frame — Lapham Lodge under construction, 2023–24.

Shechem: Eight years and a dollar

Shechem at Hope Street is the product of Ashley Thomas deciding that the kids wandering the Garden Homes alleys deserved somewhere to be — and refusing to let that idea go for eight years. The city sold the condemned building to Hope Street for $1. Demolition would cost over $100,000. Ashley went to the community. They raised $112,000 in coins and tore the building down.

On the vacant lot, Hope Street built a refuge garden while they waited — paths winding through empty space, telling the story of what was coming and explaining the name. Shechem, pronounced shek-uhm, is a city in the Bible, a place many people avoided, where encounters happened that changed people's lives. For Ashley, it was the right word: a place that shouldn't work, by the logic of who usually gets resources and where, but does. The garden was a proof-of-concept. It was also a placeholder for something that had no funding yet.

A lender was found. Then the loan fell through. Ashley sent what she called one of the hardest emails of her professional life, telling supporters she didn't know when the building would happen — only that it would. A new board member asked what the problem was. He made some calls. Two banks said yes. Construction began November 5, 2020.

The Refuge Garden held the lot while funding came together. Early design sketches from GCA, 2019.

Most architects bring a vocabulary to every project: a preferred palette, a signature move, a set of ideas developed over a career that they seek to express. GCA works differently. Before anything is drawn, they listen — not just to the client, but to the place itself. To understand how people already move through a site. To what a community does naturally, before any building tells it to. The design emerges from that listening rather than being laid over it.

Lapham Peak: The logic of the trailhead

A trailhead is one of the oldest patterns in human experience — the place of arrival and departure, where the ordinary world ends and the natural one begins. People come to a trailhead already oriented. They are about to go somewhere, or they have just come back. They are cold, or they are about to be. Lapham Lodge answers that in its proportions before you reach the door: long and low, its shed roof tilting upward toward the trail, reaching out to meet people as they come in from the woods.

Inside, custom wood trusses span the gathering space, giving it the feeling of a great hall — enough volume and warmth to feel like a destination, where a crowd can be together and still feel held. The stone piers along the east wall carry shadow that flat masonry can't; a single inch of projection catches light differently across the hours and reads as something made with care. Every mechanical and electrical system is thoughtfully concealed, so the interior stays uninterrupted. Solar panels cover roughly half the annual electrical load, designed from the start around the reality that the people who built it would also be the ones running it for the next fifty years.

26th & Capitol: The logic of refuge

Capitol Drive is loud: six lanes, constant truck traffic, the relentless energy of a major urban arterial. A building that simply opened its door to the street would have no transition, no moment of passage between the outside and the inside. When Ashley Thomas brought her vision to GCA — a gym, a café, classrooms, a woodshop, aquaponics, a rooftop greenhouse — Nick Carnahan and Brandon Reinke didn't start by fitting the program into the space. They started by asking what people needed before they could use the building. The answer was refuge — not just inside, but at the approach.

The entrance doesn't meet Capitol Drive head-on. You turn from the sidewalk into a courtyard. The building steps back from the street, and as you move toward the entry, the space compresses, the overhang lowers, and your pace slows. By the time you're inside, the street is already behind you. A glass tower rises at the corner — visible from Capitol Drive, a beacon readable from a distance that becomes more legible the closer you get, which is how a building signals to a neighborhood that it was built for the people already there, not for people passing through.

Inside, the gymnasium sits at the heart: the communal room everyone moves toward. Around it are classrooms, a café, a resource center, and a rooftop garden for growing things in a neighborhood where green space is scarce. The building is clad in glass, precast concrete, masonry, metal, and phenolic panels. It does not look like everything else on this block.

Interior detail, Shechem at Hope Street.

These two buildings share no material language, no form, and no site condition. What they share is that both were built to hold community — to give it a place to gather, to return to, to belong to. The form it takes looks completely different in a state forest than on an urban arterial. The intention is identical, and so is the approach that led to it.

Both of these projects faced the same structural problem, and it doesn't solve itself. Donors give to visions they can see. Foundations fund projects they can evaluate. Banks loan money against plans detailed enough to underwrite. All of that requires design work to exist before the money does — and design costs money.

For organizations with deep pockets, or with the luck of having the right professionals on their volunteer boards, that gap can be bridged. The Friends of Lapham Peak had three architects on their board — Mark Herr, Bruce Wydeven, and Sam Edwards — who could produce real drawings before any money arrived. That is not a normal thing to have. Their ability to show people what they were building before they had the funds to build it made the grant application possible, made the donor conversations legible, and unlocked the entire funding chain. Most nonprofits don't have that.

For the organizations that need good design the most — those trying to make the case that this vacant lot, this underfunded park, this neighborhood that the market has passed over deserves something beautiful — the gap is often impassable. You can't raise money without a vision. You can't afford a vision without money. The project stalls. The lot stays vacant. The shelter stays too small. The kids keep wandering the alleys.

What is remarkable about both Lapham Lodge and Shechem is not just that they got built, but that they got built the way they did — through years of sustained effort by people who refused to accept that the gap was permanent, who found ways to carry the picture long enough for the resources to arrive. GCA was with both of them throughout. Eight years at Hope Street. Four years at Lapham Peak. Showing up through the delays, the redesigns, the budget crunches, the moments when it would have been easier for everyone to stop.

The work of an architect on a project like this is not only technical. It is the act of keeping something imaginable when everything around it says it isn't — the rendering carried into a room full of people who haven't decided to believe yet, the floor plan that turns a conversation about a basketball court into a conversation about what a community deserves.

Both buildings exist. Both are loved. At Lapham Peak, more than 600,000 people a year now have a place worthy of the park they love, built, paid for, and given to Wisconsin by the people who loved it most. At 26th and Capitol, hundreds of kids walk through every week, nearby schools use the gym for morning classes because they don't have one, and on hot days, people come just to sit in the air conditioning. That last one is worth sitting with: a $4.8 million building used the way a front porch gets used, because it is a part of the neighborhood the same way. Both buildings stand as proof — made of brick and glass and steel and wood — that the people they were built for were worth a beautiful thing.