Porter Boathouse, home to the Wisconsin men’s and women’s rowing programs, is situated on the shores of Lake Mendota. The boathouse serves as the central training facility for the crew teams and integrates boat storage bays, coaching offices, support spaces for training, an indoor rowing tank and designated boat repair areas. In addition to specialty programming for the building, the rowing operations themselves presented specific site challenges.
The site design was required to gracefully accommodate expansive sidewalk widths, trailer access points, boat launching areas and pedestrian traffic re-routing to safely detour pedestrians using the Lakeshore Path during boat launching operations. The new building is sited nearly on top of the old building’s footprint and landscape architects at Saiki Design worked to protect and preserve a number of large, mature oak trees within the construction boundary. Using extraordinary tree protection measures designed during the planning stages and carefully implemented during construction, nearly all of the mature trees on site were preserved.
