On an early morning of classes a student walks through the brutalist concrete corridors of the Mosse Humanities Building. She can hear a faint choir from the basement on her way to art class and a brass player honking away in a practice room.
It’s easy to get lost walking to the art rooms on the sixth and seventh floors. It’s easy to get lost anywhere in the building because the floors don’t go all the way around.
Since opening in 1969 to house the scattered History, Art and Music departments, University of Wisconsin-Madison students and faculty have bemoaned the 532-by-164 foot, seven-story block of concrete, criticizing its “outdated” maze-like structure, frequent maintenance issues and cramped classrooms.
“Your class could be nearby, but it just dead ends, and you have to go all the way back outside the building and enter through a different door,” UW-Madison junior Claire Foote told The Daily Cardinal. “It's not a place that's conducive to learning.”
Mosse’s importance to campus — it teaches thousands of students roughly 70,000 credit hours across 60 departments every year — makes its issues ones that administrators have been trying to address for decades.
They may have taken one step closer to solving it.
In August, the UW Board of Regents approved UW System President Jay Rothman’s $855 million 2025-2027 budget proposal, which includes $292.5 million to demolish and replace Mosse.
UW-Madison Director of Music Dan Cavanaugh told the Cardinal in an interview a new building was needed because the costs of renovations or improvements far outweigh the value of the building.
“It gets to a point where the maintenance costs are so high on an ongoing basis that it's no longer a tenable situation,” Cavanaugh said.
Adding TVs to the fifth floor to replace flier advertisements would have cost $30,000 to $50,000 because the concrete makes installing new electrical lines very expensive, he said. At his previous school, it would have cost $450 plus the cost of the TVs for the same improvement, Cavanaugh said.
In a student media roundtable with The Daily Cardinal earlier this year, UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin agreed with a student reporter who quipped that Mosse is “god awful.” Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has also expressed support for the budget increase.
Classes in the School of Life & Sciences are set to be moved to Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall on the corner of West Johnson and North Park Street with $60 million in state support from the 2021-2023 budget. Demolition for the building is underway.
Cavanaugh cautioned the behind-the-scenes work that would need to be done before a similar replacement for Mosse could come to fruition.
“These things are long processes, and there's a lot of hidden work that happens before the ribbon cutting,” Cavanaugh said.
Harry Weese designed Mosse in a brutalist style, but his original plans were scaled back due to budget cuts. Students have long speculated why the building was designed so confusingly, with theories ranging from dissuading Vietnam War protests to the architect accidentally holding the plans upside down.
The building is outdated and makes things difficult for students and faculty — the desks are tiny, WiFi can’t be installed in the basement, and sound proofing or acoustic improvement measures remain band-aid solutions.
Students and faculty agree the space doesn’t support students as well as it could.
“We deal in the creation of joy and in music,” Cavanaugh said. He said a lack of sufficient windows is a “physical and emotional damper” preventing students from doing their best work.
The case for Mosse
Despite Mosse’s issues, some people find things to love about the building.
UW-Madison Junior Tess Voigt appreciates the brutalist architecture and how Mosse “incorporates the surroundings into the building in a way that flows into campus."
Many people take advantage of Mosse’s open layout as a shortcut between Park Street and East Campus Mall, and a central courtyard often houses people reading or skateboarding in warmer weather. A footbridge also connects Mosse to Bascom Hill.
While some students and faculty criticize Mosse for its lack of casual community spaces — the building only has one lounge in the basement — Vought found humor in how it forces people to sit on the floor.
“I would just see [one student] sitting on the floor in the art wing just like eating soup, every week,” she said.
She called the building esoteric, adding that the art community graffitied the stairwell walls, though it was painted over last year.
“I love that, I looked at every single drawing,” Voigt said.
But Voigt also pointed out a lack of new technology and space in the art department and said the art floors appear unfinished and look like a “middle school.”
Voigt voiced her concern that Mosse’s destruction would leave the art program with less space than before. Voigt and Foote were also concerned with the sustainability issues in destroying a massive concrete building.
“Tearing it down does not make sense unless there's a genuine plan for recycling concrete or using it to build something,” Voigt said.
Mary Bosch is the photo editor for The Daily Cardinal and a first year journalism student. She has covered multiple stories about university sustainability efforts, and has written for state and city news. Follow her on twitter: @Mary_Bosch6
