MILWAUKEE— A majority of the exterior for the Northwestern Mutual north office building in downtown Milwaukee is mostly complete, but the overall project that began in October of 2023 has reached its halfway marker.
Northwest Mutual’s Assistant Director of Construction Management, Tracy Lutterman says the whole purpose of the four-year project is to consolidate all 9,000 Milwaukee-area employees to one campus.
“The idea is that we’ll have a couple thousand more people downtown,” said Lutterman. “There are a lot of public spaces that we have built around both buildings. The patio spaces, the greenery we’ve brought to the building, our Mutual Market, I think this is what brings more business to our campus and becomes a benefit for Milwaukee.”
The exterior facade for the north office building was finished earlier in the fall of 2025 and a majority of all work has now shifted to the interior work spaces. Lutterman says in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era Northwestern Mutual wanted to address employees concerns and how to make work more manageable in an office environment.
“We all spend so much time in the office, so it’s nice to have a place to just relax and collaborating with our co-workers was really important to us,” said Lutterman. “Having a nice space to do that was really our intent there with rebuilding this office.”
Lutterman says if everything works according to schedule, interior work should finish by June of 2026. This leaves the rest of the sixth months to work on furnishing the building and setting up A/V equipment before employees can finally move into the office and work.
One surprising thing about the project since it started in October of 2023 is that the $500 million dollar cost for the project has been kept within budget.
Alicia Dupies with Gilbane Building Company says proper management helped the project not exceed costs.
“Things change each and every day and our plan at the beginning of the day is tackle any challenges that we see and try to solve those problems together. I think one of the things that created a really strong investment for us was bringing a construction firm on early because one of the things that that our team does is look at what the market escalation predicts things to be,” said Dupies. “I’d say were very thoughtful and detailed in what we call conceptual estimating which is when you have a concept and you have to imagine and think what is behind that project all the way through to what we see across the street at the north building. So everything is looking great with both the schedule and the budget perspective.”
Construction is expected to be fully completed by 2027.
