Spring Home Design : STEELING HOME
Used for everything from paper clips to razor blades, automobiles to skyscrapers, steel has always been one of the world’s cheapest and most versatile metals. And now architects, designers, artists and fabricators are incorporating the material into the home environment as never before. Picking up where modernist pioneers Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Charles Eames and others left off, today’s visionaries have sparked a trend toward steel-stud framing in residential construction and, more visibly, interior elements such as steel walls, floors, ceilings, doors and banisters.
Perhaps the most significant development of the new steel age is the low-tech-as-high-art look. Inspired by architects like Frank O. Gehry, who in 1978 wrapped corrugated metal and chain-link fencing around his Santa Monica home, designers are taking low-cost industrial materials--off the rack or from junkyards--and domesticating them. Diamond-plate once destined to line truck beds is cut and laid as floor tile; woven-wire panels and metal grates found in filter systems and security screens are bolted to ceilings as ornamentation; in place of paper and paint, galvanized steel sheets cover walls.
Inventive finishes are revealing steel’s many personalities. Disc-sanders fitted with varying grits of sandpaper and conditioning pads produce three-dimensional patterns--graceful swirls, graffiti-like scribbles--on chairs, tables and doors. And polished and brushed stainless-steel surfaces are giving way to more expressive treatments. Tirzo Tec, whose South El Monte company specializes in hand-ground finishes, says: “When a brushed-satin finish is done by machine, it’s too perfect. When you do it by hand, it has a softer feel to it.” In addition, steel is being painted eye-popping colors or electrostatically powder-coated, a more environmentally correct process that better protects against corrosion. (No solvents are used and overspray can be collected for reuse.) The metal is also being acid-etched, sandblasted and chemically blackened or blued. And most dramatic of all, “hot-rolled” steel is being left in the raw, its mill scale (the thin top layer that forms upon cooling) ranging from burgundy to blue. Left unsealed, the steel oxidizes further, turning a bright orange and, finally, a rusty brown the color of the earth.
Breuer, father of the first tubular-steel chair, bemoaned the critics who called steel furnishings of the ‘20s “cold, clinical, reminiscent of an operating theater.” To be sure, some of those looks are still with us, but today’s steel offerings, like Breuer’s Wassily chair, are surprisingly sensual and poetic. Artists can manipulate the metal into undulating bed frames and leafy screens of filigree fineness. Says artist Gale McCall of Inglewood whose stair railing resembles a large doodle: “Steel can do almost anything.”
No wonder we’re steel-crazy after all these years.
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Finishes First
“Each generation takes a material and reinvents it and makes it their own. In the ‘90s we’re exploring the expressive nature of steel.”
--architect Michael Heinrich
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True to Form
“People think of steel as hard-edged and heavy; I like to make it look like it’s flowing, growing, organic. Poetic things happen for me in steel.”
--artist Susan Landau
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Living Color
“Steel shows life’s wear and tear much as the human body does. But with steel, you can accelerate the rusting process or slow it way down.”
--artist Carl Dern
