The Art Gates at California State University San Marcos in San Marcos, Calif., grew out of a team effort to solve a common design problem: create a security access gate that is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to maintain. Located at the entrance of The Quad, a student housing complex at the corner of a large mixed-use development, North City, Art Gates is a public art piece created from stainless steel wire mesh from Tampa, Fla.-based McNICHOLS Co.
The project team, made up of the city; developer Urban Villages San Marcos, San-Diego-based Safdie Rabines Architects; artist Lisa Schirmer; and metal fabricator Brents Metal Art, San Diego; produced a 72-foot gated fence that has the unmistakable imprint of an artist who sees metal in ways few can. The project collaboration demonstrates how few constraints there are with metal applications when creative and resourceful minds are at work.
Schirmer, an artist, painter and graphic designer, was commissioned to create the Art Gates. Having worked with a variety of materials in her profession, it was the characteristics of stainless steel wire mesh that caught her eye for its abundance of patterns and light diffusing qualities. Schirmer envisioned the mesh as a way to turn the gates into a sculpture of abstract images of the plant life indigenous to the San Diego and San Marcos area.
“This is a young campus, and I wanted to honor the natural habitat, indigenous people, wildlife and history of the area,” says Schirmer, who was intent on the gates representing these features, especially the succulents like the agave, and other native plants like Echeveria.
While commonly known as Art Gates, the project’s official title is “A Harmony Parallel to Nature,” a name that defines a metal sculpture inspired by nature that was rendered on paper, then with iron and steel metal, where relationships of line, shape, tone and space combine to celebrate the beauty Schirmer observes.
In her renderings, Schirmer used a cross-hatching method-a Renaissance-era drawing technique that builds tones with diagonal and horizontal lines-that reminded her of the wire mesh patterns she noticed in McNICHOLS Designer Metals Catalog.
Schirmer went on to select nearly 11 different McNICHOLS wire mesh styles as the core material, including varieties of McNICHOLS’ Techna, Talica and Ashland products. “I saw how I could depict the plants from the mesh, and how the mesh dovetailed with the cross hatching in my drawing,” says Schirmer.
Schirmer worked with the architect, fabricator and developer to propose the idea to the city and gain approval prior to The Quad’s development.
Taal Safdie of Safdie Rabines Architects provided an external frame structure of fencing and gates that included a “grid” of diagonal supports that resonated with the angular lines of the building. “[Schirmer] was able to combine the architecture of the lines that jog along the building roofline, incorporate ideas from the landscape and turn these into what the fence is all about,” says Safdie.
Schirmer notes that because of the subdivision of diagonals within the main frame, the shapes became very manageable in size, so every shape fit easily onto the sheets of the McNICHOLS stainless mesh patterns. “It was like sewing a garment using plaid fabric, except the fabric is stainless steel. You lay out your pattern pieces, making sure all plaids align, and then cut.”
Fabricator Bill Brents of Brents Metal Art, came up with the idea to build a frame from tube and solid steel bar that would be hot dip galvanized and acid etched. “The brilliance of the stainless and the matte appearance of the acid-etched galvanized bar would contrast nicely, and weather far longer than a painted structure,” says Brents.
Working together, a 2- by 3-foot prototype guided the full-scale version, which is now an assembly of fully installed sections comprised of two 10-foot-high gates, a utility gate, and six 8-foot-high fences, each section weighing between 700 and 800 pounds.
To fabricate the project, Brents built a frame-within-a-frame system that fully encapsulates the wire mesh and its frame, making one side of the gates and fence a mirror image of the other with no exposed edges. The entire system is made up of hundreds of pieces of iron flat bar, more than 300 stainless steel mesh shapes, secured by thousands of aluminum and stainless rivets.
Providing an artistic entry for student residents to come and go through, while transforming an everyday street into a virtual outdoor art gallery, the Art Gates project took 18 months and was completed in time for the Fall 2013 semester.
Art Gates at California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, Calif.
Developer: Urban Villages San Marcos
Architect:
Safdie Rabines Architects, San Diego
Artist: Lisa Schirmer, San Diego
Fabricator:
Brents Metal Art, San Diego
Wire mesh: McNICHOLS Co., Tampa, Fla., www.mcnichols.com
