Years ago, I worked as a carpenter doing historic restoration projects in Fredericksburg, Va. I loved the sense of accomplishment that came from working with my hands. I liked working on the old buildings, and one of the best summers I ever spent was the summer I spent rebuilding the windows of a hotel built in 1825.
As a carpenter, I dealt particularly with wood, and I came to appreciate its texture and grain and workability. But the truth is, most of what I did in historic restoration was dealing with the failings of wood. Wood rots, checks, splinters and warps. Exposed to the least of weather, wood fails. Still, there is distinct beauty in a piece of quarter-sawn fir or a length of poplar shaped on a lathe.
As a raw building product, metal doesn’t have the romanticized beauty of wood, although there are a lot of things to love about metal. Strength. Recyclability. Durability. I feel like I just described metal as the handsome pioneer woman who can manage the homestead. There’s a lot to be admired and valued in such a material, but it’s hard to fall in love with it.
But there is a trait of metal that does raise its romantic qualities and can make it easy to love. Plasticity. And more particularly, its ductility and malleability. (I can practically hear you swooning with excitement over these qualities.) The thing with metal is you can pull it (ductility) and compress it
(malleability) into new shapes. You can fold and bend and bubble and expand and perforate it.
And, most importantly, you can do all of that relatively easily and without compromising its other great traits of strength and durability.
What we’re seeing in the metal construction industry today is inspiring architecture with dynamic façades that are textured and layered and compelling. These new designs make us re-evaluate the very sense of what a building is. Soaring, open spaces with gently curving walls and ceilings force us to redefine our understanding of space.
Metal building products are shaping our very perceptions of the built environment in ways we could not have anticipated 30 years ago. With sophisticated computer modeling and a designer’s imagination, we can experience the world around us with new wonder, as if we were young and discovering it all over again.
How exciting is that? How romantic? And it comes from our ability to work with metal.
