Steel in the environment as an inspiration to architecture

Only a very small percentage of designers ever create something that is totally original and that has no root in some precedent. The great majority of designers carry a vocabulary within themselves, a vocabulary that is being added to constantly, and that will form the basis of any design synthesis undertaken. When design students begin their training this vocabulary is often limited and can therefore produce a design synthesis that is immature and unsatisfactory. During the training of a student this vocabulary will be enlarged and enriched until the point is reached where a personal and individual synthesis can be made in response to particular problems. It is the enlargement of this design vocabulary that necessitates such a long and continuing training for those involved in architecture and the other design professions.

In architecture much of the vocabulary will be built up from studying and looking at the works of other architects. A student who copies the style of any particular designer is not indulging in plagiarism but rather is attempting to assimilate exactly how the other, maturer, designer approaches a design problem. However, not all of the design vocabulary will result from the study of the buildings of particular architects. Much is gathered in a far more unconscious way and some influences on architectural design will have origins far distant from buildings.

Le Corbusier recognised that architectural design can be influenced by the technology of the motor car. He asked designers to explore the design and production of products and apply what might be relevant to architecture.

Le Corbusier was probably not the first person, and certainly not the last, to recognise that the technology of the motor car might have something to offer to the designer of a building:

"Let us display, then, the Parthenon and the motor-car so that it may be clear that it is a question of two products of selection in different fields, one of which has reached its climax and the other is evolving. That ennobles the automobile. And what then? Well, it remains to use the motor-car as a challenge to our houses and our great buildings..."

Le Corbusier, however, challenges architects to do more than merely copy a visual image; making a building to house pineapples in the shape of a giant stone pineapple is only an elementary step in the transfer of ideas. Instead, Le Corbusier asks designers to explore the design and production of other products and to extract what may be appropriate to the problem of architecture.

The interior of the Museum at Parma by Guido Canali is an example of making use of steel scaffolding as a permanent structure inside the converted building. Steel components have been used to enhance the design.

Architects, however, have tended to be less brutal in their borrowing of steel components and have made use of them to enhance design rather than to dictate it. The interior of the Museum at Parma by Guido Canali makes use of steel scaffolding as a permanent structure inside the converted building.

The part of the enormous Palazzo della Pilotta at Parma within which the National Gallery of Parma is housed has been carefully reconstructed during a ten year programme. The work to the gallery has centred on the provision of a new circulation route to join the three formerly disconnected spaces that formed the whole.

The new route was marked out by the new metal detailing. Changes have also been introduced within the spaces themselves:

"The original oak beams and floor-joists were replaced by a light but cumbersome scaffolding structure, the basis (and aesthetic) for an interchangeable display framework from which is suspended or which supports a modular panelling system, laid horizontally or vertically to act as floor or partition. This system, slightly contradicted by the permanent-looking concrete central stair and elegant handrails, was similarly applied in the north wing. The white-painted panels, perpendicular to the perimeter, and the scaffold create stark spaces within the old shell, whose walls have been stripped of plaster and sanded to reveal the mellow tone and texture of the seventeenth-century brickwork."

However, rather than simply using the scaffolding for the creation of an interior, Canali enriches his architecture by using the fact that scaffolding is essentially a temporary system which has been developed for change and designs a modular system of panels which can be hung from the internal structure. As Frances Anderton comments:

"By juxtaposing a lightweight, metallic structure he will emphasise the enduring, robust quality of the masonry shell. But the newcomer is no wallflower. Ironically the supposedly permeable framework becomes necessarily so complex, its reticular scaffold and stark panels (creating space in the simplest, purist way, with lines and planes, verticals and horizontals) so angular and brashly metallic that it almost takes over from its refined host. It is this meeting of opposites that gives the design its richness."

The architect Richard Horden transferred technology and components from the world of yachting and used them to create architecture.

In contrast to the transfer of an existing steel system, the architect Richard Horden has transferred technology and components from the world of yachting and used them to create architecture.

Here an aluminium system has been transferred but to use the system in a new way steel components have been required. Hence steel, rather than providing the inspiration, is now providing the means to allow the transfer to happen:

"At Woodgreen, the structure is a concrete site slab supporting a single-storey frame with aluminium tubular columns on a 3.6m grid. These support aluminium oval-section roof spars.

The headpiece that joins columns and spars is a stainless steel cross, 400mm wide, which extends down the hollow centres of all the members and is bolted to them by stainless steel bolts with short lengths of stainless steel pipe inserted so that tightening the bolt does not squeeze the spar. Other holes and slots are made for services and fixings, and this causes no problems because the spars are not fully stressed at the span ends."

In transferring the technology alterations have to be made to aluminium members conceived as yacht masts and designed fundamentally as compression members. This causes problems when the aluminium tubes which work well as columns have to be used as beams and are, therefore, subject to bending moments. As John Winter points out:

"Richard Horden's response to this problem is to treat his frame as a wind-frame - it is self-supporting, can take light loads and distribute services, but where there is real work to be done, the secondary members of the structure must take the load. The roof panels are let in between the spars - each one is framed in a steel angle, sufficiently strong to take the load into the corner points and hence to the columns, so in the completed roof, the spars, while intellectually necessary for the integrity of the frame and its possibility for change, are structurally redundant."

Elsewhere, stainless steel cables are used as cross- bracing to emphasise further the transfer of technology from the lightweight world of yachts and hang gliders to the architectural world of house and home.

The building may be a high energy user and there may be problems of weathering with the method used for rainwater disposal from the roof but Horden would never have conceived of the house as the perfect answer to the creation of lightweight user-construct house; it is just a step on the way:

"Most architects are not like that. To us the perfection of a particular building is all-important. The buildings we most admire are usually complete in themselves, and are not for showing possibilities or as a step in a development...by designing for his own family, he (Horden) has retained the ability to keep changing things and so has turned the conventional notion of architecture as finished product into architecture as process."

Rather than using images that suggest shipping the use of steel made it possible for the Boat-O-Tel to be able to float.

Rather than suggest images of shipping for a building that is to do with the transfer of people to and from the liner, the Boat-O-Tel is most definitely a hotel which has been built of steel in order to allow it to float.

Designed in the Netherlands, its purpose is to take guests for cruises on the Rhine. Not only built of steel, the box like floating hotel is:

"...using a universal prefabrication system, already successfully applied to the construction of houses, hospitals and bungalows for overseas countries."

The plans and section show that the layout, which is made up of two passenger cabin decks, a restaurant, hall, lounge, bar and shop is common to most land locked hotels, with the addition of the upper promenade deck. The cockpit can be raised and lowered hydraulically to allow safe passage of the Rhine.

Structurally, the Boat-O-Tel is a catamaran of two giant pontoons joined by an intermediary structure.

"The decks are supported by a main frame work consisting of columns and struts. The former are rectangular hollow steel sections...and the latter HE sections. The columns are arranged in three rows at 3 metre spacing. They are welded to the edge of the pontoons and onto the intermediate member of the hull. The middle deck, which rests on the struts, is a combined structure of steel and concrete in which the two materials act together. A galvanised steel sheet with trapezoidal ribs, with round pressed flanges, serves as a permanent formwork, but also as main reinforcement to an in situ concrete slab 12 cm (120 mm) thick. The promenade deck is a flat chequer plate 5 mm thick resting on the HE beams."

The walls are prefabricated using cold-formed galvanised steel sections, bolted together, and shaped so that panels can be simply eased into them.

The panels are constructed of a core of insulation faced with differing standards of wood particle boards.

The Boat-O-Tel is, therefore, a building that is floated as a boat and, at the same time, a boat that has been largely constructed using building rather then naval technology. These cross-fertilisations illustrate the possibilities where technologies open themselves to other influences. How well the Boat-O-Tel will last remains to be seen.

An example of steel used to suggest a light-weight but reliable shelter can be found in David White's Hostel for the Handicapped in Hampshire, built under the direction of Colin Stansfield Smith at Hampshire County Architect's Department.

An antithesis of the hint of impermanence given by the station in Brazil is found in the use of steel to suggest a light-weight but reliable shelter in David White's Hostel for the Handicapped in Hampshire, built under the direction of Colin Stansfield Smith at Hampshire County Architect's Department.

Nor is the image of shelter a purely formal concern to the users. As Gillian Darley comments:

"Independence may be achieved by learning how to cope, along with others in the same predicament, or it may be a solitary affair of coping alone. This is not an abstract matter in which the building performs as a symbol, but unpalatable physical reality; unsentimental in approach, the building mirrors the needs of those who live there - to be exposed to things, including the world of the able-bodied, while the essential support remains at hand."

Under the umbrella of the roof the accommodation is grouped around a central street with an interrupted edge formed by planters, porches and trellis work.

The accommodation is made up of six rented flats which are intended for those who will live permanently at the hostel, and a series of groups of bedsitters for those who may be encouraged to greater independence and eventually leave the Hostel. The bedsitters are arranged in groups of five and six with shared dining and sitting rooms and with a shared front entrance from the street. The bedsitters are arranged to have an external wall and each has access to a paved area which begins under the shelter of the roof and then extends into the surrounding garden. The permanent flats have a similar access to the outdoors.

Whereas the materials used for the construction of the flats and bedsitters are traditional masonry and timber, softened by the generous planting, the roof is of a different technology and appears to hover as a protection somewhere between the enclosure of the masonry structures and the freedom of the outside world:

"A great cloak of profiled PVC was thrown over the internal public space, allowing the bright lit forum below to be used to maximum advantage. There the design starts again from first principles; this time with a cellular arrangement of linked, banked rooms; 24 bedsitting rooms, six sheltered flats and other shared facilities. It is the old trick of the railway shed; the great umbrella, which turns out to be inhabited by a family of smaller structures...The roof section swoops over the accommodation, only given substance by its adherence to the light steel frame below. Essentially open-ended, the roof is slightly sealed by a system of skirts on the exposed edges. Self-effacing and translucent, it leaves the accommodation below free."

In Sir Michael Hopkins' cutlery factory designed for David Mellor in Derbyshire the use of steel enriches the architecture through the association of images. The circular form came from the gasholder that formerly stood on the site and the structural resolution of the clear roof form which uses steel technology related to the bicycle wheel. The creation is a building that seems at peace with both its purpose and setting.

The transfer of the image produced by the shelter of the umbrella to the Hostel that provides a temporary rest for those who need to prepare themselves for a return to the ordinary world is illustrative of the way in which steel as found in the environment can produce an inspiration for architecture. In a similar way, the Michael Hopkins cutlery factory for David Mellor in Derbyshire transfers ideas not only about the circular form of the gasholder that formerly stood on the site of the building, but the structural resolution of the clear roof form apparently uses a steel technology related to the bicycle wheel.

As Professor Murta comments: "The gasholder had been demolished to ground level but the foundation remained. This foundation had formerly supported a weight of water equivalent to the volume enclosed by a three storey building over its area. It could, therefore, be reused with consequent economy to the project as a whole. There was also the aesthetic virtue that to provide a building on the gasholder site restored the existing relationship between artefact and nature."

The foundation had, therefore, determined the circular form of the building but the client also had a requirement for a clear floor space for manufacturing that was greater in area than the foundation. The solution involved a new reinforced concrete slab that cantilevered almost a metre beyond the edge of the existing foundation. The clear floor space also determined a particular design solution:

"The requirements for a space uninterrupted by columns pointed to a clear space roof structure...Additionally the need for a high level of daylight in the building meant that a central lantern would be required of sufficient size and height to give even light, deep in the plan. The concept of a roof apparently floating clear of the enclosing circular structure...became the primary aesthetic objective."

The wall is formed of load bearing masonry, stone faced to meet the requirements of the Peak Park Planning Board. Since the wall is used only in compression, some method of eliminating lateral thrust where the trusses which form the roof are carried on the wall had to be devised. The steel trusses themselves span from this wall to the central lantern element to form the necessary uninterrupted floor space.

"Lateral thrust is resolved by a tubular steel tension ring at the level of the glazed strip between the top of the wall and the soffit of the roof. It connects the ends of each truss which have been extended to the exterior of the drum. The transfer of load from trusses to the wall is provided for by an inclined truss plate bolted to the cill...The edge of the roof is unencumbered with gutters. Rainwater simply falls into a trench at ground level. There is a generous overhang to the eaves which gives a strong shadow line, visually separating the roof and the drum elements. The careful design of the truss/wall connection is echoed by the detail at the apex of the roof where daylight enters through a lantern mounted over a clerestory. An intricate conical ring truss receives the upper ends of the radial trusses while a central post supports the lantern glazing. The junction of the many trusses with the central ring...not only has to transfer roof and wind loads, but also allows support to the clerestory and receives the upper edge of the roof covering."

The constraints on the design problem have produced a solution that uses steel in order to satisfy the structural and functional demands of the building.

However, the use of steel also enriches the architecture through the association of images: the circular central lantern support reminds of the structure and form of the bicycle wheel whereas the exposed structure and circular form of the building are obviously related to the original gasholder that preceded the new building. The use of such images allows the architecture a familiarity that is at once both reassuring and stimulating. In the hands of the architect Michael Hopkins, such visual reminders are coupled with a structural elegance to produce a building that seems at peace with both its purpose and setting.