Each week, Architizer is highlighting a different building product and how to specify it. This week’s topic is metal cladding. If you’re looking for the perfect metal cladding for your next project, search for it on Source, Architizer’s new network marketplace for building products. Click here to sign up now.
There are two ways you can look at a person. One, the conventional way, is to see them as a single entity, a unified body and self with one name and one being. The other, less conventional way, is to see them as aggregates of parts and organs, as collections of billions of individual elements, an incredibly coordinated symphony of cells.
Think about buildings in the same way. Typically, we see buildings like we see people. They are finished products with a single name and identity: the Empire State Building, the Taj Mahal, the Temple of Dendur. But buildings are also extraordinary agglomerations of parts and products, gizmos and gadgets, finishes and fixtures, all synchronously buzzing to magically create a living space for the people inside.
A section through a drop ceiling from the 2014 Venice Biennale “Elements of Architecture”; photo via La Voce di New York.com
Architizer has always been about understanding how buildings work, and this week, we are starting to highlight different building components in an effort to help architects understand how to use and specify them. As our Source platform continues to grow, we would like to continue the conversations we are having with designers and manufacturers with the rest of our audience to advance the future of how architects find and specify products.
This week we focus on metal cladding, a material that has hugged the twists and turns of architecture for decades. From the punched tin of Louis Sullivan to the titanium swoops of Frank Gehry to the prismatic steel of Marc Fornes, designers have embraced metal cladding for its flexibility and finish. It’s incredibly versatile, both avant-garde and off-the-shelf. Recent news about the Grenfell Tower disaster has highlighted the ubiquity of metal cladding and underscored how important it is to understand the materials we use and the ways they work.
Louis Sullivan entrance to the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company building with bronze-plated cast-iron ornamental work; image via Suzanne Lovell
The Industrial Revolution opened up new possibilities for the fabrication of metal sheets that could be punched and formed into ornamental designs. Nineteenth-century innovators like Louis Sullivan took full advantage of it in his Chicago exteriors, but it was not until the development of the curtain wall in the mid-20th century that metal cladding really came into its own. The curtain wall was a new concept that separated structure from the exterior envelope. Instead of being supported by a brick or stone façade, new buildings had steel and concrete skeletons from which glass and metal skins could hang (like a curtain).
Left: Hildesheim Cathedral’s copper roof, completed in 1020, image via Wikipedia (Arnold Plesse); right: Vaulted Willow by MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY
At the time, aluminum was still a relatively new and exciting product, and after the rise and subsequent glut in production capacity from the two World Wars, forward-thinking designers experimented with ways to use sheet metal to skin the postwar building boom. Metal-clad buildings became the face of the modern atomic-age high-rise. Toward the end of the 20th century, as digital design opened up complex new forms, architects embraced metal’s ability to fold in multiple directions, something that glass, wood and stone cannot easily do.
Ironically, that’s the same reason that ancient builders used copper roofs to cover the dome of the Pantheon and the curves of buildings like the Hildesheim Cathedral. Today, metal cladding has moved past space-age novelty and is used to evoke timelessness and newness alike. Designers like Olson Kundig use weathered steel for its sense of industrial romance, while Zaha Hadid Architects combines handcraft and digital modeling to produce elegantly refined forms.
Left: the Alcoa Building’s modular aluminum façade designed by Harrison & Abramovitz in 1953, image via Booking.com; right: Zaha Hadid Architects’ handcrafted steel cladding for 520 West 28th Street, image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects
Over the course of this week, we will publish a variety of articles on metal cladding. One will detail how metal cladding is specified, another will be a deep dive into how an exemplary project used metal panels and in others we will talk to designers and manufacturers about how metal cladding is made and used. At the end, you should be an expert. As always, we invite you to upload your own projects and explore how to specify metal cladding through Source. Happy building!
Header photo via Condé Nast Traveler
