“Metal has become an increasingly important and fascinating component in our work, particularly as our portfolio has become more diverse,” says Sebastian Schmaling, AIA, LEED AP, principal at Johnsen Schmaling Architects.
Johnsen Schmaling Architects experiment with metal’s versatility
Located in Milwaukee, Johnsen Schmaling Architects is a small, eight-person architectural studio. “We approach our projects with rigorous upfront research and a focus on design innovation,” explains Schmaling. “Our work is driven by an interest in distilling certain characteristics or idiosyncrasies of a particular site into a set of architectural operations that inform our design and make it an immediate part of its surroundings.”
The firm was started 17 years ago by its two founding principals, Brian Johnsen, AIA, NCARB, and Schmaling. As a boutique firm, they’ve worked on private residences, large apartment buildings, long-span gymnasiums, small art galleries, dental clinics and everything in between. As such, Schmaling notes metal has been a material that was suitable in each of them. “That is perhaps the beauty of the material—it’s total versatility and an almost unlimited spectrum of structural, functional and aesthetic characteristics that can be custom-tailored around any building program and any building size.”
Even 17 years ago, when the firm worked mainly on small residential projects, they were designing with metal roofs and steel cladding panels, which taught them valuable lessons that are still informing their projects to this day. “We are particularly interested in metal’s ability to patina and weather, which turns building enclosures into living skins that seemingly assimilate to their environment and allow them to age gracefully over time,” Schmaling explains.
Egg Harbor Lodge, Egg Harbor, Wis.
Metal’s greatest advantages—low maintenance, suburb durability and recyclability—as well as its ability to be sourced with a high degree of recycled content, impact a building’s original environmental footprint and its sustainability over time. “This is perhaps the central concern of our work and, frankly, something that all architects will have to make their mission if we want to protect the environment from cataclysmic failure.”
While the firm is just starting to fully appreciate the vast possibilities in metal components, Schmaling says that after spending years experimenting with weathering steel, they are expanding their palette to bronze, brass and stainless steel. This includes experimenting with different surface treatments to achieve unusual visual and performative effects.
For an art studio and gallery building in Racine, Wis., the architects clad the base of the building in brass panels, for which they developed a custom patina finish with Scathain LLC, a Milwaukee-based metal fabricator. “The goal was to create a rich, bronze-metallic surface with a high degree of variegation,” Schmaling says. “The effect was stunning, turning the facade into a piece of art while giving it the long-term durability that an urban site requires.”
Belay MKE
Located on the northern edge of downtown Milwaukee, Belay MKE is a mixed-use development that combines an 18,000-square-foot indoor rock climbing gym with 46 small apartment units. To contrast typical developer fare, Belay MKE was conceived as an intentionally solid, monolithic block designed to reverberate the physical scale and muscular presence of the unpretentious industrial structures that used to define the fabric of the area. Johnsen Schmaling opted for a restrained exterior palette of weathering steel accentuated by fiber concrete panels, aluminum and glass, to reflect the inherent contradiction of the site. The slowly transforming skin of oxidizing corrugated steel panels wraps almost the entire building volume, the weathering skin in a carefully edited dialogue with the crisp, precise lines of the aluminum extrusions and concrete panels.
Studio for a Composer
Meanwhile, the Studio for a Composer in Spring Prairie, Wis., is an unassuming structure embedded in Wisconsin’s rural landscape. An intimate retreat, it serves as a studio for a Country Western musician to write and record music. The building has a formal discipline with exacting details and a carefully restrained material palette that is also contemporary and carries on the tradition of Midwestern pastoral architecture. The simple, rectangular volume’s long sides are covered by a weathering steel shroud with oversized glazed openings at each end of the studio to provide access into the space and out onto the vegetated roof. The building materials—exposed concrete, steel, glass and wood—were locally sourced and chosen for their ability to age gracefully over time.
As much as the firm appreciates the effects of weathering steel, Schmaling says that sometimes they don’t want to change metal’s appearance. “It is important to pay attention to correct assembly techniques that preserve the metal’s integrity, from fastening to flashing to correctly addressing vulnerable edge conditions,” he explains. “The other challenge remains cost. Metal prices have gone up consistently over the years, and the cost fluctuation of some metals like copper or brass can be staggering, making it difficult to plan ahead without building into the drawings a contingency plan for when those fluctuations may require dramatic design changes.”
“We have an insatiable appetite for experimenting with both conventional and uncommon materials to discover properties that can benefit our buildings aesthetically and their overall performance. Our interest in materiality goes hand-in-hand with an almost fanatic devotion to developing original construction details—details that reflect the rigor of our design process as much as they exploit the unique qualities of the assembly systems we deploy.”