Metal Tells a Story
by Jonathan McGaha | July 4, 2016 12:00 am
Architect is driven by inquiry and experimentation
When Bill Baxley, AIA, was 10 years old, his dad, a Coast Guard civil engineer, led an effort to build a small shelter at a little lakeside area in their Maryland community. Although young, Baxley vividly remembers the almost barn-raising-like aura of it.
“Getting together in the heat of the summer and constructing a shelter; helping my dad and the volunteers put this thing together,” he says. “It was about creating, being in this beautiful place along the water, celebrating the hard work it took, and then sitting inside the shelter and looking back at the landscape. That was incredibly impactful; making something together with people in a place.” That same sense of accomplishment and wonderment has followed Baxley throughout his career serving as the motivation for many diverse buildings and structures, many of them metal based.
Driven by Inquiry
As current vice president and director of design at LEO A DALY, Minneapolis, Baxley’s architectural mindset is driven by inquiry and the testing of ideas through experiment. If he wasn’t an architect, he could have been a geologist, due to his fascination with land forms and the stories behind them. “It has to do with place-discovering what it is about a place,” he says. “The layers of history that geology reveals tell a deep story about a place. Place-making is a big part of architecture for me, and we often study the geologies of areas to inform that narrative. I also just love being outside, and discovering the nature of an area.”
Because metal can change over time to reveal new dimensions like a geological formation, Baxley has been drawn to it since early in his career. He embraces its ability to tell a story. Working in northern Maine in the late 1980s he used a lead-coated copper product on an academic design. “Even though it was only used for copings, sidings and detailed materials, it was powerful from a design standpoint,” he says. “It has this beautiful purplish gray patina and it’s easy to form. It became quite a beautiful material.”
As his career progressed, he continued to grow in appreciation for what he calls metal’s “mutability and storytelling ability.” At Minneapolis-based BKV Group Inc., this became solidified for him in a project called the Tria House for the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. It won an AIA Divine Detail Award from AIA Minnesota for its inventive use of materials.
Tria House was Baxley’s response to a treehouse competition, but rather than do the obvious, Baxley decided to make a house for a tree. “Each material was selected to evidence a change in character over a short period of time, since the project was only to have a life span of five months,” he says. “It was a series of Corten panels that we planted around a tree. The top was perforated with holes that held baskets of earth, which over time grew through the metal. The steel would patina; grasses planted within the house would grow. The gabion path compressed from travel and the recycled glass gravel contained bits of mirror to reflect changes in the sky. As the season changed, the materials marked the passage of time.”
Capitol Idea
Baxley’s experience with the Tria House prepared him for the challenge of designing a memorial to Minnesota’s fallen firefighters. The St. Paul, Minn.- based Minnesota Fallen Firefighters Memorial uses the same Corten material to show change over time, and helps tell the story of the lives given in service of the people of Minnesota.
Located on the state capitol grounds, a large monolith forms a ceiling above the statue of a firefighter rescuing a child. Supported by a field of slender columns, it creates a pavilion that intercedes between the monumental scale of the capitol grounds and the smaller scale of the statue. The pavilion is made of weathering steel plate, which rusts to form a protective coating-a process similar to the oxidation of fire. Names of fallen firefighters are inscribed on sleeves affixed to the columns.
Today, 86 columns are part of the grid, recording the years in which Minnesota firefighters have died in the line of duty. The design allows room for necessary additions. “Every time you see It, it changes subtly,” Baxley says. “The oxidization of the Corten is especially powerful. It sort of transcended the nature of how we understand that material. I love Corten, which was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It oxidizes and protects itself, so you don’t have to use paint on its surface. The fact that it essentially takes care of itself is an important sustainable factor.”
Bethesda Intelligence
Baxley’s design for the Bethesda, Md.-based Intelligence Community Campus (ICC-B) used Norcross, Ga.-based Alcoa Architectural Products’ Reynobond laminated aluminum panels because of their light weight and ability to be painted. Baxley’s concept for the ICC-B is camouflage. This new intelligence community campus houses 17 intelligence-gathering agencies of the federal government, but rather than blending into the background, it camouflages the fact that it’s a government building.
“The metal allows these great metaphorical dialogues with the site; not only are they highperformance materials but they’re wonderfully poetic,” Baxley says. “We worked with Reynobond on ICC-B to develop a custom coating with its product development group in France. During design, we photographed the site when fall foliage was at its peak. The color palette of that woods photo along the Potomac became the inspiration for the materials. That setting-birch trees with gaps of darkness-influenced the exterior skin design. The strips of red, orange and yellow foliage were extrapolated into four custom colors that were applied to the aluminum panels with an incredibly light-absorbing matte finish. We wanted the building to have a dialogue with its backdrop, and Reynobond was able to help us do that.”
DALY Design
Stints with seven different design firms have given Baxley invaluable experience, background and knowledge to excel at LEO A DALY with clients. “We are in our best place with clients when we’re meeting them and developing an operational vision for their buildings,” he says. “That isn’t aesthetic. It’s about being performative about what they do, and how we help them do it better. In that context, the kind of containers or spaces we make, and their relationship to the landscape is all in support of translating that operational vision of their project. Then, we overlay the aesthetic form making. Since we’ve already started with adding value, our ability to challenge the status quo about what shapes and surfaces are like becomes stronger, and we get to make some really exciting decisions.”
Metal will continue to be part of these decisions. “Metal is an incredibly versatile, high-performance, lightweight material that is in lock step with our thinking about using less energy in the buildings we design and produce today,” he says.
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Sidebar: Arch Connect
What is the best advice you ever received as an architect?
Don’t get comfortable. As soon as you’re comfortable, make yourself uncomfortable. When you’re comfortable, you stop seeing and learning the world.
What’s on your iPod while you work?
I really enjoy Gregorian chants. It’s wonderful, freeing music that is good for working. But my tastes are all over the place. I put it on shuffle, and then Black Sabbath will jump up next, then Metallica, Beethoven.
What do you do on weekends?
I sail. I kayak. I’m a big sea kayaker. I like to get outside.
What is your favorite book?
“The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthiessen. It’s a story-kind of an adventure- but really it’s a book about how to live. Where is your favorite place to vacation? We spend a lot of time in southern Quebec on Lake Memphremagog. I’ve been there every year for 30 years.
What historical figure would you most like to have dinner with and why?
Buckminster Fuller. The more I learn about him, the more I am fascinated by his amazing understanding of the world, the universe and our place in it.
To future architects, what advice would you give?
Get out and see the world. Experience as much as you can. So much of our perspective is based on what we see and how we know it. The more situations you put yourself into in different locations with different people, the more you’re able to see the possibilities in things.
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