Sculptural Painted Steel Installation on a Building Elevation

Project Overview

A sculptural steel installation running across the elevation of a building, built as a set of figures — birds, fish, stems and leaf forms — fixed to and around an existing painted steel balcony frame. Some pieces are cut and folded sheet with flat colour; others are drawn in bent rod and read as open line rather than solid shape.

The two treatments are used deliberately against each other. The sheet figures carry colour and mass, and the rod figures carry movement, so the elevation has both weight and lightness rather than one uniform texture repeated along its length.

From Drawing to Steel

The figures started as line drawings on paper. That matters more here than on most jobs: a shape drawn freehand has a particular quality of line, and the whole point of the piece is that the steel keeps it. Translating a hand-drawn curve into bent rod means matching the drawing rather than idealising it — if the curve is tightened up to something geometric, the character goes out of it.

The last image in the gallery is one of the original drawings, alongside the piece it became.

What We Built

• Sculptural figures in cut and folded sheet steel with painted colour panels
• Open line figures formed in bent steel rod, mounted clear of the wall so they cast and catch light
• Tall stem assemblies rising through the balcony framework with leaf and pod forms
• Spiral and disc motifs distributed across the balustrade posts
• Fixings designed to attach to an existing painted steel frame without cutting into it

The Challenge

The installation had to attach to a structure that was already built, already painted, and not designed to receive it. Every fixing point had to be found on the existing frame rather than chosen freely, so the composition was worked around where the steel could actually be gripped — and it still had to look as though the figures had landed where they wanted to.

Colour was the other constraint. Painted work on an exterior elevation is seen against sky and against a strong green wall, and colours that balance in the shop can go flat outdoors. The palette had to hold up at distance, not just at arm’s length.

Project Gallery