SteelMaster Buildings

SteelMaster-Inspired Design Wins Awards

SteelMaster steel buildings have been used for almost everything imaginable, but Lewis Wadsworth took SteelMaster into a fantasy land…

Award-Winning Architect ‘Steels’ Away to a Fictional Time and Place 

Lewis Wadsworth lives in a fantasy world, complete with a Quonset-style house that sits on pilings and is framed by steel arches and windows made of acrylic arena-spectator shielding. He built it strong and sure, for it is the place where he will take his final bow, or as he puts it, “…this is the house where I wait for the world to come to an end.”

 He is alone, self sequestered on a forbidding stretch of a lifeless land in the Antarctic called Deception Island. “The whole of existence is generally recognized as a deception; so let me witness it being swept away from the vantage of an island named in honor of the great untruth, “ writes Wadsworth. “This is where I will make the last voyeuristic stand against oblivion in the appropriate architectural vessel and prepare to watch something that might be a storm (but could be any fashionable version of apocalypse, personal or universal) sweep in from the sea.”

Wadsworth isn’t crazy; in fact, he is a forward-thinking, award-winning architect. His essay, which documents an end-of-the-world scenario and features word pictures and drawings of his metal arch building, was selected for inclusion in AIArchitect’s Second Fantasy Architecture Theme Issue, which ran in August 2008. AIArchitect is a publication of The American Institute of Architects, a leading professional membership association for licensed architects, emerging professionals, and allied partners.

More recently, the same project won the Boston Society of Architect’s Unbuilt Architecture Award for 2009, which called for entries of unbuilt architectural designs of any project type, including purely theoretical projects and unbuilt client-sponsored projects. His design will also be discussed on November 19 at Build Boston, the largest regional convention and tradeshow for the design and construction industry.

“The idea for this sort building was something I had been playing with for a while—I had proposed a little elevated boathouse or waterfront structure with a Quonset-style “look” when I was an architecture graduate student at Yale in 2001,” says Wadsworth. “In spring of 2008 I resurrected that idea to illustrate some design and presentation ideas for a class I was teaching at The Boston Architectural College, but I hadn’t made a firm decision on how such a building might actually be put together.”

Inspiration struck as Wadsworth walked the trade show floor at the 2008 AIA National Convention where he happened upon the SteelMaster booth. SteelMaster Buildings, based in Virginia Beach, VA, manufactures arch buildings made of steel and metal as well as prefabricated metal and steel building kits designed for a broad range of residential and commercial applications including garages, workshops, carports, agricultural storage, metal barns, Quonsets, airplane hangars, RV storage, roofing systems, storage buildings, military buildings, government buildings, commercial warehousing, metal sheds, and industrial storage. 

“They had some small assembled samples of their arch material and of course quite a lot of documentation,” says Wadsworth. “I immediately understood how the system could be applied to my little idealized building, both as a structural system and as a purely “formal” way of adding some visual interest (through the pronounced corrugation of the sheet metal) to the exterior. Coincidentally, the AIA newsletter put out a call for entries for its second fantasy architecture issue about that time, so I decided to develop my idea using the SteelMaster product information I had picked up at the convention and enter it into the competition.”

By Brenda H. Welch, a freelance writer and editor living in Hampton Roads, VA.

Click here to ready Wadsworth’s essay.

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