If you have not been to the fine cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul than you are missing out on what are the jewels of the Upper-Midwest. Divided by the mighty Mississippi these two cities sport some of the nationals most extensive offerings of cultural entertainment, from theaters, to parks to museums of all kinds the Twin Cities are over-flowing with options. Many of these cultural centers offer with them some incredible architecture — the Frank Gehry designed Weisman Museum on the University of Minnesota Campus the newly constructed Guthrie Theatre or my personal favorite the Walker Art Center. Recently the Walker received a renovation with it’s most notable update being a shiny series of exterior panels that look almost like crumpled pieces of paper. This unique use of material has garnered the attention of architects around the world and served as inspiration for the design teams working on museums in New York, Tampa and more.

While scouting locations for a video shoot for a client this past summer we landed at the Walker. During our tour I asked our guide about the exterior panels and she was able to give me a little information about them. From there I did some digging of my own and to my amazement discovered that the maker of the panels (M.G. McGrath) was located only 3 miles from my new house.With featured projects like the Walker Art Center, the Denver Museum of Art and many more, M.G. McGrath is the pioneer in the architectural sheet metal industry but sits relatively unknown to the non architectural community in the quite east side of St. Paul.
After contacting M.G. McGrath I was very pleased to find out that they had a few left-over pieces from the Walker Art center project, that I could buy. I quickly purchased the last remaining pieces with the plan of using them on the interior of my house to wrap the fireplace, now months later my vision was about to come to life. I made arrangements for M.G. McGrath to fabricate the remaining pieces to fit around the fireplace wall. Because I had known the size and depth of the panels well before framing was completed on the fireplace, I was able to adjust the walls to accommodate the panel thickness for a perfect fit. Then yesterday morning M.G. McGrath’s installers came and assembled the panels and attached them to the surround. I was away during the day at work and not able to see the installation however I asked Stacy to take pictures which she did.I was anxious to see some of the progress and asked her to send some of the shots to me at work however she thought it best if I saw it completed in person and I must say it was worth the wait. The crumple pattern of the extruded aluminum panels catches the light and accent every curve, corner and angle leaving me a bit breathless.

Of all the features of the house there is no other area that is more striking than the fireplace surround. I am sure that it will be a conversation piece for years and best of all a little piece of modern art/architectural history, right in my own living room.

We painted the surround a charcoal gray to avoid any contrasting lines with the edge of the fireplace box since the panels are mesh style metal.

The first few pieces are fitting in place.

There is a little thinking that goes into installing these as you can imagine.

Like a giant game of Tetris the pieces go together.

The perforated aluminum catches the light in some incredible ways both in the daytime and night.

The fireplace will certainly be the focal point of the living room.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:44 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.