Texas Architect

Triple-S Steel

PROJECT Triple-S Steel Headquarters, San Antonio
CLIENT Triple-S Steel
ARCHITECT Lake/Flato Architects
DESIGN TEAM David Lake, FAIA; John Grable, FAIA; Darryl Ohlenbusch, AIA; David de la Hoya
CONTRACTOR Hooker Contracting Company
CONSULTANTS Civil Engineering Consultants (civil); Steve G. Persyn Consulting Engineers (structural); JD3 Engineering (MEP); Cochran & Associates (fire code); Drash Consulting (geotechnical)
PHOTOGRAPHER Chris Cooper

Glimpsed from a half-mile away, the first sight of Triple-S Steel Supply's new facility in San Antonio is a welcome anomaly amidst the industrial landscape of the former Kelly Air Force Base. The warehouse/office/store complex is also huge, although there's little surrounding context to give the approaching visitor a sense of scale. Slowly, as the eye distinguishes the vehicles in the parking lot, the visitor begins to comprehend the building's sheer enormity - looming over a relatively small office/showroom at the front is a 200,000-square-foot warehouse that is 600 feet long by 275 feet wide by 30 feet tall.

Here on the city's southwest side, Triple-S Steel has established a presence that is remarkable not so much for its size but for its design that calls attention to a building unlike anything else around. The design has been recognized as innovative by the American Institute of Steel Construction, as well as by this year's TSA Design Awards jury.

The client, a family-owned structural and ornamental steel distribution company, asked Lake/Flato Architects to design an architecturally significant building that would stand out from the pre-engineered steel structures that are common to the area around the decommissioned military airfield, now a commercial enterprise zone. The project required a gigantic scale due to the nine 10-ton horizontal cranes that were to be installed within the warehouse. The cranes operate within the warehouse's two outer 100-foot-wide segments and its 95-foot-wide middle segment.

According to John Grable, FAIA, who was part of the design team, "Functionality and practicality drove the aesthetics." To create an iconic warehouse, Lake|Flato devised a kit of parts based on the structural shapes and sections found in the company's catalogue. More than just a strategy to stay within budget, the use of off-theshelf materials provides a real-world showcase for steel detailing. The warehouse's steel exoskeleton is framed with 6-inch-thick, tilt-slab concrete panels attached to the back of the steel columns and terminating 10 feet below the roof structure. Deep overhangs provide rain protection while still allowing for cross ventilation. Set atop the warehouse are six light monitors measuring 30-feet across and 14-feet tall.

Dwarfed by the vast warehouse at its rear, the office/showroom is designed on a decidedly more humanscale to suit the people who work inside and the company's retail customers. Its winged roof references the facility's location adjacent to the still-active airfield. Inside the showroom, exposed steel trusses express the structural integrity of the company's products and abundant clerestory windows provide enough natural light to minimize the need for artificial lighting during daylight operations. To mitigate the strong sunlight along the showroom's west-facing facade, the architects improvised sunscreens by using horizontal rows of three-inch-by-three-inch steel angles. In a similar fashion, the architects installed double-angle outriggers and braces to extend the warehouse's roof line and used galvanized "Z" purlins as sunscreens.

On the exterior, sunlight on the steel structure constantly animates the building envelope, with shadows of the overhanging sunscreens moving slowly across its concrete skin. Surprisingly, when seen close-up, the exposed steel effectively reduces the mass of the building and demonstrates the inherent elegance of the project's steel components.

According to TSA Design Award juror Walter Hood, ASLA, the project represents "a building type that is ubiquitous, that we see in our landscape, but here the architect has taken this type to task in really looking at the materials that are being sold within the plant or being fabricated within the plant and looked at that as a way to begin to shape the structure itself. From the industrial bays to the showroom, the tectonics of the building has a way of engaging the visitor [to say] 'This is what we do here,' but also in making the envelope for someone to experience. And it's a very hard thing to do, because on one hand the building is highly didactic and on the other hand it has to be highly functional. Machinery is going on in the back, people are selling things in the front and to create an architecture that blurs those two boundaries, I think this building should be applauded for that. The manufacturing component could have been easily forgotten. The elements could have been hidden, but here they're exposed, and they're exposed in a way that is celebratory."

Fellow juror Brigitte Shim was equally enthusiastic in selecting the project for a Design Award: "I think that this building type is so important. It's so much a part of the economic engine that drives all of North America, and I would say it's a building type that is often neglected by architects. So the fact that this was a steel company [and] the fact that they could use their own off-the-shelf elements to actually create their own building that is both warehouse and office, I think, is fantastic. It's both advertising, but it's also about good architecture. For me, within the warehouse part of the building I appreciated the clerestory windows, the way that natural light came into a big warehouse space, and then the attention to the office spaces, to trellises and pergolas, all using their own material ¡V steel ¡V to actually create a wonderful range of spaces that serves the fabrication aspect and the office aspect of their needs."

Triple-S Steel's new building also earned national recognition this year from the American Institute of Steel Construction in its 2007 Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel awards program in the category of Projects Less than $15 Million. And, according to the architects, the owner's satisfaction with the project and long-standing history with the steel industry has led the Stein family to fund a new AISC award for innovative design in steel construction. Based in Houston, Triple-S Steel began as a small new and used steel distribution yard owned by Bruce Stein. His father, Johnny Stein, formed his own scrap metal company, Dixie Iron and Metal Co., in 1932.

As described by TSA Design Award juror Peter Bohlin, FAIA, "The steel headquarters is rather simply realized, using steel elements that the company produces or which they supply, and the plan is pretty straight-forward. The sun shading and its edges are carefully conceived. The result is really a very good corporate project, and one that says a good deal about the quality of Texas architecture."

--Stephen Sharpe is the editor of Texas Architect.