Crafter's metalwork will grace BayWalk

A metalsmith for the famous, Alex Klahm is little known here. But his huge project for the shopping district's entrance may change that.

By LENNIE BENNETT

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 8, 2001

ST. PETERSBURG -- Acanthus leaves on a screen, whorls on a bannister. They appear as delicate as gossamer. Their lightness is an illusion of the metallurgist's craft, of which Alex Klahm is a master.

Klahm, an architectural metalsmith whose designs are sought by an international roster of rich and famous clients, has worked without much local notice in his downtown studio for about three years.

That will probably change in a few months when his Millennium Gateway is expected to be erected in the BayWalk complex as part of the city's Public Arts program.

Public Art is funded through a city ordinance allocating 1 percent of the cost, up to $25,000, of facility capital improvement projects (meaning buildings, not roads and sewer work, for example) for public art. Funds are accumulated until an appropriate site for public art is decided on.

A committee of volunteers, called the Public Arts Commission, recommends the specific works to be created. Past public art projects include the oversized balls in front of North Shore swimming pool and the mangrove sculpture in front of the Municipal Services Building.

The Millennium Gateway, which will be positioned on the walkway to the parking garage across Second Avenue from BayWalk, is one of the most ambitious undertakings commissioned for the program. Klahm's design consists of two 25-foot sentinels and eight 12-foot posts of galvanized steel placed across the 60-foot-wide expanse. Each pole will be entwined with ribbon-like coils and topped with animal sculptures finished in gold leaf. More animal-topped posts will mark every 20 feet along the walkway to the garage entrance.

"We had been looking at a concept with street furniture," said Ann Wykell, the city's Manager of Cultural Affairs who oversees the Public Arts Commission. "We had not been talking about gateways or iron."

She said Klahm's work was recommended to the commission by Pinellas County Arts Council head Judith Powers Jones, "and when we began looking, we found this was a fit, it was a concept that related to our criteria that the work appeal to a wide range of people, art that was of high quality but understandable and enjoyable."

Klahm refers to his work as "large-scale jewelry," and does not call himself an artist.

"My work is functional and almost everything has something to do with architecture," he said.

Klahm typically will be called in by an architect to design and fabricate all the metal elements, such as gates, staircases and lighting fixtures, in homes and commercial buildings. He is currently working on a 45,000-square-foot house under construction in Saudi Arabia and two houses in Naples, Fla. Typically, he said, the projects he works on range from $10-million to $20-million, which explains why he does very little work in this area.

Klahm also does restoration work, replicating old pieces for historic buildings such as Vizcaya in Miami and the Pillsbury Estate in Minnesota, and seven national lighthouses.

A California native, Klahm and his wife Sharyn, both 53, have lived in many places, but he said they settled in St. Petersburg "because of the water."

Their wood-hulled, 40-foot sailboat, a rare John Alden design, is moored at the Harborage.

But his work, he says is "all-consuming."

His studio is part of a four-story building on Eighth Street between Central and First avenues N. The Klahms purchased the derelict property, originally the Harlan Hotel built in 1925, and later the Lester Brothers Furniture annex, and spent several years and several hundred thousand dollars restoring the first two floors. His touches are everywhere in the reception and office areas: balusters, tables, light fixtures and an uncharacteristically small piece, a tiny bronze rabbit, his wife's Easter gift.

In the back is his two-story, un-airconditioned studio. There, with an assistant, he manipulates metal, "an unyielding material," by melting it over a gas forge that gets as hot as 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, then hammering it into shapes. Sometimes he uses a power hammer, circa the 1940s, built for Bethlehem Steel, that can be calibrated to deliver a blow with a force of 200 pounds or just a slight tap. Or he will shape the metal by hand on an anvil, a technique called repousse, using one of his dozens of hammers.

His cast work, in which patterns are made and liquid metal poured into forms, is done off-site.

The posts for the Millennium Gateway have been cast and wait for their decorative embellishments in one corner of his studio. Klahm said he will begin work in earnest on the 34 animal figures which will be forged and hammered, not cast, making them one-of-a-kind images of Florida wildlife.

His fee of about $100,000 "is probably about half what it's worth," said Wykell. "But that was what we had and he agreed to do it."

"It was important for us to do something for the community we've chosen to live in," said Sharyn Klahm.

"Right now, I'm trying to get this thing finished and shipped so I can get to the gateway," Klahm said pointing to two massive iron gates, suspended from an overhead crane and weighing about 1,000 pounds, that are being lacquered black.

"They're the driveway gates for Tommy Lee Jones' house," he said.

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