City Creek Center

Salt Lake City, Utah · 2019
KeyBank Tower Lobby & Exterior
Okland Construction

General Contractor: Okland Construction
Our Role: Fabrication + installation,
full scope
Materials: 304 Stainless
6061 Aluminum
Finishes: #4 Satin Brushed
Powdercoat
Feature: 1/2" Plate Grass Motif,
12 Feet Tall
Duration: 4 Months

Twelve feet of
half-inch plate.
No visible seam.

The lobby stair in KeyBank Tower is guarded by a wall of half-inch stainless plate cut in a grass motif — twelve feet tall, organic, meant to read as one continuous field of reeds. It could not be fabricated as one piece and it could not be shipped as one piece. So it was spliced together on site and finished until the joints disappeared.

Shop work, performed in a finished building

We fabricated and installed the full scope across several areas of the City Creek development — the grass-motif stainless inside the KeyBank Tower lobby, powdercoated aluminum guardrail outside.

The hard part was not the fabrication. It was that a meaningful share of the finish work had to happen after the building was done — on travertine floors, against tiled walls, under permanent lighting, with no fixtures and no shop around us.

Field splicing architectural stainless and polishing it out to match a shop finish is a narrow capability. It is also the difference between a rail that was installed and a rail that looks like it grew there.

Full-height stainless grass-motif panel rising alongside the stair during installation, crew working at the top

01 — The panel

Half-inch plate doesn't forgive anything

The motif is cut from 1/2" stainless plate. Not sheet, not perforated panel — plate. Every reed carries weight, and a twelve-foot panel of it has real mass to handle, rig and hold true while it is being joined.

Plate also punishes heat. Put too much into a section that thin relative to its span and it moves, and on an organic pattern there is no straight edge anywhere to tell you by how much. The pattern that makes the piece beautiful is the same pattern that hides distortion until the light catches it.

So the sequence matters more than the speed: control the heat, check against the intended line, and accept that this is slow work by nature.

View up the KeyBank Tower lobby stair showing the grass-motif stainless panel above stone treads — KeyBank Tower lobby. The motif reads as a continuous field of reeds, floor to ceiling.

02 — The splice

The joint has to land where the pattern hides it

A twelve-foot panel arrives in pieces. That is not negotiable — it is a function of plate size, of the truck, and of getting it through a finished lobby without touching anything.

What is negotiable is whether anyone can tell. The splice has to fall where the motif absorbs it, then be welded and worked back until the reed reads as a single unbroken element. A straight-line seam across an organic pattern is the one thing the eye finds instantly, because nothing else in the composition is straight.

Get it right and nobody ever looks at it. That is the whole objective, and it is why this kind of work goes to a shop that does nothing else.

Crew member working at the top of the stair alongside the installed grass-motif panel — Panel sections joined in place, then finished out.

03 — The attachment

Nothing that holds it up is visible

The rails tie back to the walls through concealed attachment points — no plates, no visible fasteners, nothing to interrupt the face. Those connections were welded and polished in the field, in the finished space, after everything around them was already complete.

That is the constraint that shapes the whole job. There is no second attempt on a finished travertine floor. Grinding dust does not belong on stone, and carbon steel contamination does not belong anywhere near architectural stainless, so the sequencing and the protection have to be thought through before the first arc is struck.

It is also the reason a general contractor hands this scope to us rather than to whoever is already on site with a welder.

Powdercoated aluminum ornamental guardrail installed outside at City Creek along a granite base — Powdercoated aluminum guardrail, City Creek exterior — the other half of the package.

Grass-motif stainless guardrail running along the KeyBank Tower lobby balcony edge with a timber cap rail — KeyBank Tower lobby balcony

Wide view of the finished KeyBank Tower lobby with the stainless grass-motif guardrail along the balcony — The run, seen from the lobby floor

Crew installing powdercoated aluminum guardrail against the granite facade outside at City Creek — Exterior aluminum guardrail, City Creek

12 ft

Panel height

1/2 in

Stainless plate

Visible splices

4 mo

Fabrication & install

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