Metal Urge
Peter Vanni makes the cut in steel, bronze, and copper
Metalsmith Peter Vanni says he doesn’t mind a bit of dirt in his workshop. Good thing, since grime is everywhere—thick dust on the handmade worktables, blackish soot on the walls from the last foundry burn, and grease on the metal lathe and mill. What he does mind is clutter. His workshop—dubbed Archipelago Metalworks after a certain plasma-cutting technique he’s known for—is peerlessly organized. Flats and tubes of steel and bronze are lined up just so, and raising hammers hang neatly on their pegs.
This is Vanni: passionate artisan with a flair for eccentricity and subtle contradiction. On one hand, he eagerly concedes his influences—the surrealist Spanish artist Joan Miró and the Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta—but he won’t dissect the geometric fusions and wavy, abstract appendages of his own Tim Burton-esque sculpture. “That’s why we visual people do what we do,” he says. “So we don’t have to talk about it.” He’s the kind of guy who keeps a precise Monday to Friday regimen, 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., even when there’s no paying work to be done. He collaborates with some of the most urban-centric designers in Minneapolis, but keeps his studio in a Chanhassen office park, just a few miles from Prince’s Paisley Park Studios. What keeps big-name interior designers at his doorstep—including Billy Beson, Bruce Kading, Tom Gunkelman, and Andrew Flesher—is his ability to do, well, anything. Need something with an Asian aesthetic? Vanni delights in torii-gate forms such as brass and copper bells, and makes hammered hardware pieces that look like they were excavated from a Chinese monastery. For a refined home on Lake Harriet Parkway, he created a pair of classic gates with flourishes and scrolls. For an artsy homeowner near Lake Minnetonka who wanted steel security gates sans jailhouse feel, Vanni cut loose, using a configuration of arrows, circles, and angles to create in steel what Miró did in paint.
Some of his best work has a lick of wildness to it. He uses a plasma cutter on sheets of metal and then punches out the jagged forms, similar to satellite photos of the Japanese islands, hence the “archipelago” name. Some of these cuts look like bullet holes—he wryly calls one of his bed frames the “Beirut Bed”—but mostly he likes to play with metal in a way that makes it look … un-metal. You’d swear these pieces were made from a black tarp or cut leather.
Peter Vanni’s laser-cut
metalwork can be seen in
this custom home’s dining
table, dining chairs,
and buffet.
Vanni has been working with metal for more than 30 years, before he met his wife, Trish, and they had their three kids. He says he can’t exactly remember why he fell into this profession. The New Jersey native took a sculpture class at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts and liked it. He apprenticed at a metal foundry in New Mexico, took a teaching job at the University of Santa Fe, and then another gig at a Santa Fe foundry. For a few months in the late ’70s, he did stonecutting in Querceta, Italy, before teaching welding at a New Jersey artists’ atelier. By the time his wife—a Catholic theologian—got her new assignment developing a lay ministry center in Eden Prairie 12 years ago, Vanni was well-known among New Jersey designers for his metalwork.
Today, he welds and builds so prolifically that he’s cultivating quite the backlog of bells, candlesticks, and sculpture at his studio and Eden Prairie home. “A day of work like this is the most satisfying thing,” Vanni says. “There’s nothing better than feeling truly tired all over your body.”
Alyssa Ford is associate editor of Midwest Home.
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6 ISSUES (1 YEAR)
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