Steel

Architectural writer and music critic Thomas Small, 49, and wife Joanna Brody, 44, a public relations consultant, had outgrown their two-bedroom town house in Santa Monica. So in 2004, they bought a "decrepit" Culver City cottage to remodel.

It's an appealing idea: Order a prefabricated steel building, have it shipped to your home, bolt it together with a few buddies over a weekend -- and save over traditional construction. Many people have purchased a garage, barn or workshop from one of the nation's numerous sellers of such buy-and-build products with this scenario in mind. But, says John Knight, founder of Santa Clarita-based Knight Building Systems, some Southlanders end up disappointed.

CARMEN ROGERS found her new home almost by accident a couple years ago while flipping through the pages of a magazine at the supermarket checkout line. There it was photographed on a steep hillside in Montecito, the home that architect Barton Myers built for himself and his wife in 1998. Divided into three separate structures, the steel-and-glass house is uncompromisingly industrial in style yet is still in harmony with the unspoiled, oak-filled hillside.

They may have to coin a new category of art to describe Richard Serra's revolutionary creations. His colossal mazes of fabricated steel, with their eerie effects, have taken sculpture into a new realm. Once ridiculed for his "Tilted Arc" -- a 10-foot-high wall of steel at the Federal Plaza in New York, demolished in 1989 because of the public outcry -- Serra stuck to his artistic vision and gained renown for site-specific monuments that now dot the globe.

Modern steel buildings have long been considered among the most sturdy in the event of a major earthquake. But a model of a massive quake in Southern California has sparked debate among scientists and engineers over whether these structures are more vulnerable than previously thought. The Great Southern California ShakeOut, the nation's largest quake drill, suggested that about five high-rise steel buildings in the region would collapse in the modeled magnitude 7.8 quake.

If you're in the market for modern garden sculpture, the options can seem unattainable (think Henry Moore bronzes) or kitschy (Euro-reproductions manufactured in China). But here's a made-in-L.A. choice that's interesting and fairly affordable, as these things go: Los Angeles artist and landscape designer Jennifer Gilbert Asher was frustrated with the lack of affordable contemporary sculpture for her clients' projects, so she began to design her own. Asher teamed up with Mario Lopez, who runs a metal fabrication studio in South Los Angeles, and marketing veteran Karen Neill Tarnowski.

Nicknamed "the world's largest Japanese lantern" for the soft yellow glow it emanates at night, this Brian Murphy-designed house in the Hollywood Hills is the brainchild of an architect known for his edgy, offbeat creations. The effect is caused by light reflecting off the home's corrugated fiberglass shell. With views of Los Angeles from every room and an interior flooded with natural light coming through glass walls and half a dozen skylights, the Sunset Strip-area house had its current owners instantly hooked.

The e-mail from an executive at Ford Motor Co. was blunt and direct. "I do not have any interest in pursuing anything," the official wrote one of the company's parts developers in Escondido earlier this year, as the auto industry was sliding into an historic meltdown. That was how tiny KVA Stainless Inc., a 5-year-old start-up working to develop lightweight, gas-saving stainless-steel components for Ford, got dumped and how it found a new direction on the shop floor. The e-mail presented a challenge for KVA founder Ed McCrink, an 88-year-old entrepreneur whose long career included developing other steel businesses and a smoke alarm company.

The House of Representatives voted to require a switch to a copper-plated steel penny, which would cost 0.7 of a cent to make, from a zinc-and-copper penny, which costs 1.26 cents. It also would require nickels, now made of copper and nickel and costing 7.7 cents to make, to be made primarily of steel, which would drop the cost below face value.

Shares of Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. fell 7.9% after the Los Angeles distributor of metal products said it might sell as many as 7.76 million new shares to help fund the acquisition of PNA Group Holding Corp. The company's stock price dropped $5.66 to $66.13. Before Thursday, the stock had gained 32% this year. Reliance also reported that second-quarter net income rose 27% to $156.6 million, or $2.12 a share, from $122.8 million, or $1.59, a year earlier. Sales rose 10% to $2.1 billion.