Two years ago Albert Paley smiled as he watched his team haul into place the final pieces of an entrance gate for the St. Louis Zoo. Peering from their 130-foot steel jungle were creatures he had conjured up more than 20 years before. Paley is the first metal sculptor to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Institute of Architecture, after three decades of producing about 40 works a year. Dramatic gateways such as the one in St. Louis are his specialty—he has created more than 100 portals and entryways—but these whimsical gates held a particular satisfaction. Originally designed in the 1980s as an entrance to New York’s Central Park Zoo, the project’s financing fell through and the gates were never produced. Paley once called it "the greatest disappointment of my career."

By the time he was asked to resurrect "Animals Always," Paley’s operation had expanded and modernized and so had the gates—now four times larger than the Central Park version and made with laser-cut and hydraulically bent steel in place of forged iron. "I had 20 years to resolve that design," Paley says. "But it’s still a very literal piece with flora and fauna and probably 130 different animals."

Paley didn’t always work on such a grand scale. He started by making sculpture small enough to wear on a lapel. A leader of the studio jewelry movement in its heyday, Paley traded silver and gold for iron and steel in the 1970s. His distinctive sculptures and portal gates now grace hundreds of sites across the country, while his early decorative arts sell for impressive prices at auction. Today, Paley continues to explore the plastic nature of metal and the integration of architecture with ornamental metalwork.

Born to a working-class family in Philadelphia in 1944, Paley followed a girlfriend to the Tyler School of Art, just outside the city, and discovered he had a talent for three-dimensional form. After studying sculpture as an undergraduate, he switched to goldsmithing for his master’s degree, inspired by his mentor, Stanley Lechtzin, the innovative head of the jewelry department.

Paley approached jewelry with a sculptor’s sensibility, creating dramatic pendants and brooches that served as body-specific sculptures. The craft movement was taking off, and Paley soon became a leader in the jewelry arts, teaching studio jewelry at Tyler and later at Rochester Institute. But by the early 1970s, he was frustrated with studio jewelry, sensing that the field had become overcrowded and derivative.

While forming hammers and chisels for jewelry-making, he discovered ironwork and began forging candlesticks as an experiment before moving on to planters, mirrors and small tables. Blacksmithing was a far cry from fabricating silver and gold, but candlesticks felt like familiar territory. "In many ways, the functional concerns were the same—the aesthetic boundaries, the scale. The relationship of candlestick to candle was similar to the relationship of jewelry to the body," Paley says. "I was trying to express the plastic nature of heated iron. When it’s hot, you can fold it and bend it. I wanted the resulting form to reflect that."

In 1974, the Smithsonian Institution invited eight artists to submit drawings for the entrance gates of the new Renwick Gallery of American crafts and decorative arts at the American Art Museum. Paley won the commission, despite the fact that he had never produced anything larger than candlesticks and a couple of small tables. "In the early ’70s, very few people were doing ironwork," he says. "It was an incredible opportunity, but I never thought it would change my career the way it did."