The Spaces & Places of Max Steele

A Place Called Home

“I love being at Walker Place because I love telling my friends that I live at Walker Center and they think I’m talking about the art center. Sorry. I didn’t mean it.” Max Steele slowly laughs, his eyes bright behind his dark eyeglass frames. He’s good-humored and a calm individual, someone who clearly has spent most of his life studying functionality and form and appreciating every last detail.

I’m sitting in Max’s well-lit apartment in Walker Methodist’s Place building. The walls are covered in Max’s art and inspiration; each piece meticulously and artfully hung with precision. The natural light makes an incredible backdrop for his belongings and displays. That individuality and uniqueness are what makes Walker such a vibrant, incredible community; one step inside any apartment from the unassuming hallway and you’re suddenly transported to another space, a whole new place.

Max explains his take on it.

“Walker is a place for me. It’s just like my design work that I do, where I think the goal is to establish a real sense of place. A place that has some character, and has the people who are interesting to you. It’s a great place and I’ve found many friends here. I don’t know how many people live here, but there’s a lot of people here, and they all come together in this one spot we call home. I’m always able to go down to the living room or over to the dining room and run into people,” he said.

I mention to Max how neat it is that his new residence is aptly called Place — after spending a lifetime creating places for other people.

“Yeah, that’s true,” he says. “But what I love is making sure that I connect with people, and I’ve gotten to know just about everyone here, and I’m very happy with that.”

He continued. “The work that I’ve done has been focused mainly on creating places. Places for people, places for doing exciting things, live things. And I’ve spent most of my time involved in creating visions of places that don’t exist and creating something from nothing — that is what I love doing. It’s a fantastic experience when you go through that and you see people getting really something out of a place you created.

All of a sudden, it takes it away from being something subjective and makes it a place that anybody would like to be in. So I enjoy that part of it. And I realize there’s no distinction in my mind between graphic design, architecture, interior design, landscape. It’s all the same design, same process, the same effort, and the same end goal. I like to break down the barriers between all of those disciplines and create a holistic approach to design.”

The Next Right Step

So I approached some friends and we talked about lots of things and realized that I wanted the chance to be a teacher. So I applied for schools around the country. I got interviews at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Florida in Gainesville, LSU in Louisiana, and Colorado, the University of Colorado in Boulder. And you wouldn’t probably guess this but that’s where I ended up because it was pretty spectacular. They didn’t offer me the same money, but they offered a real good situation because they were creating a new program, a new program called environmental design and it was to take the old architecture five-year program, make it a four-year program with the additional two years later. And I was one of four people who were selected to create that new curriculum, basically starts from scratch and create a design program that was also environmentally focused and based its work on problem-solving.

So now there was an opportunity to use what I learned in graduate school, which was a very scientific approach to design, very different than the Illinois intuitive approach and I became much more interested in reasons why and how you do things and how things are moving forward. I was able to develop that curriculum in the summer months before the program started. It was a four-month exercise and the program was successful and I enjoyed teaching for the next 15 years.”

The Hobbies & Vision
of a Design Man

Max said, “Following my retirement, I obviously looked into what could I do, what do I love doing? And it became very clear, I love the camera. I love working with the camera. I just couldn’t put it away. And it’s always with me. Everywhere I go, I capture the items that are not real clear; simple, ordinary objects. The more mundane an object is, the better. A leaf on the ground, a little bit of water that piles up in the rainstorm. Lots of simple items become really important, and you capture those, and you develop photography as a way of seeing this way, of capturing those, and way of presenting them to other people so they can see something in a different way. Something that looks like it’s not very much, it’s not very interesting, but yet becomes very exciting and other-worldly.

“What do I do when I transition out of architecture, and I’m looking for the next thing to do because I can’t stop my creative process? Everything. Everything for me is being interesting, creative, and creating new, different approaches, new ideas, new ways of looking at the world. And I find I’m able to do that with the camera a lot. I use a camera to see things, to observe things. And I think as a teacher, I always would talk about the process of seeing and how really, that is important.

And one way to really see, I mean really see, is to get down deep into things, by using a camera to capture these moments, capture the happening. But also how to find that thing, how to find that place where the light hits something or where the colors are just right, where the themes are right. Whether you find the light hitting something in the right way, you close in, you crop in, and you get close into it. You start to see even more things and you start to see a story that’s there, and you don’t see it if you just kind of walk by. That’s really important to give it an opportunity. And these are very mundane, very simple and also very complex.”

Behind the Lens

Max is showing me some of his photographs, explaining his vision and execution. He said, “The way I took these pictures, and how I selected the pictures is part of it, but making a print of those pictures is what makes it yet another world. They become alive, and then once I did a few of these, I started to think, what can I do to distinguish? Because walking around to different galleries, where I’d like to get my work visible, a lot of comments were, ‘Well, these are great photos, but there are a lot of great photos out. What can you do to set yourself apart and distinguish what you do?’

I took some of my photographs and started looking at them very closely and realized that the better photographs were pictures that weren’t so good, and took them and got deeper into each of those and started to print them. I got a printer and started to create real paintings with the photographs. The paintings then turned into complex prints. Later on, I started adding more than one image together, two and three images in the printer, not in a computer, because I prefer to do it as a sketch, as an impulse, as a visceral thing. So it’s not just overplanned or worked on too much. I wanted to have more depth to it.