To this day, the Renwick uses Paley’s "Portal Gates" as its visual trademark. A baroque mass of twisted iron, copper and steel, the gates are a contemporary twist on a Belle Epoque theme: a perfect prelude to the historic building and its displays. Just as he had mixed gold and silver in his jewelry, Paley used polished copper to contrast with blackened iron. His ornamental Renwick gates offered a visual complexity not seen for decades and heralded the beginnings of postmodernism, which would take over in the ’80s as a reaction to the austerity of modernism and the Bauhaus.

"Modernism stripped ornamentation from buildings," Paley says. "My work was always seen as a counterpoint to architecture. With postmodernism, ornament was looked at again as part of the architectural vernacular."

The Renwick commission spurred others, and Paley set up a studio to make forged and fabricated furniture and large-scale work while continuing to produce and teach jewelry. But he found architectural metalwork and goldsmithing an uncomfortable fit. "Sitting at a goldsmith bench is a totally different discipline from ironwork, which involves noise and smoke," he says. "It’s an industrial sensibility, which I turned into an art process. I had to adapt environmentally."

Like the Renwick gates, much of Paley’s early work featured unfurling vines and whiplash motifs that spawned constant comparisons to Art Nouveau. His initial influence was not the Victorian era, he insists, but traditional Celtic, Turkish and Oceanic decorative arts, all of which are characterized by fluid, organic forms.

Paley created his last piece of jewelry in 1978 and hired a full-time assistant to help produce large-scale work. Where goldsmithing is a solitary venture, large-scale metals required teamwork. Paley now employs a staff of 15 and, increasingly, has large steel elements produced off-site. While he still enjoys hands-on production, half his time is spent designing and orchestrating, "similar to what an architect does," he says.

Starting with the Renwick coup, Paley’s forte has been the dramatic entrance. Recently, he completed a portal gate for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and not far away, a 100-foot sculpture, still unnamed, at the entrance of the new National Harbor complex, a $2 billion convention center and hotel development on the Potomac River.

Even his sculptures often serve as portals of sorts. "A lot of my sculptures are freestanding pieces adjacent to buildings, so there is a dialogue created between the architecture, the landscape design and the artwork itself," Paley says. "This is the main focus now: how to enrich the architectural environment with the inclusion of artwork."