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Timeless Beauty: Chicago Landmark Restored to Its Natural Stone Glory

Megy Karydes — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 21:30:36 +0000

Timeless Beauty: Chicago Landmark Restored to Its Natural Stone Glory

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All photos unless otherwise specified appear courtesy of the Richard H. Driehaus Museum Archives.

Exterior 1883

After the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, many homes made of wood were destroyed. When it came time to build new homes, laws were passed to prevent a similar disaster. Fireproof materials such as brick, marble, limestone, and terracotta tile became the preferred building materials since constructing buildings with wood was banned in the downtown area.

Eight years after the fire, construction of the Nickerson House on Chicago’s near northside neighborhood began. The three-story, 24,000 square foot Italianate mansion was reported to be the largest and most extravagant private residence in Chicago at the time it was completed. The exterior façade is made of limestone and Berea sandstone from Ohio. Known as the “marble mansion,” the property is even more impressive inside. “The interior stonework consists of at least 17 different types of French, Italian, Belgium, and American marble as well as onyx and alabaster,” says Sally-Ann Felgenhauer, director of collections and exhibitions for The Richard H. Driehaus Museum.

Exterior Pre-Restoration

Soon after it was built, the light-gray sandstone exterior would lose its luster due to environmental issues. “Over the years, the naturally light stonework blackened due to the build-up of soot and grime from industrial pollutants,” Felgenhauer says. As the exterior became dark and unsightly, the decorative stone elements also began to erode.

The Nickerson House became The Richard H. Driehaus Museum when Richard H. Driehaus, a Chicago investment manager well known for his interests in preserving historic buildings, bought the home in 2003. According to a New York Times article, Driehaus purchased the home from the American College of Surgeons, a professional association that had owned it since the 1920s and soon afterward hired M. Kirby Talley Jr., an Amsterdam-based author and art historian, to oversee the restoration.

“My marching orders were to take it back to 1883,” Talley says in the New York Times article. “It’s remarkable to find a situation like this where you can honestly say that no expenses were denied to do the job the right way.”

In 2003, the same year Driehaus acquired the property, major restoration of the building began, including restoring the exterior façade.

Restoration of a Historical Landmark

“The Driehaus Museum as a Gilded Age mansion is an important piece of Chicago’s history and a window into the past that looks forward by exploring the interplay between historic and contemporary art that honors the legacy of Richard H. Driehaus,” Felgenhauer says.

Restoring the exterior required careful work by skilled teams. According to Felgenhauer, none of the stonework has been changed, but it has been restored.

The sandstone and limestone used were both native materials to the Midwest. Berea sandstone, quarried in Ohio, was a common choice for buildings. Sandstone is a soft and porous material and while fireproof, would eventually absorb the soot billowing from the smoke from nearby coal plants. By the time Driehaus purchased the property, “those industrial pollutants had morphed into a kind of 100-year-old crust. In some places, that crust was 20 millimeters thick,” according to the Driehaus Museum blog post on why the Nickerson House used to be black.

“During the restoration, the Driehaus Museum contracted the Conservation of Sculpture & Objects Studios, Inc. (CSOS) to clean the façade using handheld lasers through a process called ablation,” Felgenhauer explains. “They removed 20,000 square feet of black crust from the stonework over a period of 18 months between 2004-2005. This was officially the first building to be cleaned in North America using this process.”

The reason lasers were used instead of more aggressive approaches such as micro-blasting was because the exterior was so soft that a harsher process would have resulted in worsening of the erosion and in some cases bleaching out the sandstone’s natural yellowish color.

According to the Driehaus Museum website covering the natural stone exterior restoration project, the laser cleaned at a rate of approximately 2.5 square feet per hour.

The website shares a bit more detail on the process of using the laser. “A beam of light from a handheld contraption is pointed at the building, and it breaks the molecular bond that had formed between the stone and pollutants,” according to Driehaus Museum.

According to Felgenhauer, the CSOS team spent more than a year clearing 20,000 square feet of black crust and it was all done with small handheld instruments.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a Chicago landmark on September 28, 1977. In 2008, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks awarded the Richard H. Driehaus Museum with the Chicago Landmark Award for Preservation Excellence, Felgenhauer adds.

Keeping Natural Stone Looking Great

Exterior Post-Restoration

While the restoration project was completed in 2004, the museum continues regular maintenance which includes restoration and conversation. “More recently, as part of the museum’s maintenance program, the building façade underwent tuckpointing,” says Felgenhauer.

It’s a testament to its longevity that with proper upkeep and maintenance, natural stone can withstand even the harshest elements and last for centuries.

The Perfect Match: Digging Deep to Restore the Wyoming State Capitol

Randi Minetor — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 17:55:18 +0000

The Perfect Match: Digging Deep to Restore the Wyoming State Capitol

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An earlier version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2022 edition of Building Stone Magazine.

Wyoming State Capitol. Photo courtesy of Dan Schwalm Photography.

Just one highway leads to Rawlins, Wyoming, a small city 150 miles northwest of the state capital of Cheyenne. Rawlins straddles interstate route 80, but otherwise has drawn little attention to itself since its glory days in the 1800s, when it served as a freight and passenger stop on the Transcontinental Railroad.

In the late nineteenth century, a quarry here produced sandstone for construction projects throughout the region. Rawlins sandstone glows in sunlight with a warm gray that lends a stately air to building exteriors, making it particularly attractive to designers of ornate government edifices. Overseeing the quarry’s production, owner Hans Larsen knew that this high-quality stone should be the fundamental material to grace the Wyoming territorial capitol building, for which construction began in the mid-1880s, several years before Wyoming received statehood. However, the architects had specified sandstone from Loveland, Colorado for the foundation and the capitol steps, with plans to bring more of this stone from Loveland to create the ornamented façade.

Hearing of this insult to Wyoming quarries, Larsen stormed into Cheyenne, demanding that the local government use materials from its own resources rather than importing stone from another territory’s quarry. Government officials, no doubt taken aback by this fiery businessman, saw the wisdom in his point. Larsen won the contract, making Rawlins sandstone the material of choice for the capitol’s impressive exterior. Skilled stone masons created hundreds of detailed sculpted features by hand. Each column, corner, and cornice was a unique tribute to the sandstone’s quality and durability. The finished structure, including the towering rotunda, opened in 1888.

Not even Wyoming sandstone can last forever, however, so some 130 years later, Wyoming’s infamously harsh winters had taken their toll on the original building, as well as the additions to Capitol Square constructed in 1890 and 1917. In 2013, the state began a massive $299 million renovation of the entire capitol complex, bringing top talent from across the region to Cheyenne to restore the grandeur of this splendid Renaissance Revival façade. The state determined that the restored capitol should look exactly as it did when the first crew completed it in 1888, so the team of architects, masons, and fabricators looked northwest to Rawlins once again for stone to match the building’s worn exterior.

But Rawlins no longer had a working stone quarry. The quarry had closed in the 1920s, nearly 100 years before.

Unearthing the Stone

A block of sandstone is hoisted by a stiff leg derrick in a sandstone quarry owned by the Kerr Marle and Stone Company near Rawlins, WY between 1890 and 1910. It is believed that this photo might be the same quarry used in the Wyoming State Capitol restoration. Photo courtesy Wyoming State Archives.

The land containing the former quarry now belonged to Overland Trail Cattle Company, a major ranching and cattle operation and a subsidiary of Anschutz Corp, a private equity company based in Denver, Colorado.

“Eldon Strid, a local person, provided a tremendous amount of knowledge about where the quarry was and who the owners were,” said Jeff Callinan of J.E. Dunn Construction Company, the general contractor for the state capitol project. “The land had recently changed hands—they were about to put a wind farm on this land.”

J.E. Dunn tried to contact the owners, but when they received no response, they enlisted the help of the governor’s office of the State of Wyoming. Governor Matt Mead and his staff approached Anschutz and “managed to shake it loose,” Callinan said, striking a deal that allowed the state to take 253 tons of sandstone from the former quarry for a reasonable price, providing the state found its own people to bring out the stone. J.E. Dunn tackled this tall order and located a mobile quarry operator in South Dakota.

“We’d never had to set up a mobile quarry before,” said Callinan. “Normally, we are in the business of going out to the quarry to select big blocks of stone. In this case, we had to learn about the front end and getting the stone extracted. It’s a logistical project to get the stone out of the earth and get it to the people who can create a piece to go into the building. This team knows how to go through that logistical challenge.”

The governor’s office of the State of Wyoming helped in the access in the capitol’s former quarry source in Rawlins, WY, which had closed nearly 100 years before. 235 tons of sandstone were quarried and used in the restoration effort. Here, cuts are made in the sandstone where sections of block will be extracted using a wire saw. Photo courtesy State of Wyoming.

Setting up a mobile quarry came with its own package of obstacles, Callinan explained. “We had to build a road. We had to coordinate with the Department of Corrections because there was a prison nearby. Then the Fish and Wildlife Department identified that a golden eagle was nesting in the area.” Golden eagles are a protected species under the Bald and Golden Eagles Act of 1940, so the quarry team had to wait for a month to begin their work until the eaglets had fledged and the birds abandoned the nest.

The effort to reopen the long-dormant quarry proved to be more than worthwhile, said Tom Van Etten, president of Galloy & Van Etten, Inc., an award-winning family-owned stone fabrication company in Chicago. Van Etten led the twelve-person team that turned the Rawlins sandstone into meticulously cut and sculpted replacement pieces for the Wyoming project. “It’s a perfect match,” he said. “They found not just the right quarry, but the right stone matching in color.”

Choosing exactly the right cuts of sandstone—matching the color of each to the existing stonework in the capitol façade—became the full-time job of preservation architect Katie Butler of CSHQA, headquartered in Boise, ID. Butler and CSHQA principal John Maulin came into the state capitol project in 2015 at the request of HDR Architecture, Inc., the architect of record. “I visited the site in Wyoming almost every other week for three years and attended numerous trips to quarries and fabricators to select the stone, review samples, and ensure the processes were in compliance with the construction documents,” said Butler.

The process began with the team comparing a series of seven Rawlins sandstone samples, ranging in color from gray to buff, to each building level and elevation of the three building periods. “After a day on a lift, three samples were consistently found to match the existing stone at all areas,” said Butler. “These three samples established the range of colors we would use to select blocks from the Rawlins quarry.” The team visited the quarry three times between October and November 2015 to determine if the 3’ x 3’ blocks were in the correct range for color and veining.

The project team compares samples to quarry blocks. Tom Van Etten, president of Galloy & Van Etten, led the twelve-person team that turned the Rawlins sandstone into meticulously cut and sculpted pieces for the Wyoming project. Photo courtesy State of Wyoming.

“It was quite the process,” said Butler. “At each site visit, we reviewed stone from different parts of the quarry—south pit, middle pit, and north pit. It was all the same type of sandstone but varied from each part of the quarry. It was tough trying to make sure that the underlying color and variation would be appropriate, especially with the building having been built in multiple phases.” After each visit, the team documented the process with photos and summarized it all in a field report.

When stone became available from the Colorado quarry in Loveland for repairs of the stairs on the north and west side of the building, Butler and her team repeated this painstaking comparison until they found the right match for the existing steps.

With this process completed, Butler and the rest of the team—Scott Evett from masonry contractor Mark 1 Restoration Company; Mike Ford, senior associate with stone restoration architect Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. (WJE); and representatives from J.E. Dunn, HDR, and the State of Wyoming met on site regularly to review mockups, trial repairs, and overall project progress.

Enormous Scope

While the historians searched for exactly the right stone, Ford and the WJE team worked with Mark 1 Restoration to determine the scope of the required repairs. “It was about developing a repair approach that we thought was good and sound, but prioritized enough that we could do the repairs we felt were most important, deferring others,” said Ford. “We went on site, did an investigation, and provided options for repair.”

Placing life safety above all other priorities, the WJE team discovered that the stone at the base of the building—the two courses quarried in Loveland—had deteriorated enough to raise concerns about its continued viability. A clear surface treatment had been applied to this stone in the 1990s, but it did not prevent damage from water and weather, and it “likely accelerated deterioration,” a report on the project noted. Many of the cornices and column capitals showed “severe delamination,” the document continued, also due primarily to water exposure. Some areas had been patched with mortar and stabilized with protective netting, applied years before to slow the progression of the inevitable—and to keep pieces of the façade from raining down on passersby.

The ornate elements throughout the Capitol façade had deteriorated during more than a century of Wyoming weather. Photo courtesy Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.

When it came to the restoration of these decorative elements, Ford and his team presented the state with options. “Often people look at these projects and say, ‘I can’t do that,’ instead of ‘Yes, I can do it, and this is what it will look like,’” he said. “For example, if you have snow and it sits on cornices and ledges and it melts, it gets into the stone and it absorbs. Then it freezes, and it happens again and again—that’s called thermal cycling, or freeze/thaw. A lot of the distress we were seeing was at these projecting ledges. We said that we could do dutchman repairs to match the original, and could improve water management; however, another approach could include installation of a sheet metal flashing. This may address water management and be more cost effective, but it would have an aesthetic impact.”

WJE installed a mockup of both the stone dutchman and flashing approach and showed the state. The state chose the dutchman approach. “That is fine; they were able to make a good decision with the mockups and an understanding of the benefits and drawbacks we presented,” said Ford. “It’s a historic building. You want to keep the historic character and integrity.”

In all, a total of 1,135 individual pieces throughout the building’s exterior required repairs or replacement, using 3,160 cubic feet of stone. “We put the stone in a local yard until we shipped it to Galloy & Van Etten in Chicago,” said Callinan. “There were truckloads and truckloads and truckloads.”

As if the size and scope of the project were not complex enough, the original architect in the 1880s, Davis W. Gibbs, had designed just about every feature of the ornate European-inspired façade to be unique.

“As a masonry restoration fabricator, Mark 1 created a shop drawing for each additional piece,” said Callinan. This shop ticket included the type of stone, its dimensions, the dutchman repair styles required, the number of the actual block of stone from which this piece would be cut, elevation drawings, and tooling requirements. “These would be approved, and it would go into fabrication. A lot of times they oversize them a little bit, so onsite they can tool it a little bit to get a perfect fit. Some have similar profiles and textures, but each piece was fabricated for a specific place and purpose.”

The masonry team worked to develop standardized details for categories of stone profiles—so all the cornice ledges, for example, had the same basic shape and required the same kinds of onsite work once they arrived at the job site. “Every stone on the building was assigned a number, so you could see all of these on the elevations,” said Butler. Tom and Susan Van Etten led the effort at their Chicago facility to fabricate the profile of each element, roughing in the shape and preparing it for the decorative carving to be done by hand in Cheyenne.

On site, masons from Mark 1 installed the dutchmen that had been fabricated in Chicago at Galloy & Van Etten with planers, pneumatic chisels, combing tools and other shaping devices to create exact replicas of the original detail for each column and cornice. Portions of the building were hand-finished on site—the rock face of the base stone, for example, using a small pitching tool to remove bits of material at a time.

Butler totaled up the various kinds of repairs the project required: four different kinds of joints, eight different resurfacing techniques, 33 kinds of dutchmen, and two types of surface treatments. “WJE and CSHQA worked as a team,” she said. “WJE reviewed each repair for structural integrity and watertightness, while CSHQA would take the lead on the aesthetic appearance. There were only a couple of occasions where we had to change something because the stone wasn’t a good match.”

Every facet of the stone restoration required meticulous work by hand using small tools. Photo courtesy Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.

The Reopening

Four years of overhaul—the complex’s first major renovation since 1917—resulted in a state capitol worthy of the accolades it has received. The stonework received the 2021 Grande Pinnacle Award from the Natural Stone Institute, while awards for the total project streamed in from many trade organizations: the American Public Works Association, Building Design and Construction magazine, the American Council of Engineering Companies of Colorado, the Construction Management Association of America, and Engineering-News Record Mountain States.

“A project like this takes extraordinary skill, but it takes a team that knows who the right players are to accomplish it,” said Callinan. “It was extremely helpful to bring the right artisans to the table. The stone masons who were carving the stone onsite were the same people who worked with us on two other state capitol projects.”

State capitol restoration stands in a class of its own, said Butler, making this her favorite kind of work. “There are only fifty state capitols,” she pointed out, “so it’s a really special building type. It’s fun to see how things can be put back together and preserved without it looking like it was ever touched.”

A Concrete Argument for Stone: Building for Longevity at Freedom Place

Stacey Freed — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 19:47:34 +0000

A Concrete Argument for Stone: Building for Longevity at Freedom Place

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An earlier version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2022 edition of Building Stone Magazine. All photos, unless otherwise noted, appear courtesy of Steve Hinds Photography.

Freedom Place at Old Parkland in Dallas is the newest addition to what was originally a 19th-century hospital complex done in the Jeffersonian style.

A former hospital complex originally built in 1894, the Old Parkland campus in Dallas, Texas, has seen its share of reclamation and renovation in the past decades. The most recent addition, Freedom Place at Old Parkland, echoes the campus’ existing Jeffersonian buildings in style and design. Designing and building a 140-foot, six-story structure that includes 8,310 pieces of limestone required massive planning and coordination — particularly because the original design plan was created for cast stone.

Despite challenges that ran the gamut from an increased need for collaboration to fabrication difficulties to unique engineering needs and the impact of weather conditions, the masonry was completed in a little more than a year.

An Argument for Longevity

Freedom Place fits seamlessly with the other older buildings in the complex, one of which was built using Indiana limestone.

“I really believe certain structures like churches, institutions, and government buildings should have a higher calling. Those areas of the market should be built for longevity,” says Rob Barnes, president and CEO of Dee Brown Inc., whose company did the stone installation on the Freedom Place project. Dee Brown was awarded the contract based on the architectural drawings that included cast stone. Barnes was instrumental in convincing building owner Crow Holdings, a privately held real estate investment and development firm, whose offices are on the campus, to switch from using cast stone to natural stone — specifically, durable Indiana limestone.

As Barnes laid out his argument, “cast stone has a shortened lifecycle compared to natural stone, which is denser, generally less porous, and doesn’t craze like cast stone. Craze, or ‘spider veins,’

is a characteristic that has to do with the amount of product produced and how much water is put on it during the curing phase,” he says. Once water makes its way into the material it begins to create problems with longevity. “There’s a lot of subjectivity in the manufacturing of cast stone that you don’t have with the natural product. It’s extracted; it’s solid. It has a longer history of performance. If you’re going to build a 100-year building, you want to use natural stone.”

Market forces also bolstered Barnes’ argument. While many people assume natural stone is more expensive than cast, that depends on supply and demand. At the time the documents came out for bid, he says, “there was a lot of volume in the market [for cast stone], a lot of speculation on a lot of projects, and [enough cast stone] couldn’t have been produced in a timely manner.” All of which made the cost of the natural stone competitive.

As it turned out, owner Harlan Crow didn’t have to be pushed too much. In addition, one of the original buildings, circa 1902, was built from Indiana limestone. As Barnes says, using natural stone on the newest building “would close the chapter.”

Material Challenges

Barnes says that making the switch forced the project to move from the traditional bid-for-award to design-build because of the increased level of collaboration needed. There would be significant adjustments to shop drawings and the engineering process. This added stress to the time allotted for stone procurement, so schedules had to be adjusted.

The fabricators at 3D Stone in Bloomington, Indiana, were concerned with how the new material would be anchored to the structure.

PICCO Group developed 205 pages of what were essentially bespoke connection details. The engineers point to piece “D67,” top right in photo, as one example. That piece sits on the structure but “it really wants to tip out,” says main stone engineer Matthew Innocente. “There’s a big rotation that we were trying to restrain using that D67 plate and four pins.” Drawing courtesy of PICCO Group.

For the engineers, the switch to natural stone meant a real shift in their work. PICCO Group, a Canadian firm with a long history of specializing in stone cladding, had been brought into the project during site excavation when the design still showed cast stone. But natural stone pieces would likely be much larger, and some would be heavier. In some cases, the engineers would have to add steel to the building to be able to support the stone. If the limestone took up two courses of cast stone, the building angles might be off. “These were massive cubic stones in a design with large overhangs and corners. There was some tricky engineering that meant we had to be creative with solutions,” says project manager Dustin South.

South and main stone engineer Matt Innocente were tasked with developing the connections to attach the stone to the structure. “We have 205 pages of connection details,” Innocente says. “That’s more than 200 different connection types we created because of the way this building is designed. It’s not just a flat wall where every piece can be repetitively connected in the same way. These are bespoke connections for a lot of unique dispersed elements like soffits, keystones, corners, columns.”

The connections — dowels, pins, stainless steel plates — had to be able to carry the weight of the stones, keep them from falling off the structure, and hold the stone back from wind loading.

They also had to consider whether their designs could be implemented by an installer. “We can invent a crazy connection,” South says, “but if you can’t reach your hand around it and bolt it down, it’s useless.”

That meant a lot of back-and-forth coordination with the installers and general contractor. PICCO Group worked on the project for about a year, South says.

The entry door under the portico proved a particular challenge. Above the door is a 13-foot wide triangular piece, two feet six inches thick and weighing in excess of 10,000 pounds. It was more than any crew could handle.

The limestone supplier suggested breaking it into three pieces and have vertical joints in it. The architects found that aesthetically unacceptable. The installers had to figure out a way to get a crane small enough but with enough capacity to reach under the porch and fly this piece into place — and be accurate to within a 16th of an inch.

Their biggest challenge was the sheer size of some of the limestone pieces. South points to one 7,000-pound stone by way of example. “Once you add in the lateral forces, that’s another 1,000 pounds of wind load that acts on the stone,” South says. With such large surface areas, the “connections have to take those loads into account as well as the stresses imposed on the stone to make sure, for example, that the pins don’t burst from the stone, that the plate is stiff and large enough, that we have enough anchors going into the structure to support the stone.”

Then there were the carvings and a balcony railing that had to be held in place and designed to carry the weight of people possibly leaning against or sitting on them.

New Technology Helps

Kevin Newton, senior project manager at The Beck Group in Dallas, which provided architectural and construction services, marvels at how such large and complex buildings with dentals, Ionic columns, and Corinthian capitals were built in the past without benefit of technology. Working on this project has given him a new appreciation for this style of architecture, he says. “Knowing we have cranes and hoists and forklifts with 12,000-pound capacity — how did the ancients build these kind of stone buildings with hand tools and no machinery?”

Kneelers, six-foot sections of stone, cantilever off the corners of the roof triangle. Each is a single piece of stone, nearly 7,000 pounds. Installing each one tied up the tower crane that had to hold it in place for hours, bracing against the wind, while masons anchored it. If the winds were over 20 miles an hour, the crew couldn’t set the piece for that day because it couldn’t tolerate that kind of movement.

There was, in fact, a lot of technology that went into this project, which began as a watercolor rendering drawn by Craig Hamilton, the design architect, who works from his office outside London. Once the building owner blessed the design, Beck Group, the project’s architect of record, turned the renderings into construction documents — some in CAD, some 2D computer drawings, floor plans, and elevations which also addressed local building code compliance. The ultimate finished product was a 3D Revit model for the design. From there, the process moved to the construction side, Newton says, where they used Building Information Modeling (BIM) to check for “clash detection,” i.e., identifying where two parts of a building design interfere with each other.

Although a natural element, the limestone pieces themselves underwent some changes that required technological assistance. The design called for stone cladding that was eight-inches thick, but to reduce some of the weight and give the stone full depth, the backs especially at the corners of the stones were “gutted out and hooked,” says Shawn Culbertson, vice president of drafting and project development at 3D Stone in Bloomington, Indiana. This took a lot of time and required a special tool made by a blacksmith to plane or scrape the material to get the right profile.

“This was definitely not something we went at like we normally would,” says Culbertson, whose company was also responsible for the hundreds of detailed carvings that adorn the building. “There was a lot of time management and networking with other fabricators as we worked on the carvings.”

The rosettes were modeled by architect Craig Hamilton. Then they were scanned and duplicated on a CNC machine. 3D Stone worked with Dee Brown to design a threaded stainless-steel insert. Once the builders set the arches, they could spin the rosettes and lock them in place. The threaded insert was timed so the rosettes all face the same direction.

Those carvings — 66 large-scale oxen crania, for example — required the use of CAD cam software and CNC equipment. “The oxen were originally modeled out of wood and clay. Then a 3D scanner scanned that and created an STL model (a 3D file format). Then we were able to bring that into our CAD system,” Culbertson says. “It probably took a million lines of code to move the machines the way we needed to carve them out. We’d run six of them over a weekend to meet the deadline.”

The other helpful building tool was decidedly old-fashioned — an actual mockup. 3D Stone provided stone samples to the installers at Dee Brown, which then built a two-story mockup, approximately 16’ X 13’. “It had all the detail we could build into it,” Barnes says. They used it as a building guide, and the architects were able to see the aesthetics of the variegated limestone, which moved in color from silver to buff and back to silver with seams that naturally occur in the earth.

Dee Brown built an approximately 16’ X 13’ two-story mockup with as much detail as possible to test the design. Photo courtesy of Dee Brown Inc.

Barnes says the mockup helped them “work through the building challenges, so when we transferred to the project, we were able to see some things that needed to be done to make the install go better.”

They looked at how the flashing needed to interface with the vertical jambs, how the anchorage interfaced with the backup, how they could create that seamless, waterproof back and how best to work out the brick patterns. “It was a collaborative effort with the project team and the install team,” Barnes says. “It helped us work through finalizing the schedule, too. It’s a very complex façade. A steel structure is more complex than one that’s concrete. There’s more tolerance and give in the steel and we had to work through the challenges of how the building is built and how you lock it in, so you don’t have movement in the backup structure as you install products. The mockup was a beneficial exercise for everyone.”

Fifteen months; 180 individual carvings; 8,310 pieces of Indiana limestone brought in by 155 truckloads and the end result is a stunning structure that will stand the test of time. “Freedom Place’s one-of-a-kind limestone, brick, and zinc façade is really a jewel in the Dallas skyline,” Newton says. “Everyone on the team is so proud to have overcome the unique design and construction challenge. The clients and tenants are elated.

Thassos White Marble Adds Reflection and Beauty to 2 Bryant Park Lobby Project

Megy Karydes — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 14:57:24 +0000

Thassos White Marble Adds Reflection and Beauty to 2 Bryant Park Lobby Project

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Photos appear courtesy of Pavel Bendov/ArchExplorer.

There aren’t many nearly freestanding buildings in the middle of New York City, but 2 Bryant Park is located on a unique site.

“The building, which is not the tallest building in the area, happens to be open on three sides,” Dan Shannon, architect and managing partner of MdeAS, an architectural company that specializes in commercial office building development, institutional, and multifamily residential developments primarily in the New York City and metropolitan area.

To give some perspective of 2 Bryant Park’s location, it is surrounded by Bryant Park to the south and the Avenue of the Americas on the west. A public plaza is located on the north side.

The existing building cut the two parks off from one another and had a small, poorly positioned lobby. To better connect these spaces, the central column bay and structural slab were removed from the first and second floor, creating a double-height lobby concourse linking the two parks and pulling pedestrians from one space to the other.

Shannon and his team wanted to take advantage of the unique footprint of the building and connect the park to the plaza visually. Choosing the right natural stone would prove to be a pivotal decision. They decided to create a two-story high entry lobby passage through the building and elevate that open space using Thassos White marble from Greece along the primary and surrounding walls.

Why Use Natural Stone?

Shannon is drawn to using natural stone in his projects because natural stone represents quality, durability, tradition, and elegance. He finds we’re also fundamentally moved by natural materials like wood or stone.

“It’s part of our psyche. It’s part of where we came from. It’s part of where we’re going,” Shannon explains. “When people respond in a positive way to an architectural space, it generally has a lot to do with the use of natural materials.”

When he was working on 2 Bryant Park, Shannon was clear in his vision for the spacious lobby and entryway. Those who live, work, and visit New York City are often in a hurry. They need to get from one place to the other and don’t have time to notice the beauty in plain sight. He wanted people who walked into that space to stop—to notice and appreciate the natural stone. He wanted them to respond to it.

The Different Facets of Thassos White Marble

Thassos White marble offers different appearances depending on how it’s treated, and that’s one of the reasons he really wanted to use it in 2 Bryant Park.

The predominant walls were made of honed slabs and nylon brushed. “What the nylon brushing did was give it a very nice matte finish,” Shannon explains, “but it also unified the material.”

Shannon reminds us that all natural stone carries some blemishes because it’s a product from nature and not manmade. Through experimentation with their partner in Italy, Roberto Canali from Euromarble, they were able to cover or eliminate some of the blemishes through nylon brushing.

Nylon brushing is also commonly referred to as a leathered finish. “It feels like leather, it’s got a little bit of rippling, but it’s not as rough as thermal,” Shannon adds. “It came into prominence about five to ten years ago and they’re doing it mostly on marbles because it gives the marble a kind of old world look to it. It looks like it’s worn. It gives it a richness.”

Whereas part of the wall features a nearly pure-white sleek matte finish, he and the team wanted contrast for the sides, so they considered black Italian slate.

“Slate has that beautiful cleft finish,” Shannon says. “When it gets pressure along that grain, it cleaves and creates that nice texture cleft surface, which looks like you you’re looking at the topography of the world.”

While the design team and ownership really liked that look, it was decided that the black Italian slate was too much contrast for this room. “We all wanted a more subtle reading.”

This is where the versatility of Thassos White marble came back into play. Shannon went back to Canali to experiment with a different technique on the stone.

“We took large, thick pieces of the Thassos and put them into this hydraulic machine which had a blade on it, which puts pressure along the grain, on top of it, and it shears the marble,” Shannon explains. “What we found was within reason, with a certain size, with a certain amount of pressure, that we could get a positive result in terms of what we were looking for in the appearance.”

The appearance they were going for was that rougher quarry face when you’ve knocked out the blocks.

To achieve the look was the result of a process that involved finding the right size panels that would give them the kind of contours they wanted. “The bigger the panel, the more profile it was, and we couldn’t control it,” he notes. Finding the right size meant they could control the process better by placing the stone panels on wheeled carts so they could move them around. This allowed them to see how they each looked next to each other and get them closer to looking like they naturally belong to each other.

This process also allowed them to work on the panels by hand since some needed handwork to knock down some of the profile. “You may find a perfect piece but it had one bad part,” Shannon says. In that case, someone on Canali’s team would hit it with the chisel and be able to smooth out some of the imperfections or profiles that didn’t work with the adjacent material.

Natural Light Reflections on the Marble

One of the things Shannon is most proud is how well the natural stone looks on the walls and how the impressive entryway connects to one of New York City’s popular green public spaces.

“It’s kind of like this kaleidoscope connecting these two worlds,” he says. “It really does happen during the day. Sometimes you get the green reflection of the trees that tint the stone because it’s white, and I think that’s just magical. It really is that contrast and the simplicity of it. That is fantastic, you know, just really unique.”

Shannon’s initial vision for the lobby of 2 Bryant Park was for people who walked into that space to stop, to notice and respond to the natural stone. There is no doubt that 2 Bryant Park has carved a name for itself thanks to Shannon and his team who were willing to experiment with what natural stone could do.

Beyond Beauty: Creating Timeless Spaces with Sustainable Natural Stone

Megy Karydes — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 12:30:20 +0000

Beyond Beauty: Creating Timeless Spaces with Sustainable Natural Stone

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Natural stone is often chosen for residential and commercial work because of its beauty and versatility. It’s also really nuanced, according to Roger P. Jackson, FAIA, LEED AP, a senior principal and past president of FFKR Architects, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based full-service architecture firm that serves clients primarily in its headquarter city and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Jackson mostly uses granite for his architectural projects, although he’s also worked with limestone. He is drawn to the beauty of natural stone and believes that its beauty goes beyond aesthetics. “Natural stone feels more durable,” Jackson says. “It has a character of strength, stability, durability, and mobility.”

While other materials may be durable, Jackson notes that natural stone in particular has history, character, and feels good to the touch. It can be carved, and texture can be added to many types of stone, adding another level of interest. Texture is often something he’s seeking when designing buildings.

Jackson credits his clients who understand and appreciate the strength and beauty of natural stone and are willing to invest in it. As a result, he’s been able to incorporate some truly remarkable natural stone into his projects.

Why temples and religious institutions request natural stone

FFKR Architects created an entire division within their firm to manage their work with specialized buildings such as religious institutions. The firm often works on temple buildings and special projects for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and these properties often have unique complexities. While their work in this space began more than three decades ago with the upgrade and extensive remodel work on the Hotel Utah Building when it was converted into the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, its architects have since designed new temples in cities across the United States and completed remodeling projects on historic church buildings including temples and the Tabernacle on Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Jackson is one of the architects who directs the Religious Studio. According to Jackson, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints likes to build their buildings out of noble and enduring materials that truly stand the test of time. “They want to build out of long term materials,” he adds, noting they are looking at investments in their buildings that can last 1,000 years. Interiors can be more flexible so they can be remodeled as necessary, but the exteriors are requested to be noble, rich, and beautiful.

Natural stone is often chosen for these reasons.

Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple: Choosing the right stone for the project

One of Jackson’s most recent projects was the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple, which features Deer Isle granite from a quarry in Maine. “It’s this beautiful, kind of medium gray stone that has a little bit of a lavender cast to it,” he explains. “It looks beautiful when it’s dry. It looks beautiful when it’s wet. It’s one of my favorite stones because it’s really quite unique.”

Many buildings throughout the East Coast are built using this particular stone. There were many reasons why this stone stood out for him and his team to use for this project.

First, many of the stone buildings in Philadelphia feature a grayish granite. Right across the street is the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, which Jackson describes as a fabulous and beautiful building but kind of a brownstone, which is more of a sandstone or a rusty chocolate rich brown. By choosing Deer Isle granite, the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple would match more of the buildings in town and not compete with or match the Catholic cathedral across the street.

Adjacent to the temple are two historic Renaissance Revival icons – the Philadelphia Free Library and the Family Courts Building. The temple is a wonderful addition to the historic Logan Square – one of the five original squares planned for Philadelphia by William Penn.

Secondly and importantly, Deer Isle granite passed the technical and compression testing that would allow it to hold up for centuries to come with flying colors. Some of the technical testing it underwent, according to Jackson, focused on its strength. “How strong is the stone, how much does it weigh when it’s wet, and how saturated can it get? What is its freeze thaw? You run it through, you soak it, freeze it hard, thaw it out, soak it, freeze it,” and they’d repeat the cycle over the course of months specified by the testing requirements.

Finally, the building is clad in cut natural stone and highly detailed in the Neoclassical revival style of American Georgian architecture. The granite was flexible to be carved and textured, even if it wouldn’t be as visible from 200 feet above ground.

“One common cost-cutting feature is the higher up you get, the more dumbed down the details and the carvings,” Jackson says when it comes to building with natural stone. “We did not do that. We knew people would be looking at this building up close.”

Jackson says the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple is a spectacular building in the city and one of his favorite projects.

Natural stone has timeless character

Jackson loves using natural stone for projects and there is another type of stone he’s hoping to be able to use for a project soon: Moleanos, a Portuguese limestone that he says features a beautiful creamy color: “Orange and creamy as opposed to yellow.”

Until then, he’ll continue to reach for the best natural stone for each project because he insists stone has timeless character that never goes out of style. He points to most ancient buildings that still stand tall today because they were built with stone.

“Natural stone has this timeless look whether you carve it, shape it to match a historic classical precedent, or you cut big fat slabs and build with big pieces,” he says.

He looks at the some of the buildings being built today that are more modern or contemporary and while he admits he’s more of a classical and traditional architect, architects and project managers are drawn to natural stone for similar reasons: they want that richness of color and a material with natural character and the timelessness that natural stone provides.

“Natural stone is not going to go away until you carry it away,” Jackson says.

Range, Sustainability, and Beauty: Why Architect Craig Copeland Uses Natural Stone

Megy Karydes — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 20:32:14 +0000

Range, Sustainability, and Beauty: Why Architect Craig Copeland Uses Natural Stone

| art carving case study commercial design interior marble travertine

All photos appear courtesy of Craig Copeland.

There is no mistaking natural stone for its range, beauty, and sustainability. These are among the many reasons Craig Copeland, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, an architect, sculptor, industrial designer, and partner at Pelli Clarke & Partners finds himself recommending natural stone to many of his clients. He appreciates the qualities of natural stone, particularly marble and travertine, so much that he created another business, Situcraft, a natural stone carving and design studio in New York so he could design furniture made primarily using these types of stone.

Maximizing stone’s natural features

“I like natural stone because of the connections to nature and to the earth,” Copeland explains. Unlike other raw material also sourced from the earth, natural stone in its raw state is not only beautiful in its own right, he adds, but he can work with it directly as it is. “It also has incredible durability,” he adds. “There are other natural materials, like wood, that you can work with directly, but they don’t have the same kind of durability that stone has.”

In addition to the sustainability aspect of natural stone, Copeland is drawn to the look stone affords. He appreciates the variability of color and patterning or vein movement and the possibilities of enhancing those features with different textures.

Deciding how and when to use natural stone

As an architect, when Copeland and his team want to recommend the use of natural stone to a client, they engage the client and stakeholders in the process. It’s more of a question of where and how to use natural stone rather than if they should use it, he notes.

In many cases, he says, the best place to incorporate natural stone in the design is where you’re closest to the building, both visually and tactically. “Where you actually can see and touch the building or the architecture,” he explains. “I think that’s a big part of it – tapping into the power of stone and our connection to the earth through its use architecturally.”

From a sustainability standpoint, durability is an important reason he often recommends stone for projects. Unlike other materials that need to be updated or replaced regularly, natural stone is often the best choice but, also, with technological advances in extraction and application, a client can get even more expressive forms for a project.

“I think the other beauty of stone is that you can use the stone in a variety of sizes and really procure and enhance the resourcefulness,” he notes, especially as it relates to sustainability. This is important to him not only as an architect but as a designer as well. “There’s more consciousness and more possibilities today.” Where sustainability might have been an afterthought or not even considered in the past, today it’s in the forefront as people consider the role of building materials in mitigating climate change.

A natural stone vision for projects

When it makes sense, Copeland will suggest stone for projects even when the client hasn’t considered it. “We start by asking, ‘Where is the value?’” Copeland says. “How far can we extend the value of the stone on any given project? As we’re beginning to answer that question, we engage the clients and talk that through.”

In the case of commercial projects, he says the opportunities to incorporate natural stone might be the paving or the base of the facade. He admits he likes to turn things around sometimes to create interesting effects. For one project, Copeland took what traditionally would be a wood wall and had natural stone installed on the wall and floor in the lobby. “The effect was quite stunning,” he says.

Working in marble and travertine

His love for stone extends beyond his practice as an architect.

Copeland enjoys working with marble and travertine when designing furniture pieces for Situcraft. For larger pieces, he leans toward travertine. After spending time observing Henry Moore’s work, an English artist known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures, Copeland felt that travertine could also pull off those contours and curves.

“For the smaller pieces, I like working in marble,” he says. The type of marble he chooses will depend on what he’s designing and sculpting. “I really enjoy working with [Calacatta] Lasa in terms of its hardness,” he explains. “You can really get incredible detail, but it’s very difficult to work with, so it’s challenging.”

Another way he likes to challenge himself is through the use of wet or dry carving techniques. He enjoys working with stones that have larger deposits of quartz, although it might involve more of a wet carving approach. Most of the carving he’s done has been dry and according to Copeland, when travertine is dry, it actually carves incredibly well.

“The trick with the travertine is its strength is very different in different orientations,” he notes. “So it requires a different sensitivity than marble. Marble is a little bit more forgiving in that sense.”
There are many reasons Copeland gravitates toward natural stone for his architecture and furniture projects. One thing he always comes back to is that its beauty and durability as a natural product of the earth cannot be undermined.

On his Situcraft website, he shares: “Situcraft believes that stone helps ground art, design, and architecture to the natural and real world. Natural stone is the only material that is directly available from the earth, with unequalled durability and beautifully unique forms and colors – the tangible essence of over a hundred million years, available to our touch.”
For Copeland, it’s not a matter of if natural stone should be included in a design. It’s how.

Using Natural Stone to Create Old Hollywood Glamour in a New Beverly Hills Hotel

Heather Carter — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 13:08:18 +0000

Using Natural Stone to Create Old Hollywood Glamour in a New Beverly Hills Hotel

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An earlier version of this article appeared in Building Stone Magazine.

Located at the crossroads of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard, the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills is one of the tallest buildings in the city. The hotel, which boasts a Streamline Moderne design, is the brand’s first new build on the West Coast and its second hotel in California.

“The Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills is an urban oasis that combines modern luxury with timeless design. This building welcomes visitors to Beverly Hills in a completely new way,” said Pierre-Yves Rochon, founder and global design director at Pierre-Yves Rochon (PYR) in Paris and Chicago. “The exterior design honors the Golden Age of Hollywood and the architectural history of Los Angeles. Its form is harmonious with its surroundings, but it is also very visible and striking. It reminds us of the 1930s curved buildings in Los Angeles. The Streamline Moderne design is sleek, clad in limestone, and transitions well to the interiors. The volumes, curved edges, and Art Deco-inspired furniture pieces continue to create the hotel’s identity.”

The exterior architecture design of the 207,641-square-foot property was led by PYR in collaboration with architectural firms Perkins and Will and Gensler. A collaborative effort from start to finish, the $200 million undertaking spared no expense, as evidenced by its impressive Portuguese limestone-clad exterior and the interior spaces dressed in marble, granite, travertine, and onyx.

“The interior design challenge at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills was to create a world-class design unlike any other hotel in L.A.,” Rochon said. “It needed to appeal to both international travelers and locals. We created this environment by celebrating large volumes, elegance, and artisanship, which can be appreciated by all. It also has a uniquely Southern California feel—it is light, open, airy, and has an effortless and comfortable style. It has ‘Old Hollywood’ glamour.”

“The sense of cinematic glamour begins with the dramatic arrival to the porte-cochère with a sweeping bronze canopy,” the designer explained. “Guests are welcomed through bronze doors adorned with Lalique crystal pulls. A soaring entry lobby is framed by two tall bronze zodiac screens and anchored by a monumental bronze chandelier. Intimate adjacent alcoves allow for a private check-in and concierge experience, while a floor-to-ceiling glossy onyx fireplace warms the lounge just beyond. The sophistication of the public areas is enhanced by the refined quality of craftsmanship in the FF&E [furniture, fixtures and equipment] program, including a carefully curated collection of art works, Lalique gold leaf backed crystal panels, hand-selected Italian marbles and custom furnishings from around the world.”

Natural Stone Adds Glamour and Intrigue

Photo courtesy of PICCO Engineering.

One of the most striking features of the hotel can be seen in the two-story lobby, where a 17-foot onyx fireplace sets the perfect backdrop for a massive, custom-designed bronze and crystal chandelier. Across the lobby in the main waiting area a trio of marbles was used to create a clean, contemporary floor design. A base of Calacatta Oro marble is accented by thin bronze inserts, creating a repetitive rectangular design throughout the space. The Calacatta Oro marble frames an inner design composed of Crema Marfil and Amarelo Negrais marble, which are bordered by thin strips of Absolute Black granite.

The hotel provides an intimate hospitality experience, with only 18 rooms on each floor—119 deluxe rooms and 51 suites. “The atmosphere is exciting, vibrant, and full of life. We created a quiet backdrop of creams and beiges accented by cool celadons and golden caramels, and sleek black lacquer finishes. This palette also continues into the standard guestrooms, which creates a cohesive guest experience,” Rochon said.

The guestrooms celebrate a classic California style, with floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto oversized private balconies. Each type of room promotes a different color scheme, from the standard rooms to the presidential suite. The king-sized rooms embrace a blue theme, with patterned rugs and complementary accents, while the queen-sized rooms take on a gold theme. Suites are distinguished by chocolate brown and cream outfitting. All bathrooms are clad in marble, waterjet-cut into geometric patterns for the floors and walls. 12×24 inch pieces of Bianco Dolomiti marble were installed on the walls of the bathrooms and showers, separated by 1 1/2 inch vertical bands of Amarelo Negrais marble. The floors in the king- and queen-sized rooms feature an intricate stone medallion, with intermixed squares of Bianco Dolomiti and Crema Marfil marble, framed by 1 1/2 inch strips of Amarelo Negrais marble. In the suites, Bianco Dolomiti, Crema Marfil, and Amarelo Negrais are used to create a unique flower-like pattern on the floor. Crema Marfil was used for the tub surrounds to provide a cohesive look.

In the villas, Calacatta Oro marble was used on the floors. These rooms were designed using hints of celadon, a pale shade of green, with white and cream accents. The bathrooms, which combine all color shades through the use of stone and tile, also feature geometric-inspired floor medallions. The walls share the same stone design as the queen- and king-sized rooms, with 12- x 24 inch pieces of Calacatta Oro in place of Bianco Dolomiti marble, while the floors showcase triangular and circular pieces of waterjet-cut Noir St. Laurent and Crema Marfil marble that is framed by the 1 1/2 inch bands of Amarelo Negrais marble. In the shower, Calcacatta Oro was used for the shower bench and Crema Marfil graces the floors, along with square pieces of Noir St. Laurent marble framed by strips of Amarelo Negrais marble.

The 3,215-square-foot presidential suite, which includes a 1,459-square-foot terrace, combines shades of gold and cream with Noir St. Laurent marble floors to create something regal and one-of-a-kind. The Noir St. Laurent is featured throughout the entire suite’s floors and was carried into the bathroom, where it was used alongside thin bands of Amarelo Negrais marble to create a rectangular-inspired design. Large-format pieces of the same white onyx used for the lobby fireplace were also applied on these walls and the tub surround for an upscale look and feel. The presidential suite’s bathroom features floor to ceiling windows that offer dramatic views of the Hollywood Hills.

An Intricate Installation

A talented team of professionals was enlisted to fabricate and install the hotel’s intricate stone bathroom features. The polished 1 1/2 inch bands of Amarelo Negrais marble required a keen eye to ensure design perfection.

“This detail created a 180-degree continuum that wrapped the bathroom in a warm yellow hue,” said Solomon Aryeh, owner of SMG Stone Company, Inc. “This intricate detail that was achieved in the fabrication process was an important design element that lent the bathroom an elevated experience. Every one of the wall bands was installed to line up with one another horizontally and vertically, with some walls containing up to seven bands that faded into the door surround. This included bands lining up directly with the soap niche and a horizontal line detail on the light fixtures.”

Because of the client’s high standards, Aryeh and his team had to maintain tight tolerances to ensure design accuracy. “To achieve the lining up of the joints in the bathroom, the framing of the room had to be exact with tolerances no more than 1/8 inch,” he explained. “Our task was to work hand-in-hand with the framer to maintain the design integrity requiring walls to be plumb and installed in perfect square. Stone tiles were installed in a thinset system that required the mortar bed to be no more than 3/16 inch thick, as there was no room to build up the tiles or room for adjustments. A thicker mortar bed would off-set the joints from one end of the bathroom to the other, completely compromising the design.”

With several mock-ups completed during the design process and hundreds of dry lays assembled onsite prior to the install, the designers and installers successfully worked together for about four years to construct the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills.

Since its completion, the hotel has received numerous national and international accolades, including a Natural Stone Institute Pinnacle Award in the Commericial Interior category.

“The reaction has been very positive from the owner, Hilton, and the City of Beverly Hills,” Rochon said. “The building has greatly elevated the character of the site. It complements its adjacent sister hotel, the Beverly Hilton. It is true to the city’s heritage of Hollywood glamour.”

TAGS: commercial design bathroom inspire fireplace heather fiore

Why Retailers Are Embracing Natural Stone

Megy Karydes — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 19:00:22 +0000

Why Retailers Are Embracing Natural Stone

| commercial design

The Blue Box Café within Tiffany & Co.’s new retail design concept in New York City features dramatic Amazonite quartzite on its walls. Celine’s new Miami shop is clad in Pinta Verde marble from Brazil. Barney’s New York in Chelsea experiments with different ways to use marble—from curved staircases to cantilevered displays for handbags and jewelry. Savvy retailers and forward-thinking designers are embracing natural stone for more than its utilitarian purposes.

Natural stone is being featured front and center as retailers realize in order to appeal to today’s tech-driven and easily-distracted consumers they need to create a sense of community and appeal to all of their senses. Architects and designers are using natural stone to help convey that ethereal and grounding feeling often missing in most retail environments.

Natural Stone & The Multi-Sensory Journey

The Blue Box Cafe. Photo courtesy of Tiffany & Co.

Luxury retailers aren’t the only retailers taking their cue from the elements to promote a multi-sensory journey. It’s something architects and designers have been encouraging for years and we’re seeing more installations today as retailers struggle to shift purchasing preferences from the convenience of online to brick and mortar.

Joy Monice Malnar, AIA, professor emerita of architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, and Frank Vodvarka, professor emeritus of fine arts at Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, are co-authors of Sensory Design, which explores the nature of our responses to spatial constructs—from various sorts of buildings to gardens and outdoor spaces, to constructions of fantasy. In their book, they illustrate how our designed environment would be enriched if designers had a better understanding of the human senses.

“Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of matter, space, and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle,” shares Juhani Pallasmaa in Sensory Design.

While some designers might consider some structural attributes as ornamental, and, therefore, inessential, others look at architecture as a way to engage our sensory perceptions, according to the authors. Natural stone can be used as more than just a solid building material.

When Tiffany & Co. was planning a redesign and its new retail dining concept, The Blue Box Café, it knew it needed something to dazzle its well-heeled customers. The artfully-composed fourth floor also houses Tiffany’s new luxury Home & Accessories collection of elevated everyday objects.

The striking interior décor incorporates industrial details that pay homage to Tiffany’s craftsmanship and heritage. Among the playful and unexpected touches are elegant finishes like Amazonite quartzite, reflecting the new Home & Accessories collection’s emphasis on everyday luxury.

“Both the café and redesign of the Home & Accessories floor reflect a modern luxury experience,” says Reed Krakoff, chief artistic officer for Tiffany & Co. “The space is experimental and experiential – a window into the new Tiffany.”

In an even more stunning use of natural stone, the Swiss architect for French brand Celine’s new flagship store in Miami’s Design District treated the façades, floors, walls, and ceilings with Brazilian Pinta Verde marble. The stone gives the surfaces a calming blue-green coloration which not only allows the marble to show off its gorgeous hues but lends a beautiful and ethereal background for the brand’s luxury apparel and accessories.

Natural Stone and a Community Space

Photo courtesy of Smokey Mountain Tops.

Like The Blue Box Café at Tiffany & Co., retailers like Draper James are focusing on creating community gathering spaces and using natural stone to encourage mingling.

When Reese Witherspoon launched Draper James in Nashville, she wanted the vibe to feel like “the modern southern woman’s home,” according to the retail brand’s blog. To achieve that feeling, her interior designer added a marble countertop to the cash wrap to make it feel more like a kitchen island, complete with stools around the perimeter. The seating area encourages guests to kick back and relax.

Draper James. Photo courtesy of Smokey Mountain Tops.

Sweet tea is always at the ready on the marble countertops, too. “I picture a customer walking into the store and being offered a sweet tea by a sales associate,” Witherspoon shares on the blog.

Natural stone helps retailers create that authentic connection with customers. Rather than an afterthought, it’s a mindful decision designed to encourage spending more time in the environment which often translates to customers spending more money in-store.

Retailers have their work cut out for them as they continue to test new store concepts in order to make brick-and-mortar shopping fun again. We know natural stone has real weight, both literally and figuratively, and adds a certain permanence as well as a higher level of luxury to any environment. Featuring natural stone, whether it’s to encourage a multi-sensory experience, or as a design element to engage community, isn’t just beautiful, it’s helping bring brands to life and increasing their bottom line.

TAGS: commercial design inspire megy karydes

Travertine: Watching Stones Form in Real-Time

Karin Kirk — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 23:23:27 +0000

Travertine: Watching Stones Form in Real-Time

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Layers of travertine are formed in small pools of mineral-laden water. Bacteria that get trapped in the travertine create the lacy pattern that travertine is known for.

When we imagine how natural stone forms, our minds wander to a primeval time in Earth’s past, or to a fiery underworld within the bowels of the planet. After all, rocks capture the history of the Earth and reveal its inner workings. Travertine is different. If you stand in the right place, you can watch it form right before your eyes. There aren’t too many places on Earth where you can watch a rock take shape in real time, but Yellowstone National Park is one of them.

Mammoth Hot Springs is one of the first sights to greet visitors who enter the park from the north entrance. Mounds, ledges, and terraces of brightly colored travertine glisten in the sunshine, with ribbons of spring water flowing over the formations, adding layer upon layer of minerals. Luckily for us, boardwalks traverse the hot spring deposits, allowing for safe viewing amid a delightful array of steaming springs, multicolored pools, and fantastical mineral formations.

Hot Water Creates Travertine

Travertine is formed by calcium-rich spring water. In Yellowstone, travertine results from a simple interaction of hot water, limestone, and a fault zone. The story begins with a vast, partially molten magma chamber that lurks about 5 miles underneath Yellowstone. This magma is the source of all of Yellowstone’s past volcanic eruptions. Even during today’s period of volcanic quiescence, we’re reminded of this extraordinary subterranean heat by the abundance of hot springs, geysers, fumaroles, and my personal favorite: boiling mud pots. These features are caused by groundwater flowing through hot rock.

Filamentous bacteria thrive in the spring water and create smooth drapes of travertine. The bacteria become entombed in the stone, and when they decompose they leave behind the void spaces that make travertine so intricate and interesting.

Underneath Mammoth, heated groundwater flows through layers of limestone. The hot water dissolves some of the limestone. The mineral-rich water then travels to the surface along a fault zone. Hot water emerges from the mouth of the spring, and precipitates calcite (calcium carbonate). Limestone and travertine are both made of calcite, but they form in different ways. (Limestone forms in marine environments, and is made out of the remains of seashells, corals, and calcite that is dissolved in the seawater.) The hot spring is dissolving away some of the underlying limestone and re-depositing it as travertine. Geologic recycling, if you will.

Part of the fun of watching rocks form in real time is that it sheds light on how rocks formed in the ancient past. A fundamental rule of geology is “the present is the key to the past.” A process happening today tells you something about how it happened long ago. In the case of travertine, a myriad of different textures and patterns can be seen while wandering the springs and pools. The variations are caused by changes in the water flow rate, the temperature of the water, and the types of microorganisms present. On average, the active springs in Mammoth add an astonishing 8-inch thickness of new stone every year.

Everything in the water gets coated in calcite, creating instant fossils.

The travertine terraces at Mammoth range in color from stark white to rich hues of gold, green, orange, and brown. The colors are from heat-loving bacteria that thrive in the hot water. Active springs bear the colorful signatures of bacteria, while recent but inactive sections of the spring are pure white, since they no longer have microorganisms to add color. As the travertine ages, it turns grey. One can judge the age of different formations by looking at the color. The darker the grey, the older it is.

Anything that falls into the hot spring pools becomes coated in calcite. Leaves, sticks, and even feathers turn into instant fossils. I can’t help but wonder how many sunglasses and baseball hats have also become fossilized tributes to a summer vacation mishap, entombed for eternity within the travertine layers.

The Gardiner Travertine Quarry

The former quarry above the town of Gardiner, MT has drilled and sawn faces of travertine.

Across the valley and outside the park’s boundary lies another travertine deposit. It’s the site of former hot springs that bubbled up out of the ground around 50,000 years ago. That sounds like a long time ago, but in geologic terms, that’s a very recent event. A small quarry, now inactive, sits on the site and allows a glimpse into both the stone and the operations used to quarry it. Smooth walls of cut stone offer a cutaway view of the layering that makes travertine so appealing. Long drill marks show how blocks of stone were split away from the wall. Large blocks have been removed from the walls and invite close inspection, revealing the same thin layers and organic shapes that can be seen over in Yellowstone. From the vantage point of the quarry, you can look down at Yellowstone’s famous entrance arch, and see the bright white of Mammoth Hot Springs glimmering in the distance. Someday the springs at Mammoth will stop flowing and hot water will emerge somewhere else nearby, starting the cycle all over again.

Italian Travertine – Popular Through the Ages

The Colosseum is made from Tivoli travertine. Photo by Dan Kamminga, reused via Creative Commons license.

The travertine-forming process can happen anywhere that has the combination of hot water and limestone. Major travertine quarries exist in Turkey, Mexico, China, Peru, and Iran. But Italian travertine may have the most compelling history. Fueled by the same geothermal heat as Mt. Vesuvius and the Roman baths, the mineral springs at Bagni di Tivoli have built up an enormous layer of travertine. It’s over 300 feet thick and began forming 200,000 years ago. (Again, 200,000 years is very young; a typical granite is a thousand times older, or even ten thousand times older!)The Tivoli quarry outside Rome has been producing stone for over two thousand years. In Roman times, Tivoli travertine became the building material of choice because it was locally available and relatively easy to cut and shape. Over generations, the popularity of the stone has persisted, and Tivoli’s vast deposits have continued to supply material for buildings all over the world. It’s amazing to think that the same travertine used by Roman stonemasons to build iconic structures like the Colosseum is being used for sleek, modern construction today.

The Getty Center is clad with travertine. This photo shows one of the feature stones, highlighted to show intriguing natural textures of the stone. Photo by ‘Ted,’ reused via Creative Commons license.

The Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is an example of innovative travertine use. The building’s exterior, interior, and floors—290,000 pieces in total—are made of Tivoli travertine. But rather than the traditional “vein cut” stones that are cut perpendicular to the layers, the Getty’s travertine is split horizontally along the layers, as if opening up the pages of a geologic storybook. To further highlight the natural expressions of the stone, the Getty’s blocks are left as rough, cleaved faces, rather than sawn and polished. When especially interesting blocks of stone were encountered in the quarry, the architect, Richard Meier, highlighted them by mounting them in as “feature stones.” Some feature stones reveal fossilized leaves, feathers, and reeds, just like the ones at Yellowstone (no cowboy hats, though!). Others show a fibrous texture caused by algae in the hot springs, or gas bubbles encased in calcite and frozen in time. The feature stones are thoughtfully placed in prominent locations to make the building itself part of the immersive, interactive experience.

Uses of Travertine

There’s good reason why travertine has been in continuous use for over 2,000 years. The warm hues and soft texture of travertine give it an old-world feel that has never gone out of style and never will. Travertine can be white, cream, yellow, pink, tan, or reddish, all due to small amounts of iron or sulfur in the stone. The porous texture of travertine can be left “unfilled” for visual interest, or it can be filled with color-matched grout to produce a smoother surface. Because of travertine’s high porosity, the use of a sealant is recommended. Travertine has the same mineral composition as limestone and marble, so it shares similar properties. It is around 3 on Mohs hardness scale (harder than a fingernail, but slightly softer than a copper penny), which means that it can become scratched with heavy use. Exposure to acids like vinegar or citrus juice will etch the surface of the stone. While travertine is not an appropriate choice for a hardworking kitchen countertop, it makes an excellent backsplash for a timeless, traditional kitchen. Travertine is a natural choice for bathroom vanities, wall tile, or flooring. Even in the Getty Museum’s well-trafficked hallways, the floors are projected to last more than 50 years. Travertine cladding or large-format tiles are a beautiful, refined choice for interior and exterior walls, as is commonly seen in commercial buildings, museums, courthouses, and public spaces.

Travertine may be a young rock, geologically speaking, but it has already stood the test of time. The Roman Colosseum offers an irrefutable testament to its durability—an unlikely combination of old building made from young stones.

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Mammoth Hot Springs is made up of various springs, pools, and mineral terraces. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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Layers of travertine are formed in small pools of mineral-laden water. Bacteria that get trapped in the travertine create the lacy pattern that travertine is known for. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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Layers of travertine are formed in small pools of mineral-laden water. Bacteria that get trapped in the travertine create the lacy pattern that travertine is known for. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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Everything in the water gets coated in calcite, creating instant fossils. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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Different colors are caused by heat-loving algae and bacteria living in the hot springs. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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This wayward cowboy hat will soon become part of the fossil record. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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Fossilized leaves in the Getty Center travertine. Photo by Kevin Stanchfield, reused via Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/sgt_spanky/368781983/

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The former quarry above the town of Gardiner, MT has drilled and sawn faces of travertine. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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Close up of the porous texture of travertine in the Gardiner quarry. Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk.

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The Colosseum is made from Tivoli travertine. Photo by Dan Kamminga, reused via Creative Commons license.

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Learn More

Read more about the history of travertine in Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology, by David B. Williams.

More from the Geology Series

The post Travertine: Watching Stones Form in Real-Time appeared first on Use Natural Stone.

Got Lava? A Photographic Tour of Iceland’s Native Stone

Karin Kirk — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 18:43:25 +0000

Got Lava? A Photographic Tour of Iceland’s Native Stone

| basalt commercial geology

Iceland’s Native Stone | A Photographic Tour of Lava

After a long flight over the North Atlantic, the coastline was finally visible through the airplane window. The landscape became more apparent as we descended – vast plains of bare rock, with tufts of steam wafting up from geothermal vents.

Photo courtesy of Karin Kirk

The plane touched down amid a barren landscape, making me wonder if in fact we had gone off course and mistakenly arrived on the moon. My seatmate looked troubled. “Are we here?” she asked, with concern in her voice.

“Yes,” I replied with a big smile. “Welcome to Iceland.”

Iceland’s backstory: Plate tectonics and basalt

Iceland is a unique circumstance of geology. The island sits atop one of Earth’s tectonic boundaries. Plate tectonics refers to the way that continent-sized rafts of solid rock, called ‘plates,’ float on hot, fluid material below. Earth’s plates move slowly, at an average rate of just one inch per year. Almost all of the geologic action on our planet happens at the edges of plates – where adjacent plates bump together, scrape past each other, or rip apart into two pieces. These activities create things like mountain ranges, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

Iceland straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Here, the Earth’s crust is being pulled apart; the North American plate and the Eurasian plate are moving off in opposite directions as the Atlantic Ocean widens. There is a distinct seam that runs up the middle of the ocean floor, where the crust gets yanked apart, then fills in with lava. It yanks apart some more, and then more lava oozes out. In this manner, the entire ocean crust is built. The lava rock is basalt, an igneous rock that is dark grey or black. All the ocean basins, everywhere in the world, are underlain by basalt.

A rift in the Earth erupts with fiery lava in this 2014 eruption in Iceland. Image by Sparkle Motion, reused via Creative Commons license.

Iceland’s section of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a bit hyperactive. It’s particularly hot and it erupts a lot of lava. So much lava, in fact, that it has built itself up above sea level. As a geologist, I am fascinated by the notion that you can observe the same process that normally happens at the bottom of the ocean, but up on land. In a place called Thingvellir, you can wander among lava flows and rifts in the landscape, and easily see how the place is being pulled apart. You can also see volcanoes large and small, hot springs, geysers, steam vents, and fumaroles. Iceland is like a geologists’ candy store.

As with everywhere else along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the lava that erupts out of the rift is basalt. You may be familiar with Absolute Black, Premium Black, and similar fine-grained, dark-colored stones. These are commercial versions of basalt (or its close cousins). Iceland is built of layer upon layer of cooled basalt lava flows. Icelanders are justifiably proud of their volcanoes, their wild landscape, their insane weather, and their native lava rock. It makes perfect sense that they’d use this stone in a variety of ways, which is not only a pragmatic use of an abundant material, but also ties their architecture to the natural environment that makes Iceland so special.

On a recent trip to Iceland, I set out to find examples of how the native stone was used. I was happily surprised at the wide range of uses I encountered, from historic settlements to starkly modern new construction.

Svartifoss waterfall. Image from Pixabay.

Basalt columns have their own architecture

Before we dive into the architectural uses of basalt lava, it’s worthwhile to understand the characteristic pattern formed by this stone. Basalt lava flows tend to cool and crack into hexagonal columns, like a giant bundle of pencil-shaped stone. This distinctive rock forms the backdrop for many of Iceland’s iconic waterfalls. Basalt columns are a familiar theme, and it was especially fun to see how Icelanders incorporated them into their designs.

Okay, with the geologic fundamentals covered, let’s dive into the a photographic tour that I call, “101 Uses for Lava.”

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The Hof is a conference center and performing arts venue in Iceland’s vibrant northern city of Akureyri. This prominent building is a stone-clad cylinder, situated right on the harbor. Its sleek Nordic design gives a nod to local materials. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Only up close do you realize the stone cladding is made of basalt columns, sliced lengthwise. Standing underneath the building and looking up reveals the shape of the columns. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Image by Karin Kirk.

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The Hof has some architectural intrigue. Part of the building is set inside the basalt ‘skin’ of the structure. Image by Karin Kirk.

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This modern residence outside Reykjavik is clad with honed basalt. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Image by Karin Kirk.

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The mirrored windows almost look like cut-outs that poke through the building to reveal the vivid blue sky behind. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Transitioning from the modern to the historical, a manor farm uses basalt blocks as a foundation, with layers of sod on top of the stone. Sod also covers the rooftops. This farmhouse was built in 1870 in Laufás, Iceland. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Dry-stack basalt stone walls are used around the church. Image by Karin Kirk.

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If you are wondering what the dreamiest place on Earth looks like, here it is. This infinity pool at Hofsós gazes right out into a fjord. A key distinction is that the fjord is icy cold, while the pool is geothermally hot. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Retaining walls throughout the grounds are made from basalt columns, and the floors inside are laid with large format, honed basalt tile. The use of natural stone throughout the facility evokes the volcanic nature of the hot water. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Image by Karin Kirk.

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The Hofsós hot springs have several accents made from basalt columns. The source of the columns is a cliffside beach nearby. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Stađarbjargavík (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) is the name of the location of the basalt. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Who says you need rectangular stones to make a tidy wall? This dry stacked wall in Akureyri displays impressive masonry skills. Image by Karin Kirk.

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At first glance this looks like ordinary modular concrete block. But a closer inspection reveals that it’s actually lava rock. The telltale sign is the presence of Swiss-cheese-like holes, caused by gases in the lava. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Basalt lava naturally cools into hexagonal columns. This sidewalk at the Sigló Hotel is made from slices of basalt columns. Image by Karin Kirk.

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This church walkway uses the same style of cut basalt columns, but with the added bonus of a pretty gate that frames the view. Image by Karin Kirk.

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The walkway in a gift shop is made from basalt cobbles that were cut in half, polished, and set in concrete. The white speckles seen in some of the stones are deposits of calcite that have filled in the original pore spaces in the stone. Lava rock is commonly full of holes caused by gases in the lava. Often the pores get filled in by another mineral after the fact. If you want to sound exceptionally smart (or maybe just nerdy) you can call this stone amygdaloidal basalt. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Basalt does not naturally cleave into thin layers. This flagstone was likely made by cutting the blocks. Alpine wildflowers have sweetly colonized the joints between the stones. Image by Karin Kirk.

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The plaza in front of the church in Siglufjörður has a seating area made from basalt columns. Image by Karin Kirk.

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Basalt columns make handy signposts, since they have naturally flat sides. This one displays a description of the greenhouse at the Akureyri botanical garden. Image by Karin Kirk.

This photographic tour of Iceland’s natural stone might inspire you to visit Iceland, or consider the ways you can use your own native stone, or both. Like many of us, Icelanders clearly have a deep affinity for their landscape, which makes it even more satisfying to use materials that reflect one’s local geology.

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The post Got Lava? A Photographic Tour of Iceland’s Native Stone appeared first on Use Natural Stone.

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Got Lava? A Photographic Tour of Iceland’s Native Stone

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