Billie Tsien and Tod Williams credit their love of stone with their frequent visits to Rome. As Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners, the pair has designed and built more than 40 buildings, a large percentage of which are made using natural stone. “We’re interested in solidity, place and character,” Williams says, with the ultimate goal of creating projects “that have a long lifespan, are meaningful to the community, and will be loved for centuries.”Their choice to use natural stone is both practical and philosophical.

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.

A stair project is typically all in a day’s work for an engineer, but what PICCO Group put together for a Toronto homeowner counters logic and the perceived limitations of natural stone.

Ancient Art of Stone creates one-of-a-kind stone portals at their studio in Cowichan Valley, British Columbia, Canada. They first source stones, then design and build artistic and functional fireplaces, stone doors, spas, mosaics, megaliths, and murals and ship and install them across North America.

In Rwanda’s Burera District, the volcanic rock pumice was undervalued and unappreciated. The mundane natural stone proved itself to be a change agent in this landlocked African country.