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Stone has two distinct architectural faces: in monumental architecture,
it stands for wealth, power, and permanence; on the other hand, especially
when used at a domestic scale and based on local craft traditions, it
appears as modest, forthright, and natural. These two aspects of stone
correspond to the varying levels of effort and skill marshalled in its
fabrication, transportation, and erection. Finely worked, accurately cut
blocks, sometimes of exotic origin or polished to a jewel-like finish,
characterize monumental architecture; while fieldstone, rubble, or
roughly-worked stone set in thick mortar beds are more often associated with
modest works. Stone's symbolic content is not determined by these two
traditions alone, but also reflects the revolutionary changes brought about
by industrialization, and the attitudes—ranging from ambivalence to outright
hostility—with which those changes are greeted. Increasingly anachronistic
from a purely functional standpoint, stone survives in 20th-century
architecture largely as a medium through which these attitudes can be
symbolically expressed. At the beginning of the 20th century, monumental
stone architecture is associated primarily with Neo-Classical and Gothic
Revival styles. McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station (1910) and
James J. Farley Post Office (1912), both in New York City, employ Classical
stone facades—Doric and Corinthian respectively—coexisting with an
infrastructure of glass and steel necessary to accommodate and express the
realities of modern urban life. Ralph Adams Cram, America's leading Gothic
Revivalist, also incorporates modern construction technologies—including
various hidden reinforced concrete decks, lintels, and bond beams—together
with traditional limestone detailing in projects such as his Princeton
University Chapel (1922) in Princeton, New Jersey.
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McKim, Mead & White: Pennsylvania Station |
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McKim, Mead & White: Post Office |
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Cram: Princeton University Chapel |
At the same time, Neo-Classical monumentality was attacked from several
points of view at the beginning of the 20th century. The Arts and Crafts
movement, reacting to the social and physical fallout associated with
industrialization, proposed a return to "honest" craft values. These values
are expressed in the rough stone walls of W.R. Lethaby's All Saints' Church
(1902) in Herefordshire, England, and the rounded rubble stone foundations
of the John Bakewell Phillips House (1906) designed by the Greene Brothers
in Pasadena, California. Edwin Lutyens's use of rubble stone in early
20th-century residential projects like Grey Walls (1900) in Gullane,
Scotland, is similarly rooted in an Arts and Crafts sensibility, although
his monumental Viceroy's House (1931) in New Delhi, clad with finely-worked
red and buff-colored Dholpur sandstone, reaffirms the Neo-Classical
tradition, albeit combined with vernacular elements.
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Lethaby: All Saints' Church |
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Greene & Greene: Phillips House |
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Lutyens: Grey Walls |
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Lutyens: Viceroy's House |
The most radical of the reactions against traditional architectural styles
was the Modern Movement or "International Style." Modernists also invoked
the idea of "honesty," not to support craft and traditional social
relations, but rather to provide intellectual cover for the unsettling
changes in the built environment associated with the Industrial
Revolution—specifically, the rationalization of the building process to
increase productivity and reduce costs. Eliminating gratuitous decoration
became a fundamental tenet of Modernism, the elaborately ornamented stone
facades of traditional monumental architecture being an obvious target.
Still, the use of stone as honest bearing wall, or smooth-surfaced veneer,
was generally accepted.
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Corbusier: Villa Mandrot |
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Wright: Falling Water |
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Roche & Dinkeloo: Wesleyan |
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Roche & Dinkeloo: Metropolitan Museum |
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Le Corbusier's Villa de Mme de Mandrot (1931) in Le Pradet, France
illustrates the use of undecorated stone walls within a Modernist syntax, as
does his earlier exploration of parallel masonry bearing walls in the
Maisions Citrohan projects of the early 1920s. While such structural stone
walls remained fairly common in domestic-scaled buildings—Frank Lloyd
Wright's dramatic use of stone piers supporting horizontal cantilevers of
reinforced concrete at Falling Water (1938) in Bear Run, Pennsylvania is a
notable example—the development of steel and concrete frameworks rendered
stone loadbearing walls virtually obsolete for larger institutional or
commercial buildings. An exception is Kevin Roche's Creative Arts Center at
Wesleyan University (1973) in Middletown, Connecticut, consisting of 14-inch
thick limestone bearing walls laid without mortar, and capped by a
reinforced concrete roof structure. Roche uses a similar stone system in his
additions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1974-1980) in New York City.
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Wagner: Post Office Savings Bank |
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Loos: Müller House |
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Attitudes towards nonstructural cladding, articulated by 19th-century
theorists such as John Ruskin, Carl Bötticher, and Gottfried Semper, and
adapted in the 20th century by European architect-theorists such as Otto
Wagner and Adolf Loos, provided a theoretical basis for the "honest"
expression of thin stone veneer. Wagner's Post Office Savings Bank (1906) in
Vienna, although constructed with conventional brick bearing walls, is clad
with thin marble panels visibly attached to the brick walls with
aluminum-capped iron bolts. Adolf Loos used stone and other cladding
materials to develop richly surfaced interior spaces that correspond, not to
the structure of his houses, but to the logic of their social functioning.
Loos's Müller House (1930) in Prague includes thin green-veined Cipollino
marble panels on key interior surfaces, emblematic of wealth and refined
taste, but at the same time marked by a certain Modern dissonance.
Stone cladding was often used to impart a kind of traditional legitimacy
to otherwise Modern buildings. Examples include Mies van der Rohe's
Barcelona Pavilion (1929), featuring thin marble veneer over masonry backup
walls; Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio (1936)—now Casa del Populo—in
Como, Italy, clad in travertine panels; Edward Durrell Stone and Philip
Goodwin's Museum of Modern Art (1939); and the United Nations Secretariat
Building (1953) by Wallace K. Harrison and others—the latter two buildings,
both in New York City, clad in white marble and glass.
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Mies: Barcelona Pavilion |
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Terragni: Casa del Fascio |
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Stone: MOMA |
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Harrison: UN Secretariat |
On the other hand, rough stone was used to impart a more domestic or natural
feeling to Modern buildings. Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius's Hagerty
House (1938) in Cohasset, Massachusetts utilizes stone and stucco surfaces
to create a picturesque—though still Modern—formal composition; while
Breuer's house (1947) in Ligonier, Pennsylvania finds the desired
traditional values within the texture of loosely coursed, local shale walls
rather than in the building's overall form. Eero Saarinen's IBM Facility
(1956) in Yorktown, New York contrasts roughly-worked stone walls
reassembled from existing pasture barriers on the site with Modern glass
curtain walls.
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Saarinen: CBS Building |
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Breuer: Whitney Museum |
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Roche & Dinkeloo: Ford Foundation |
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Pei: East Wing, National Gallery |
Still, stone use declined in the three decades following World War II in
favor of more technologically-advanced materials and curtain wall systems.
Within the Modernist genre, stone was relegated to thin veneer without
decorative embellishment, understated in its color and texture. Saarinen's
CBS Building (1965) and Breuer's Whitney Museum (1966), both in New York
City, are faced in a muted, thermal-finished granite cladding consistent
with the minimalist aesthetic of the time. Other examples include Kevin
Roche's Ford Foundation Building (1968) in New York City, with granite
cladding defining the boundaries of its abstract cubic form; and I.M. Pei's
East Wing of the National Gallery (1978) in Washington, D.C., similarly
using stone veneer—in this case Tennessee marble matching the original stone
used in the museum's West Wing—to define its abstract angular geometry.
The 1980s saw an explosion in the use of stone cladding as the inhibiting
strictures of Modernism gave way to Postmodern exuberance, while advances in
stone fabrication technology significantly reduced costs. The Postmodern
synthesis—combining the symbolic values of traditional architecture with the
rational infrastructure of Modernism—gained both notoriety and legitimacy
with the construction of Philip Johnson's AT&T Building (1983) in New York
City. Clad in pink granite, Johnson's tower is reminiscent of earlier
20th-century stone-clad New York skyscrapers such as Shreve Lamb & Harmon's
Empire State Building (1931) and Raymond Hood's RCA (now GE) Building in
Rockefeller Center (1933). Other notable examples within this genre are
Michael Graves's Humana Headquarters Building (1985) in Louisville,
Kentucky, covered with several varieties of exterior granites and interior
marbles; Kohn Pedersen Fox's Procter and Gamble World Headquarters (1985) in
Cincinnati, Ohio, clad in six-inch thick buff-colored Indiana limestone
panels spanning from floor to floor; and Cesar Pelli's World Financial
Center (1985-1988) in New York City consisting of four office towers, two
gatehouses and a Wintergarden which together use 2 million square feet of
stone, primarily polished and thermal-finished granite.
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Johnson: AT&T Building |
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Shreve, Lamb & Harmon: Empire State Building |
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Hood: RCA Building |
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Graves: Humana Headquarters |
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KPF: Proctor & Gamble |
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Pelli: World Financial Center |
Earlier attempts at such a synthesis can be seen in the abstracted
monumental Classicism promoted by Mussolini during the 1930s and 1940s.
Guerrini, Lapadula and Romano's Palace of Italian Civilization (1942) in
Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR), just outside of Rome, is an
example; its monumental cubic form, defined by rows of deep-set travertine
arcades, mimics the stone arches and axiality of Classical and Baroque Rome
while adhering to the Modernist discipline of plane, unornamented surfaces.
In the U.S., a variant form of abstracted Neo-Classicism can be seen in the
pierced marble cladding of Edward Durell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art
(1964) commissioned by Huntington Hartford, and in the arched travertine
facade of Wallace K. Harrison's Metropolitan Opera House (1966), both in New
York City.
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Guerrinni et. al.: Palace of Italian Civilization |
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Stone: Gallery of Modern Art |
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Harrison: Metropolitan Opera House |
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SOM: Beinecke Library |
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Herzog & deMeuron: Dominus Winery |
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Stone cladding used in this way certainly celebrates wealth and power. Yet
stone was also deployed in reaction to the alleged "inhumanity" or
"superficiality" of Modernist postwar architecture and urbanism, to which
its apparent solidity—together with the repackaging of pedestrian-oriented
urban design ideas—was offered as an antidote. Hans Kollhoff and Helga
Timmerman's granite-clad Office and Shop Building (1994) in Berlin
illustrates this notion of a stone-faced urban architecture whose value
derives from appearing to be "solid." Yet even the apparent solidity of
stone can be challenged. Two very different 20th-century projects are
notable for their exploration of stone as translucent membrane or filter.
Skidmore Owings and Merrill's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
(1963) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut features thin marble
slabs within a granite-clad gridded steel framework through which diffuse
sunlight enters the library space. Herzog and deMeuron's Dominus Winery
(1998) in Yountville, California appropriates rubble-filled wire mesh
"gabions"—intended for inexpensive and expedient highway retaining walls—as
translucent "stone wickerwork" within an otherwise normative Modernist
framework.
Especially outside the U.S., Postmodernism draws on the platonic
geometries associated with such 18th-century visionary designers as
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullée. The stone block or panel
becomes important in this context not just for its symbolic resonance, but
as the basic elemental unit to which the overall geometric form of the
building is inextricably tied. Charles Correa's Jawahar Kala Kendra Museum
(1990) in Jaipur, India is based on a nine-square plan, with each square
block symmetrically stepping down at the corners, consistent with the module
of its red sandstone cladding; Aldo Rossi's Monument to Sandro Pertini
(1990) in Milan, Italy is a symmetrical cubic block clad in grey and pink
marble into which a monumental stair is cut. Here, stone provides an
historic link, both to Milan's Duomo (whose stone was cut from the same
quarry), and to the traditional rose granite street pavement removed for
subway construction and reused by Rossi on the site.
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Ledoux: Officina del Bottaio |
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Boullée: Cenotaph for Newton |
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Correa: Jawahar Kala Kendra Museum |
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Rossi: Monument to Pertini |
A self-consciously critical, if not overtly ironic, attitude toward the use
of stone can also be discovered in Postmodern architecture. Vittorio
Mazzucconi's 22 Avenue Matignon (1976) in Paris juxtaposes fragments from an
old stone facade within a new glass curtain wall. Francesco Venezia's Museum
(1989) in Gibellina, Sicily, sets part of an earthquake-damaged stone
building into a new stone structure in which the old and new are integrated,
yet clearly distinguished. Hans Hollein's Jewelry Shop (1974) in Vienna
creates a deliberately "cracked" stone facade that challenges not only the
Modernist notion of honest expression, but also the canonical meaning of
stone as a signifier of wealth and permanence. Venturi, Scott Brown &
Associate's Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery (1987) in London takes a
Corinthian pilaster motif from the existing Museum's 19th-century
Neo-Classical facade, carefully reproduces it in a new stone facade, and
then incrementally transforms it into an increasingly abstract (Modern)
figure. Rem Koolhaas's Nexus World Kashii (1991) in Fukuoka, Japan features
a curving wall whose concrete surface texture expertly simulates—and
caricatures—the traditional stonework of Japanese castles. Examples of the
deliberate and didactic juxtaposition of stone with more modern construction
technologies include Álvaro Siza's Galician Center for Contemporary Art
(1994) in Santiago de Compostela, where granite cladding rests on exposed
steel channels and posts; and Herzog and deMeuron's Stone House in Tavole,
Italy (1982), in which a slate-like rubble infill wall is contrasted with a
rigorously orthogonal exposed reinforced concrete frame.
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Venezia: Museum in Gibellina |
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Hollein: Jewelry Shop in Vienna |
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Venturi: Sainsbury Wing |
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Koolhaas: Nexus World Kashii |
Stone has also been "re-invented" by several 20th-century architects who
have developed wall systems combining aspects of stone masonry and concrete
technology. Frank Lloyd Wright's "desert rubble masonry"—first used at
Taliesin West (1937) in Scottsdale, Arizona—sets unworked stones tight
against concrete formwork so that they become visible on the wall's surface.
Similarly, Eero Saarinen's Norwegian-based system, adapted for his Stiles
and Morse Colleges (1962) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut,
injects pressurized concrete into forms filled with rough stones. Peter
Zumthor, for his Thermal Bath (1997) in Vals, Switzerland, created a
composite concrete-masonry system in which locally-quarried gneiss blocks
defining the continuous cave-like internal spaces and external massing of
the building are made integral with reinforced concrete cores. In each of
these cases the individual stone, ordinarily suppressed within the concrete
matrix, is literally brought to the surface and exploited.
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Wright: Taliesin West |
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Saarinen: Stiles and Morse Colleges |
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Zumthor: Thermal Bath |
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Terry: Maitland Robinson Library |
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Bofill: Sanctuary of Meritxell |
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Jensen & Brynildsen: Hospital in Maharastra |
Finally, stone buildings have continued to be built in traditional ways
throughout the 20th century. Quinlan Terry's Maitland Robinson Library
(1993) in Cambridge, England, with its pedimented stone facade, may serve as
an example of the continuing interest in literal, Neo-Classical form. The
use of stone based on local, vernacular traditions can be seen in numerous
20th-century projects: examples include Ricardo Bofill's Sanctuary of
Meritxell (1978) in Andorra, faced with thick stone excavated from the site
by Galician masons; Jan Olav Jensen and Per Christian Brynildsen's Hospital
(1985) in Maharastra, India, featuring stone loadbearing walls built with
local materials by local masons; and Raffaele Cavadini's Municipal Buildings
(1995) in Iragna, Switzerland, faced with dry split stones detailed
according to local tradition.
Further reading:
The history of stone in 20th-century architecture can be pieced together
from readings in general architectural histories and in the accounts of
individual architects, but sections or chapters dealing specifically with
stone are unusual. Exceptions include Sailer (1991), featuring interviews on
the subject of stone with architects such as Philip Johnson and Cesar Pelli;
Goff (1997), showcasing late 20th-century American stone houses; and
Patterson (1994), examining in great detail the use of stone (and other
materials) in the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Detailed drawings
illustrating stone construction in the works of architects such as Ralph
Adams Cram, Adolf Loos, Edwin Lutyens, McKim, Mead and White, Mies van der
Rohe, and Otto Wagner can be found in Ford (1990). Innovative
late-20th-century stone projects from around the world are featured in the
periodical A+U (1998). Building construction textbooks also contain
information on stone—short illustrated chapters explaining its use as
loadbearing structure and nonstructural veneer can be found in Allen (1999).
Allen, Edward, Fundamentals of Building Construction Materials and
Methods, 3rd Edition, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999
"Architecture in Stone," A + U: Architecture and Urbanism, no.4
(331) (1998)
Ford, Edward, The Details of Modern Architecture, Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1990
Goff, Lee, Stone Built Contemporary American Houses, New York:
Monacelli Press, 1997
Patterson, Terry L., Frank Lloyd Wright and the Meaning of Materials,
New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994
Sailer, John, The Great Stone Architects: Interviews with Philip
Johnson, John Burgee, Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli, Helmut Jahn, John Portman
and Der Scutt, Oradell, New Jersey: Tradelink Publishing, 1991
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