Met History wrote:

> Gabeti wrote:  "The good cast stone you don't notice.  Try the front
> steps at the New Victory Theater.  Last time I looked they looked
> pretty good."

Christopher,

You point out something that is very important, which is the natural
variations of texture, composition and visual appearance of a fine
stone. If the cast stone looks good, or not, has a lot to do with the
specific situation of physical placement in relation to environment, and
how close the observer is to the object.

I do wonder though if you had not been thinking to look if you would
have noticed the steps were concrete or as a person wandering around the
streets of NY without a sharp eye honed on wax removal you would never
have noticed or thought twice about it. It is one thing to notice, it is
another to go looking for it.

I was down at Union Square and thinking on your query I went over to
look at some particularly ornate precast limestone that I remember
having seen in progress many years ago. I could not tell which of the
two sides of ornamentation was real, and which the precast. I know one
side is real as a mold was made in place. The casting material was
Amonite, I think a Belgian mix with limestone in it. I'll post/send
pictures here eventually, probably next week. It is a very fine example
of precast working.

I also looked at the B&N at the cornice... the gray sandstone has no
variation, a very fine aggregate of sand and a highly smooth, but not
polished surface... which presented a great deal of difficulty in
patching as at the time none of the proprietary mixes that we used
provided a fine enough grain. We ended mixing up a type-N mortar with
Type-O sand and custom gray pigments from Kremer. It was a super pain...
the materials did not always behave well from day to day, or hour to
hour, and certainly from mechanic to mechanic... and the architect was
very difficult about our making it invisible. There should never have
been an attempt to make the patches invisible at this location because
what was being asked was simply not possible, the 100% matching. A few
of the patches match and blend well, many of them do not and are
cracked... but in likely no worse condition than the surrounding
delaminated stone. If you want you can stand right up to the stone and
put your nose on it -- though the argument over how far back (I
recommend 12 ft) someone should stand in order to critique masonry work,
and composite patching in particular, is ongoing. At the B&N we faced
unreasonable expectations of materials, of application, of the weather,
and a stone that presented particularly unique problems.

As a contractor we would have needed a research department in order to
counter the arguments that we faced on a daily basis pushing for an
unreachable standard of performance. It is not the first time we have
faced unreasonable expectations of "conservators". There is this
intellectual idea that something can be done (we saw a picture, or we
saw it done by Contractor X in Borough Whatever, or you should have been
able to read our minds) when in fact it cannot be. It may have been done
really quite well in one location, but the factors that made it work may
simply not be present in another location -- and often there is just no
listening. Even worse when the conservator has authority but no hands-on
or construction experience.

One of the arguments I have had at the House of Fifteen Bathrooms is
that in one area they prefer the monotonous appearance of the composite
patch over the beauty of the stone, abut 2 sf of area. I argued with
them fairly strenuously, and finally last week I gave in. I'm reminded
one of the arguments for the glass bead blasting of Brooklyn Borough
Hall was that Howard Golden did not like the variation brought about due
to dutchman with a different marble (I think Georgia) to replace
deteriorated Tuckahoe. The glass bead blasting leveled out the
appearance and made things look uniform. I think the contemporary
architectural consumer is trained to want uniformity in fields of surface.

][<en

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