[log in to unmask] wrote:

> I'm from Missouri.  Can anyone point me to some "really good" cast 
> stone, outside of the garden bench? Maybe cast stone only needs 
> weathering?

Go look at the water table (the one with many dentils) that goes the 
full width of the building directly above the entry at the Barnes & 
Noble headquarters at Union Square. Though it is GFRC (glass fiber 
reinforced concrete) it is still cast stone to resemble gray sandstone. 
It should, I hope, still look like it belongs there. To the west of 
there on the west side of Broadway is an arabesque building that if you 
go to the entry you will see right above the door, in the door surround, 
a bulbous mass on either side... check them out as I believe one of them 
is cast stone. It has been a while since I have seen either of these.

There are a whole lot of techniques that can be used to play with cast 
concrete/stone... weathering is not the only alternative. Not many 
people are curious to explore the techniques. There are a whole lot of 
reasons for that and mostly having to do with the economy of 
commodification and return on production process. Also on Brian's 
comments on the lack of curiosity in general. One reason that historic 
preservation is perceived as more expensive is that if one is only going 
to try to replicate an existing condition ONCE in their life then the 
proportion of experience, research and development to eventual result is 
fairly high. A good deal of my personal work time these days is spent in 
making prototypes and one-off replications that often lead into 
establishing a production oriented process. John Leeke seems to do a 
good deal of this as well. One needs to be in an economic position to be 
able to survive.

> So maybe the limestone we think is "nice" is on 1920s buildings, old 
> enough so that it has eroded?  Can you think of new limestone 
> installations that are/are not equally moving?  I cannot.  In fact, 
> when I have seen new limestone installations I have generally thought 
> to myself "so what"?  I think I am thinking of the big new 
> towhouse/condo on 95th between Fifth and Madison, next to the House of 
> the Redeemer.

I know the townhouse/condo you speak of. You bring up though something 
else which is why stone installations currently tend to look monotonous.

It has a bit to do with industrial process, a whole lot easier and less 
expensive to make straight and fewer cuts over and over. There is very 
little handwork involved in this fabrication. As technology progresses 
and with computer aided carving etc. though there is a steady movement 
towards drawing an ornate object in AutoCAD then having the machine cut 
the stone accordingly. So ornate details are being industrialized. (And 
an issue with this is like w/ farmers who get bigger and bigger 
threshers and have to work more and more land area, with fewer hedgerows 
and streams, in order to pay off the cost of the new machines. Can one 
make enough ornate units to pay off the equipment costs?) But the ornate 
units even with mechanization still cost more than a simple rectangle of 
straight faces. Fabricators think in terms as to cost on the number of 
cuts they have to make as the number of cuts is a measure of how many 
times the stone needs to be handled.

And there is the transport issue... as an example China has become very 
prominent in stone importation. The more thinly a stone is cut, and the 
more modular the dimensioning (modularity in design being another 
driving factor in monotony)  the more facade area can be fit into a sea 
container. If cost is figured byt he square foot of facade then a 
thinner stone makes for a cheaper sf cost.

I believe that Architects currently using stone on new designs tend to 
think of it as a cladding in terms learned from glass curtain walls. 
This weds well with the quarrier's desire to maximise profit from a 
finite source... the amount of 'good' stone that they have in the ground 
by cutting it into thinner and thinner sections. I have seen 
granite-aluminum composite panels that overall were 1/4" thickness with 
1/16" of granite glued to them. On a facade, and that is what they are 
intended for, they will look like stone. The physical characteristics of 
limestone don't allow for such thin sectioning... yet. Once cast iron 
was made to resemble stone, terra cotta to resemble stone, and now stone 
is made to resemble glass.

I see the interelation of interests that affect the process as 
symbiotic, the quarrier has a desire for an optimal result, the 
architect is led in part by the availability of stone in a particular 
configuration and then uses it like glass (or worse yet like EIFS), the 
developer generally wants to get the feel of stone at the lowest cost. 
Stone continues, as in the townhouse/condo example, to have a plush 
appeal and helps sell hi-market residences... regardless even if it is 
not real stone.

Stone selection also results in a monotony of design as when the 
collective knowledge does not lend to knowing how particular stones will 
perform poorly in an einvironment. I see it as evolutionary selection in 
that when the knowledge is sparse there is a higher level of 
experimentation and variations in use of materials and design but as 
time moves on there becomes more of a concern for predictable physical 
performance. Nowadays there is a whole lot of intellectual energy that 
goes into things like the appropriate design of a stone anchor with a 
relatively predictable performance on what may seem a smnall detail in a 
much larger system. So selection of a limestone that at one time may 
have had more occlusions in it, let us say and offered more variation to 
the human experience, may not be such a good choice now for a thin 
(1-1/4") thickness veneer because design folks know right off that it 
will not perform well.

Though this is also countered by how contemporary stone is marketed 
(very aggressive strategies on the part of stone quarriers & 
fabricators) and that if someone has a quarry with lousy stone in it 
that does not mean that they might not be able to sell it... as I 
understand happened with Lincoln Center and the really bizarre use of 
thin section travertine that does not hold up well in the freeze-thaw 
climate of NYC.

][<en

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