STONECUTTERS URBAN ECOLOGY 101: URBAN THERAPY

Living and walking about a city is always an exciting experience for me as a stone history buff. Something new around every corner. It's like a road cut for a geologist or a walk in the forest for an ecologist. Up to now Chicago is my favorite city, although my son says new york is better.

I have a simple 4-step program that may help you enjoy your urban walks as well. It’s an urban ecology starter that works for me.

I believe there have been four major changes in the stone industry since 1850 which have helped define the urban landscape. I call them footprints in stone. Recognizing these technologies helps me put these building forms into a time frame. Maybe not perfect because there is overlap and digression, just as there is in fashion, but it’s a useful historical reference system, and a sense of history never hurts. Hopefully it will help to make one more comfortable in our urban environment.

1 - Local stone on stone 1850-1910

In this era, stone was locally quarried and cut by hand as i describe in my “Lost Trade of Stonecutting” blog. It is a totally romantic period, before compressed air, or useful gangsaws. This technology certainly provided a sense of place to urban areas. Cities were defined by local geology. It's the era of the vagabond stonecutter going from job to job, city to city. Many architects came out of stonecutter backgrounds at this time since stone was the fundamental building material. Cities in this era reflected the ground they were built on, giving rise to urban identities defined by stonework.

Local Stone on Stone, here Portland Oregon, Basalt and Sandstone 

2 - Deep drilled hammer face 1900-1930

This technology was developed with the invention of useful compressed air. It often used local stone as well if good building stone was available. However if there was no local stone suitable for architectural construction, regional granite was often used. Softer stones, limestone and sandstones, would still often be cut by hand locally.

Stone was removed from quarries by drilling and blasting horizontal beds and drilling vertical blocks to millbock sizes. Slabs were split or sawed  to be hammer finished with multiple air hammers called drifters or shot gangsaws  this was the era when stone cutting was infamous for dustborn ailments. We call silicosis most often caused by hitting the stone with air hammers to shape.

This was the era when my father and his three brothers first started in the stone trade. Faces of building became smooth but not polished with beautiful details. Columns were cut on lathes. Flute often cut by hand with hand-held hammering tools. Intricate details including relief sculpture were put into building facades in granite as well as sandstone and limestone. Stonecutters were employed at job sites as well as quarry fabrication sites. This is the era when cutting and shaping of stone went from local to regional fabrication facilities. These regional faculties developed sophisticated equipment and and often had multiple stone resources. Beautiful permanent building, stone on stone walls were built. Many of these buildings have been gutted out, and refitted, and still serve as great urban architecture for us to enjoy even today.

Deep drilled hammer face.  Typical rustication with columns and carving of this period in Granite

3 - polished smooth face 1925-1970

The next stone building type totally changed the relationship between the local stone economy with both people, and the local stone forms. The industry separated local knowledge about stone since it become something that arrived by truck or train from a distant fabrication source. This precut cut stone was shipped ready to put on the face of building  for the first time. Stone no longer was cut or quarried locally. Stone is no longer a structural building component, but rather it becomes a veneer over a concrete structure.

The modern gang saw made low cost fabrication of 2-inch and thicker slabs, or what we call dimension stone possible. Huge surface grinders brought stone slabs to a high finish, then they were sawed to size and sent to local building sites to cover concrete structures as decorative and protective veneers. This new building process, the modern high-rise elevator-equipped building, became covered in stone, terracotta, or brick, all as veneers, likely none of it local.

These production facilities were not placed locally but rather close to the source of quality and quantity stone quarries. Varieties of color being important. The stone blocks were shipped by rail to these centrally located modern fabrication plants. There stone fabrication expertise flourished. Finished cut to size building skins were then sent to local job sites for a new trade called stone setters to install. This forced the separation of the local knowledge of stone, and its origin, and how it is fabricated. This all happened in my father's and my lifetime.

 Granite and Marble veneer covering a concrete building. Here Morton gneiss and Georgia granite in Portland Oregon

4 - International thin cut stone 1970-2011

The final stone footprint once again came with a breakthrough in mass gangsaw cutting. This came about with the ability to mass cut thin slabs by putting post tension in diamond or shot gangsaw blades, fast mass production of multiple slabs brought costs of stone down for building construction and made stone slab prices such that the general public could afford stone counters for the first time. Suddenly there was a stone revolution all over the world.

I believe this technology started in Germany and Italy. Even today if you go to the Italian stone fabrication centers at the base of the aupanies you will see thousands of blocks of stone drilled out from quarries all over the word to be sawed with these gangsaws – although American, south American and Asian facilities are catching up by using this technology.

But the important point for the urban walker is that once again, stone is used as integral part of the building structure. Steel skeletons were erected with floors floating free of concrete side walls. Their weight is transferred down by transferring it to vertical steel supports. What is called curtain walls, a very descriptive term, the glass and stone are mounted on horizontal frames with their mass also transferred to vertical steel supports. Thus the glass and stone skins become the protective skin of the structure. Stone is once again a useful and important structural component of the building. This makes stone curtain walls a practical and economical building component, not just a pretty face covering concrete. Economical mass production of stone slabs certainly changed the urban landscape.

This is the current state of high rise construction. Thankfully design professionals soften the building by employing historical stone elements to soften this harsh building system. I call them urban furniture to ease our eyes. Sculpture is used this way as well. It would be a pretty bleak world if curtain wall construction was not offset this way. Of course traditional tricks of texture and color soften these structures as well. Future blogs.

International thin set here south American granite sawed in Italy in Portland, Oregon

I hope this brief survey of stone footprints makes your urban experience more enjoyable, for as a friend once told me many years ago, i have always looked at the shoes behind the glass, while you looked at the way they the shoes were housed. I think a little history along with how things are done can often be therapeutic to the soul.

Form As A Result of Historic Process

They say form follows function

This paper says sometimes form is a result of historic process

I published an article in stone world magazine in 1996, where i introduced a concept I called "inside out design." Looking at it 15 years later, I still believe it is a good article even though I have no reason to believe any one ever read it. Never the less 25 years and one half dozen articles later I still attempt to provoke minds, for better or worse.

I have read that capitols on stone columns imitate tree limbs on original wood columns. To me this makes sense, particularly since I have seen small tree trunks used this way to support wooden boards for use as platforms to pour concrete roofs in colonial Mexico.

Historians would have you believe that if you don’t know the difference between Corinthian, Doric, or Ionic capitols, your education is incomplete. But to me I never cared, it seemed pointless, but I do like the tree branch concept, which probably casts a shadow on my education.

I believe, based on personal observation gleaned from 50 years in the stone business, that the technology within industry provides designers basic building blocks to work with. The possibilities and limitations of the medium you are working in change through time. These changes provide design professionals an ever-changing variety of possibilities. This all seems logical and apparent to most of us.

However, what is interesting are those limitations of past technologies, that become permanent design staples all around us. Learning to recognize these technological glitches to me provides a more meaningful appreciation of the design environment. It goes back to the tree limb thing, I think. For example, walking through an historic neighborhood with a craftsman who has knowledge of wood construction, or walking the streets of a city with a stone worker interested in history, is much more fun than taking a tour and having someone tell you the architectural style and the name of the architect who designed it. I think this suggests that I am not only interested in the designers name but maybe my interest is more centered on the technology and people working on the project.

I am sure that every construction medium could chime in here -- it would be interesting to hear other thoughts. My experience is with stone which has traditionally been the provider of urban forms or designer building blocks.

Here are a few examples to open the discussion:

The quirk miter. A staple of urban stone design

Problem: stone is fragile - miters don’t work - they chip

Quirk Miter

Solution: split and pitch or saw and grind strong edge - A staple of urban stone architecture.

Rustification

The historic difficulty of holding sharp corners before modern equipment is probably the reason for rustification. That is a term I use to describe softening the edges of each stone with a bevel or round. This seems to have become a staple of the stone imitation industry, terracotta. By employing various bevels, rounds and offsets designers have been able to create beautiful designs in building forms in both stone and terracotta. My stonecutter father used to say ‘it all comes out in the wash’. The chips that is. (“wash” being a term stonecutters use for bevel.)

United States Customs House, downtown Portland

Nothing worse then looking at an old stone building with close-fitting joints without details of some sort separating the stones and seeing the front, or what stonecutters call the face of the stone weave in and out.

Lincoln Hall, Portland State University

35 years ago a design firm asked me how to get a elegant look in their entry lobby without paying a high price. I advised them to bevel the edges of marble tiles to make them appear like blocks of stone. They did and it seemed to come out great. This technique seemed to be used quite often . The beautiful use of stone tiles in mall architecture still fascinates me, even though I don’t frequent malls much. Stone use in mall design makes a strong statement, good or bad.

Heads

Because gang sawing stone slabs has always been a difficult and imprecise job, granite veneer slabs have often employed a structure called the head in architectural projects, that is corners, are dealt with by specifying a given fixed dimension at butt joints.

Head

Problem of uneven thickness solved at minimal cost:

Even today my son often uses a CNC stone router to plane all exposed edges on kitchen counter projects to provide a uniform edge. It is one of many things that separate an average job from an outstanding counter job. Old tricks in modern stone fabrication.

CNC Stone Router

I have a suspicion that many moldings that have become design staples were originally from wood or stone problems that are now part of our daily lives. Can you think of any?

The Lost Trade of Stone Cutting

An essay by Joseph Conrad describing stone construction before gang saws or compressed air, 1800 to 1900

Have you ever thought about how those old stone churches, so much a part of 

Portland’s identity, were built? Walking with my father, the stonecutter, gave 

me an interesting insight back in 1965.

People who work with stone can leave permanent marks on the urban landscape. I call these “Stone Footprints.”

Introduction

Thirty years ago when I was designing our company logo, I sketched a derrick lifting a mill block from a granite batholith and titled the company, "Joseph Conrad, Stonecutter," doubting that anyone would understand what the logo was or what the title "stonecutter" means. The quarry and the trade had both been long forgotten.

Back in 1917, Portland had a significant stone cutting industry, with 17 to 20 companies that supported hundreds of people. The times and technology changed over the years. By 1980, about the time I was designing my company logo, Portland had only one stone company, which probably supported 10 to 15 people. Styles and tastes changed, and today, Portland may have around 30 stone companies supporting perhaps 500 people. But during these changes much has been lost, for few of the people in the current stone industry have any sense of history or an interest in stones other than as a means to make a living-although all of them demonstrate a healthy sense of romance towards stone, since that is an integral part of the stone business. People who work with stone can leave permanent marks on the urban landscape. However, since for the most part, the urban landscape is defined by dimension stone- sandstone, limestone, marble, and granite-for this, we need to look at the sources of these materials to understand how these materials shape our city. The urban landscape I call "stone footprints" for the most part is defined by technologies at stone saw mills, which are far from local stone workers. But here I will focus on the small but important part of our past. The stonecutter, a long forgotten trade.

This is my personal understanding of the stonecutter. I have for most of my life lived on the West Coast so I can speak little of the great body of stone history mostly located on the East Coast. So my knowledge is somewhat local and does not include the work of marble cutters, again the result of geography. And of course it excludes the monumental efforts of European stone workers of the 13th through 15th centuries.

People who work with stone can leave permanent marks on the urban landscape. I call these “Stone Footprints.”


A stonecutter by definition is one who cuts a stone by hand to a specific size to fit in a specific location. Among other cut stone pieces making the whole, most often for a building.

I donated a book to the stone museum some years ago outlining the work of the stonecutter. It was about 45 pages, 5” x 7” pocket manual, filled with geometry, math equations of shapes describing solutions to architectural problems. I think these sorts of working manuals existed for many trades then. It was very complex reading, so I couldn't understand much. Imagine cutting a circular stair casing complete with step, facing, outside, and inside walls, with a circular base and the hand rail, banisters in granite or marble. Columns that fit, cutting the flutes in columns, arches, door frames, windows frames, sloped sill coping, floors and ceiling radial patterns or grades that wrap around a city block and align perfectly. A lot of three-dimensional math is required.

Stonecutter's Geometry: Ramp & Twist

The first job I had in this industry was laying out large complex shapes full size on the floor of a pattern room, then making zinc templates of each piece for stonecutters to apply to individual stone while shaping it in 1959. I don't know if early stone cutters had the luxury of such patternmaking , but developing complex shapes in three planes with stone was part of their job. I presume to know a little, but my father and my two older brothers could calculate what dad called ramp and twist. My younger brother who was an artist in stone and I could not. The modern era of the stonecutters in the United States was from 1800 to 1920, when they were replaced by the gang saw (for the most part) although they still exist in large architectural and Memorial fabrication facilities is in the Midwest, East and Southeast, with the help of sawn slabs. I read once there may be 300 stonecutters left in the United States.

Stonecutters learned to pitch stone with minimal effort.

I briefly apprenticed in a fabrication facility cutting dies, slants, hickeys and bases for monumental dealers. They mostly used 6 inch and eight inch sawn or polished slabs of granite. Stonecutters talk of the subtleties of each type of granite amongst themselves. They all pitch differently. These Memorial cutters are offended by point marks or ill- defined corner lines, a sign a failure in stone cutting. You won't survive as a memorial cutter if you can't drive a clean pitched face on a 10" slab of granite cutting from two sides with the handset and a specialized stonecutter's hammer. Stonecutters would stun a modern stone worker or government ergonomics inspector. No stonecutter could work with bent elbows. Swinging a 1 1/2 to 3 pound hammer 8 hours a day requires work to be at hip level.


Apprentice cutters were called lumpers whose job was to shovel up spalls for the stonecutters. I think there were many extra labor jobs back then. I met a stone polisher in Portland in 1968 who told me he knew my uncle Ted, a bricklayer and stonemason when he was a teenager working as a water boy for masons. Back then marble setters (installers) wore white shirts and ties in Portland in the 1920s and 30s. Even though I worked in the stone trade for 15 years and had four years of college, I needed to attend a year long Saturday brick layer school and serve a three-year apprenticeship before I was given a marble masons union card in 1975. Standards for craftsmen then were much more rigid, but today almost anyone can call himself a stone artisan.

My father told me that there were 2000 stone workers living in the Knowles, California granite quarry in 1920 when he worked there. They were building San Francisco's city, state and federal buildings, post offices, courthouses, City Hall and the Customs house. To me, these buildings are the most beautiful parts of San Francisco, all of which were built out of Sierra Nevada granite. We walked around several abandoned quarries looking at granite foundations of stone bunk houses in the lonely foothills of Madera County California. All gone now, flowers, live oak, and abandoned quarry holes full of water. They are on private property ranch land, with no easy access. These old quarries exist all over the country, a remnant of another time.

Back then the stonecutter traveled from job to job, city to city, following the work. They worked with local materials, giving rise to the urban identities we can still recognize. This was well before modern day mass production steel frame, stone skin buildings.

There is an architectural expression that cities reflect the ground they are built on.


Here are some examples of local stone that gave rise to urban identities back then:

• Portland Oregon, basalt and sandstone churches
• Vancouver BC-B.C. granite waterfront and public buildings
• San Francisco Sierra Nevada white granite public buildings
• New York City brownstones
• Austin Texas pink granite capital, historic public buildings
• Moriello Mexico, city of pink limestone
• Jerusalem yellow limestone
• Minneapolis Canadian shield granite and Kasota stone.

The list goes on: cityscapes defined by local stone, a connection to the past, stone providing a sense of place.



In fact, I often visit the Central Montana town of Lewistown. Croatian immigrant stonecutters, who settled there in the 1800s, built it out of local sandstone. When I first visited no one seemed to know the source of the stone. After making inquiries I found my daughter-in-law's great aunt Mary who was ready and willing to help me. Two years later she took me the town’s old quarry. We took some pictures. There is a strong sense of local pride in Lewistown where the old stonework has not been painted over or covered by trendy designs.

I have spent 5 working vacations attempting to reopen old marble quarries in Southeastern Alaska (once owned by the Vermont Marble Company). These quarries provided much of the stone used on buildings throughout the West. 60,000 blocks remain in the rain forest there on Marble Island. A pile of white marble 40 feet long, 40 feet high and 3 miles long still lies on the ground covered by thick layers of moss.

See Stearns County Minnesota for a great video on the history of stone

I have only found four places in the world where traditional stone cutters are still celebrated, by showing their tools in display cases. There may be others. The first is the state historical Center in Helena Montana and, second, a state building in Vienna Austria. Both honor stone craftsmen. The third is the Stearns county museum in Minnesota, where I grew up. This building is located next to a granite quarry that is now used as a nature park. It has a sunken man-made exhibition quarry in it showing the tools of the trade. It is a shame that Tenino Washington does not have an exhibition since its community pool is an old quarry. The Vermont marble company has a museum that recalls when their company once controlled almost all the marble work in the USA. However its more gratifying when noncommercial individuals provide the history lesson. It seems to suggest a more sincere interest.

As my father and I continued walking around abandoned quarry he told me stonecutters of his era were paid a dollar per hour and train fare to and from their home state. Great wages. By comparison, electricians received 60 cents per hour at the same time. No wonder the stone cutters strutted the streets of San Francisco with their wooden foldup tape measures in their back pockets on Sundays.

I don't know the exact delineation of jobs, but stonecutters worked at both the quarry and the actual jobsite at this time. In 1965 I was visiting with a 75- year-old memorial dealer from the bay area. He joked that so much stone dust came from a job shack that the insurance rates went up to the business across the street in San Francisco. In that era some lived, some died, my father told me he never expected to see 40 years. His three stonecutter brothers didn't live beyond 45.

I recently erected an 8’ by 6’ screen wall in my front yard. Looking out the window, I noticed it has a twist in it caused by its end posts not being in perfect alignment. My dad would have called this a wine, I suppose from the word winding. Can't have this in stone construction, it would eventually fall. Gravity disapproves.

Stonecutters and bricklayers are unique among tradesemen. They insist on their work being absolutely level and plumb.

Later, Dad and I came across a piece of granite –five feet wide, five feet long and 6 inches thick-lying among the wildflowers. All the edges were rough split top and bottom broken face. Interestingly, there was a perimeter of 3 to 4 inches of point marks all around it. I asked my father what this was. I can still see him 50 years later. “You don't know? That's a level seat! The stonecutter prepared this stone for the surface drifter to hammer point the top flat to his marks. Years later it dawned on me, this is the fundamental beginning of every building stone ever cut. The stonecutter from 1900 to present had the advantage of compressed air to help them shape the stone, but it's still all begins with a level seat the stonecutters first step.*

So far the so for the sake of experimentation let's think of the process stonecutters must have used before Ingersoll's book, The Uses of Compressed Air was published around 1895. I can only speculate the work of the stonecutter before compressed air. (I will chronicle what I call deep drilled hammer face compressed air technology another time.)

Bit is turned with each hammer blow. My son told me they still have in drilling contests in granite in Reno Nevada. Probably due to railroad building for explosives through the Sierra Nevada. I believe that Sullivan Channler used steam power in Alaska quarries at the turn of the century to chisel. I don't know if steam energy was used to drill. But I doubt it was used to drill stones locally. Hammer and chisel most likely. I watched my father drill this way in concrete at his Lake home where we had no electricity.

St. Patrick's

1st Presbyterian 1887

1st Congregational 1891

St. James Lutheran

1st Baptist 1894

Previous essays about stone by Joseph Conrad

"Stone Cutters Provide The Human Touch", Stone World Magazine 1996

"Heroes Of Local Knowledge", Portland's Future Magazine 1998

"Footprints In Stone", Field Trip To Downtown Portland For The Geological Society Of Oregon 2003

"Stone And Icabana" Lectures To Portland Icabana Society In The Portland Japanese Garden; 1999

"Exploring Historic Stone Quarry In Southeast Alaska", Lectures To Oregon Historic Architectural Society 2000

"The Influence Of Stone Production Techniques On Urban Morphology, A Historic Review Of American Stone Technologies And Its Influence On Cityscapes", Shown At The University Of Portland Library Art Exhibition 1995