Architecture
Stone throwing
Alan Powers looks at the renewed interest in natural stone There is a conspiracy theory to the effect that architects are in the grip of the suppliers of building products and their advertising agents. It is tempting to suggest that modern architecture in the 1930s was produced by salesmen of steel windows, that the Cement and Concrete Association ran a sinister indoctrination centre at its now-abandoned headquarters outside Slough, where, in a pure Avengers setting, the beautiful gardens were dotted with con- crete sculpture and test panels of different aggregates. The story comes up to date not with the makers of neoprene gaskets or frit- ted glass (to mention two indispensable hi- tech materials) but with, of all surprising things, stone. The second Natural Stone show held at Wembley last month showed that stone is bidding to become the face of buildings to come. The location is ironically appropriate since the British Empire exhibition at Wembley of 1924, from which the stadium and other large buildings survive, was the first large-scale use of concrete for building in Britain, admittedly in architectural forms that tried to look as much like masonry as possible. You have to say 'natural' stone because concrete is unnatural stone (although composed of mineral materials) and can, in the form of `reconstituted stone' be supplied in building blocks or moulded ornamental patterns.
Natural stone is many things to many people. The fascination of a trade fair is that these things are indiscriminately thrust together. The dominant impression was that stone means death or the most luxuri- ous form of hygiene. Death was chiefly pre- sented by the National Association of Master Masons who shared the event. There is clearly a revival in the gravestone business and you can order sandblasted personalised pictures of your loved one's motorbike on black granite.
The trouble with monumental masons, in fact, is that they will give you anything you want, unlike artist-craftsmen who will only give you what they know to be good and ask you to pay more. Computers can set out lettering and machines can carve it. No human hand need ever touch the stone but if it's handwork you want, then as in the 19th century, the trade is adept at produc- ing its own version of a genuine artist's original and there are plenty of gravestones on offer with pictorial devices which, in more discerning hands, might stay on the right side of the kitsch barrier. For hygiene, one of the most impressive of the many large machines on show carved and pol- ished marble basin surrounds, guided by computer. In the bathroom as in the grave, stone brings consolations of permanence and embodied wealth.
This renewed interest in stone may seem to indicate a turn towards architectural tra- dition. Stone is on the tick-list of planners looking for heritage qualities, although the results can be so disastrous that in the Pembrokeshire Coast national park it is no longer permitted at all. This is chiefly because it is impossible to enforce distinc- tions between natural and artificial stone, although even the former is capable of being hideously maltreated, cut up into bricks and reassembled as vertical crazy paving. At the quality end of neo-tradition- al architecture, new stone buildings are ris- ing, such as Demetri Porphyrios's new complex at Magdalen College, Oxford. One of the Stone Federation's awards for 1995 was for the Swaminarayan Mandir, better known as the Neasden Temple, whose Bulgarian stone was mostly carved in India and shipped back to within a stone's throw of Wembley to become more lastingly exotic than any past imperial jun- ketings.
Stone has seldom been entirely absent from the repertoire of modern architec- ture, with the proviso that it should nor- mally appear `honestly' stuck onto a concrete frame. Luxurious cladding materi- als, particularly inside buildings, have a dis- tinguished history but a stone-clad building today tends to spread its virtue very thinly.
The problem with stone architecture of all styles is the lack of a developed poetics of stone. John Ruskin laid the groundwork for understanding how certain buildings bring out the stoniness of stone which paradoxical- ly may be achieved by using less rather than more of the material. The work of the human hand is crucial to bringing life to stone although this does not necessarily need to appear in elaborate carving. As C. R. Cockerell remarked about the superb rusti- cated basement of his university library in Cambridge (subsequently the Law Library, now taken over by Gonville and Caius), `Observe the large stones and the attempt at a large manner, it being as difficult to be large and noble in architecture as it is to be large and noble in morals.'
This lesson needs to be learnt all over again if stone is not to be wasted in mis- guided or trivial effects. `The more the merrier' was the unofficial motto at the Natural Stone show which is good for trade but not necessarily good for ecology or architecture.
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