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ndiana limestone is enjoying renewed popularity in America. No longer is it relegated to banks and courthouses seeking a monumental, trust-inspiring look. Today, stone means style. Part of the reason is the trendsetting pseudoclassica I facades and lobbies created by architects such as Philip Johnson and Michael Graves. Other factors are the natural insulating properties of stone and the growing demand for renovating historic buildings. Wilbur Bybee, owner of the Bybee Stone Company in Ellettsville, Indiana, concedes that concrete may be a bit cheaper, but it doesn't age as gracefully as natural limestone. "With concrete, after ten years you don't even want to get close to it," he says, adding, "When you build a building out of Indiana limestone, it just sits there forever." Building stones can be thick or thin. The thin pieces are usually featureless rectangles destined to be exterior wall panels. The thick pieces can accommodate what Bybee calls fancy stuffcornices, dentils, scrollwork, and other ornamentation. Close to a third of the mill's business is restoration work. Henry Morris, 62, is the Bybee company's master carver, who has perhaps carved more stone than Michelangelo ever laid eyes on. With a hand-held pneumatic chisel, Morris has had to carve exact replicas of statues, using a photograph as a guide. He recently re-created the onceornate capitals of pilasters¡ on the Iowa State Capitol's facade. "You can see out there what I had to work from," Morris says, gesturing toward a featureless sandstone capital, 1.2 meters wide. Shipped from Des Moines, Iowa, as a sample, the largely decomposed original appears to have been carved out of dried mud. Morris's version is a burst of swirling, sharply detailed foliage and scrollwork. Stone carving has been called a dying art, but in the Bybee mill, as elsewhere in Indiana, most carvers are young men. And the best of them can carve anything they set their minds to, from ornamental birdbaths to cigar-smoking frogs. That the quarrymen of the 1800s used sledgehammers, hand drills, and two-
man crosscut saws to dig massive quarry blocks out of the ground is almost inconceivable. Even today, quarrying limestone is a slow and arduous operation. To see how it's done, I visit the Reed Quarry a few kilometers from the Bybee mill. "In one year, we can quarry one-fifth of a hectare to full depth," says owner Ted Reed from a ridge overlooking a pit about 18 meters deep and somewhat larger than a football field. "We have got 36 hectares, so it would take us 180 years to quarry it all." Below us, the quarry workers have cut the exposed limestone floor into rectangles. When I first peer into the quarry, I assume the handful of men down below are on a break. In fact, quietly and almost invisibly, a set of wire saws is hard at work slicing a series of 30-meter cuts in the quarry floor. A wire saw is not really a saw at all but a long loop of thin steel cable that runs over and around a sequence of clattering wheels, or sheaves. The sheaves are stuck on posts around the quarry and throughout the terrain above it, forming some 12odd corners along a 600-meter circuit. "We run it all over the countryside," Reed explains, "so the wire will be long enough not to wear out before we get to the bottom of the cut." The part doing the cutting is whichever section of the wire is currently forced into a cut by the sheaves spinning on either side. A mixture of white sand and water sloshes into the cut to give the wire its bite. Down below, a wire saw has finished making a vertical cut. Workers with pneumatic drills start cracking the bottom of the massive block along its grain. The block still is not free, so a man with a sledgehammer steps in to finish the job. Finally, a crane operator "turns the cut," pulling on a cable hooked to the block until it topples onto its side in an explosion of dust. The men clamber up onto the monolith and set to work splitting it into 2.5-meter blocks with drills and wedges. Today, many of the architects who have begun ordering stone, whether limestone, granite, or marble, are hoping to endow their buildings with the same aura of stately timelessness that the Empire
State Building exudes. If anyone building kicked off this revival, it was the AT&T Building in New York City, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee in 1979. Johnson and Burgee went with a controversial broken-pediment top, and for the facade they chose granite. Not just any granite, bu.t Stony Creek pink, from a quarry In Connecticut. "It has a character," says Burgee. "It's called pink, but what color is it really? It's gray and pink and red and crystal and white. It has a depth and a richness and a natural variation that makes it beautiful, not like some flat, painted surface." In recent years granite has often been the choice for exterior building stone because of its hardness and weather-resistant polished finish. Recently, Johnson and Burgee had thousands of pieces of granite trucked to Boston, Massachusetts, for their architectural extravaganza-a new structure for The New England Insurance company. One morning, I watched a stone setter fix a granite fascia, or facing piece, at the top of the building's high arch. As it is hoisted into position, the fascia appears dangerously flimsy-it's the size of a desktop but barely 2.5 centimeters thick, after all. With granite, however, appearances are deceptive. The slab weighs 135 kilograms, but it's rugged enough. I ask Bill Weis, who is supervising the stone setters, precisely how the fascia is attached to the building's steel frame. He points out the stainless-steel pins and lips that clasp the granite edges snugly in place. The fascia, in fact, is a trick. Behind it is mostly air. Arches in ancient Rome were built of stone stacked on stone. So were the pyramids and the Washington. Monument. Architects create the optical illusion that this is how modern stone buildings stand up, but for the past century stone has really been a veneer hung on steel frames. Still, though the structure of the modern stone building is illusory, its surface has a naturalness-an earthiness, quite literally-that is undeniably appealing. 0 About the Author: Doug Stewart sachusetts-based writer.
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