Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations by Yale Architecture

Foreword It is with great enthusiasm that I share this publication, “Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations,” from the Spring 2023 graduate design studio at the Yale University School of Architecture led by faculty member Tei Carpenter. Stony Creek Quarry is a unique place, located in Branford, Connecticut just twenty minutes away from the Yale University campus. It has a significant architectural legacy. The granite stone from the quarry, known for its pink hue, can be found around the world, most notably at Grand Central Station, the base of the Statue of Liberty, and around Yale’s campus. The students embarked upon an immersive exploration of the Stony Creek Quarry, enriching their architectural education by studying local history, craft, labor, and the material heritage of a place. With passion and liveliness, they proposed visions for the evolution of Stony Creek Quarry, centering crucial issues of environmental sustainability, maintenance of cultural heritage, public access, local and regional economy, and education. Using their tools as architects – sketches, drawings, physical models and other imagery – the students brought potential evolutions of Stony Creek Quarry to life, to spark dialogue about the future. The success of the studio can be attributed to ongoing interactions with the people in the community and at the quarry who generously offered their time and knowledge to the students throughout the semester. I would like to extend my appreciation to the local community, Stony Creek Quarry, and the Stony Creek Museum for the kind welcome and gracious support of our students and their work. — Deborah Berke, FAIA, LEED AP Dean and J.M. Hopping Professor of Architecture Yale School of Architecture

Introduction In the Spring of 2023, I led a group of eleven fourth-semester graduate students at the Yale School of Architecture in an architecture design studio titled “Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations.” The studio operated at the intersection of architecture, landscape and infrastructure to envision future proposals for the Stony Creek Quarry in Branford, Connecticut. The Stony Creek Quarry, renowned for its pink granite, was part of a historic industry of quarrying in the region, supplying granite and effectively building parts of New York City at sites including Grand Central Station, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Columbia University. While many regional quarries have closed due to real estate pressures, Stony Creek Quarry remains active and is the last dimensional natural stone quarry in Connecticut. In the near future, working with the town of Branford, Stony Creek Quarry will need to transition and begin a process of evolution as an active site to one that is more public and the studio explored possibilities for this transformation. We asked how might one propose an act of reclamation of the quarry to make it public for the local community and the region? How might the quarry remain at least partially active in the future to provide granite to match existing historic projects while continuing the craft and legacy of skilled quarry work? How might one reinvent a site steeped in history and local heritage to imagine future activation and programs for the region? Architecture’s relationship to its materials was a focal point of the studio and we looked specifically at the granite of Stony Creek to examine material as geology, process, labor, industry, heritage and as a material system. We studied Robert Smithson’s Theory of Non-Sites and landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton’s work on “Reciprocal Landscapes” as starting points 6

to understand the site of the Stony Creek Quarry and corresponding sites in New York City (and beyond) where Stony Creek granite is installed, to examine how the construction of a landscape in one place in the city is related to transformation elsewhere, here in Branford, Connecticut. To that end, we learned how it is difficult to see either place in isolation but rather to understand these places together as an entanglement of material circulation, labor, and complex environmental and spatial relationships. The studio worked across scales of time to anticipate a quarry moving from an active to a more multifaceted condition and to transform it from a solely historic dimensional quarry to a reclaimed more publically accessible site. Over the course of the semester, we visited the Stony Creek Museum, we made several field trips out to the Stony Creek Quarry, and we traveled to New York City to see the Stony Creek granite installed in situ at Grand Central Station and at Columbia University’s campus. We were very lucky to work closely with folks at the Stony Creek Quarry and local community members in Branford as well as with colleagues at the Yale School of the Environment to understand key issues and concerns. This publication attempts to capture the semester’s work, experiences, and engagements with the local community and the Stony Creek Quarry. — Tei Carpenter Critic, Yale School of Architecture Founder, Agency—Agency

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Contents 5 6

Foreword: Dean Deborah Berke Introduction: Tei Carpenter

PEOPLE

8 Faculty, Students & Community Participants

III.

THE STUDIO

15 The Art of Removal: Alberto Martínez García 17 Research 18 Progress 20 Planned Perpetuation 23 The Material Memory of Space Making 26 Stony Flow 29 Seam Building

35 36 36

II.

PLACE

9 History & Reflections: Anthony “Unk” DaRos 11 Current Conditions at the Quarry: Darrell Petit & Tom Cleveland

IV. THE QUARRY CONTINUED 33 Reflections and Continuations: Erin Bascom & Felipe Palacio Trujillo

Afterword: Tiantian Xu Acknowledgments Colophon

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I. PEOPLE Students

Faculty

Alfred Wong Amelia Lin Elise Kennedy Erin Bascom Felipe Palacio Trujillo Hwanil Chang Jinrui Zhang Khalid Hassan N’Dos Onochie Samantha Hrusovsky Tong Hsu

Tei Carpenter Alan Plattus Alicia Imperiale Aniket Shahane Anthony Acciavatti David Eugin Moon

Visiting Critics Evan Shieh Mae-Ling Lokko Marc Tsurumaki Marie Law Adams Tatiana Bilbao

Teaching Fellow Alberto Martínez García

Community Participants Anthony “Unk” DaRos Darrell Petit Gaboury Benoit Mary Lee Weber Maureen White Naomi Darling Tim White Tom Cleveland

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

II. PLACE This is about the coming of the Quarry and its impact on a sleepy little village located on Long Island Sound called Stony Creek. It had a handful of farmers and fishermen who were subsistence farming and hardly making a living. A small hotel industry started in the 1840’s and with the coming of the railroad the population grew to 300. The first wave of immigrants were German, followed by the Irish. Most were in the cities, but many found work laboring on the expansion of the railroad which came through this sleepy village. They had their own bars and beer gardens, much to the chagrin of the local Womens’ Christian Temperance Union which was very active in Stony Creek. The land around Stony Creek was poor for farming and full of boulders left by the glaciers. But what Stony Creek and surrounding areas had were large granite outcroppings along the coast. The first quarry was on Hall’s Point and the next one was on one of the Thimble Islands, today known as Phelps Island. The labor was intensive, the rock was hard and heavy, extracted with the use of hand tools. Being located near the water allowed them to transport the finished stone to the cities. The product was mostly cobblestone, curbing, and hitching posts. These were small operations. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, quarries were limited to softer stone, such as sandstone, limestone, slate, and marbles. The Industrial Revolution changed all that with steam driven machinery and the vast improvement in the quality of steel and also the introduction of building codes driven by destructive fires in the cities. Brick and stone was the material of choice for the architects at the time. There was an abundance of granite and it came into its own. After the Civil War, quarry owners saw the opportunities: the quantity and quality of the available stone, the ideal location on the coast with the railroad. This also allowed them to move

inland, by installing rail spurs to the mainline and to the docks on the coast. This of course was going to have a huge impact on these peaceful little villages. Quarries began to spring up between the East River in Guilford and the Farm River in Branford. No less than fifteen quarries operated at the same time, seven of which were in Stony Creek which was right in the middle. The major quarries were Beatties which opened in 1870 in Leetes Island, Hughes and Bangs in Sachem Head in 1871, and Red Hill in 1874 in Stony Creek. When Norcross opened in 1882, Stony Creek’s population exploded. During the height of the quarry era, Norcross employed 700 men, Beatties over 700, and Hughes and Bangs about 200 with the smaller quarries contributing several hundred more. After the Civil War, the Stony Creek population was 305. By 1890, it was 1,395; by 1900 it was 1,950. During that period, it was estimated that an additional 1,800 transient workers passed through Stony Creek. The building boom was comparable to a Western mining town. It grew so fast that it needed its own cemetery. By 1870, the school enrollment skyrocketed, the four single room schoolhouses were not enough. In 1892, they built a three-story frame school building. By 1900 it was conducting double classes. It became so crowded that the schools had to use private residences for the overflow of students. In 1874, Stony Creek Congressional Church was gathered. In 1888, the Swedish Lutheran Church was organized, the first in Branford. The huge Catholic population in Leetes Island and Stony Creek applied to the Bishop to allow for a church in Stony Creek, but was directed to use the chapel in Beatties Quarry. In 1927, a church was finally built in Stony Creek but it remained a mission of St. George in Guilford until 1948 when it then became St. Therese Parish.

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History and Reflections

During this whole period the summer resort hotels were in full operation. The first one was on Pot Island which predated the quarries, and six more on the mainland. Of these, three of them predated the quarries. There were also 45 summer cottages on the mainland and 35 on the Thimble Islands. This made for three distinct groups: The Creekers, the Cottagers as they were called, and the Quarrymen who were almost all new immigrants. Stores and business sprang up to service the growing number of quarry families. There were seven stores where you could purchase fresh meat and produce, along with two bakeries, dress shops, shoemakers, general stores, fresh milk delivery, fresh fish delivery, and ice and coal deliveries. There were also sawmills, carpenter shops and blacksmiths, along with two resident doctors. All of the economy of Stony Creek was thriving due to the quarries. The most successful businesses were the seven taverns in Stony Creek. As mentioned, earlier, the Womens’ Christian Temperance Union was very active, by now they were running full blast. Annually, the towns would vote on the temperance issue. One year the Stony Creek district voted to go dry by a slim margin. But the next year it went wet by a large margin. Branford and Guilford remained dry. On the weekends, people came by wagon and later by trolley to Stony Creek. During the development of the quarries, Norcross and Beatties had company housing. Beatties also had company stores, with one boarding house and twenty small houses. Norcross had fifteen small houses and two boarding houses. The Gilley boarding house, the smaller of the two, housed the English and Americans. The DaRos boarding house was the largest. It was 150’ long and three stories high. It had 45 unheated bedrooms, a common dining room, two smoking rooms, and living quarters for the family of the proprietors, who were my grandparents. My grandfather was an operations engineer and my grandmother ran the boarding house. She would provide sixty workers with three hot meals 10

each a day, do their laundry, and clean the rooms with no running water or electricity. The boarders were German, Spanish, Irish, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, and Finnish. They were single men by company rules. Declining markets and rising labor cost caused New England quarries to start folding. World War I drove the cost of black powder and steel nearly out of sight especially for the smaller operations. By 1920, Norcross was the only quarry still in operation but well below half of what it used to be. It too shut down in 1933 due to a strike and the owner, Earl Dodd, locked them out. He maintained a crew of four to fulfill backorders. The out of work quarrymen, most who settled in Stony Creek, went to work in the factories in Branford. The social divisions which were once characteristic of Stony Creek disappeared, for the sons and daughters worshiped together, went to school together, and went to war together. Nature returned some quarries to forest and some to wetlands. At Sachem Head and Leetes Island, expensive homes and manufactured lawns took over. Many of the descendants of the quarrymen still live in the Creek; they became doctors, lawyers, businessmen, tradesmen, and community leaders raising the next generation of Quarry descendants. In my case, I am the fourth generation that worked in the Quarry. Stony Creek granite is still quarried today primarily because of its uniqueness. The consistent inconsistency of Stony Creek granite, claimed to be the oldest vein of granite in all of New England will always be in demand, for when it is finished and polished it is like no other. The Yale School of Architecture students are working on projects that could address the future transition of the Quarry, which the Town of Branford owns. The students have come up with some interesting ideas that reflect the history of the quarry as well as honoring the place and the past generations. This would be a way of keeping the site as an asset, opened to the public. — Anthony “Unk” DaRos

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Stony Creek Quarry is a leader in the natural stone world on critical issues like sustainability, material transparency, innovation, and collaboration—issues that are alive today in the architectural community, especially for those of a new generation where social equity and climate change are the critical existential issues of our time. So, when architects Tei Carpenter, Liz Galvez and Tiantian Xu accepted our invitation to visit the quarry and seized on the opportunity to conduct a studio on the quarry, we saw it as a natural extension of the educational and sustainable mission that has defined the quarry over the last ten years. We committed to the challenge of working with the Yale School of Architecture and its talented faculty and students from around the world to imagine transformative change. All quarries are transformative by nature—their shapes and voids appear and disappear as the operational needs of the dimensional quarry constantly change. A wall becomes a ramp; a road disappears as the ledge under it is quarried. Stony Creek Quarry’s management and organizational form has been under transformation throughout the last 15 years. Doug Anderson, a long-time Branford businessman, took over the lease with the Town of Branford in 2006 and proceeded to put the quarry on a stable financial and operational foundation. Darrell Petit then began reviving and redefining Stony Creek Granite in the commercial marketplace as well as re-establishing the historic Stony Creek Quarry within international stone industry circles. Darrell helped create the first sustainability initiatives at the Natural Stone Institute (the international trade association for dimension stone quarriers, fabricators and distributors), which led to the creation of the American National Standard, ANSI/NSI 373: Sustainable Production of Natural Dimensional Stone, as part of the ongoing efforts to document and improve the sustainability profile of natural dimensional stone.

The purpose of this standard is to recognize and drive sustainability practices in the natural dimensional stone industry. The standard establishes a set of well-defined environmental, ecological, social responsibility and human health metrics through a multi-stakeholder science-based approach recognized by the green building movement as an indicator of leadership in sustainability performance. The Stony Creek Quarry achieved certification in 2016, the third certified company in the world. Since Tom Cleveland joined as the Sustainability Director, Stony Creek has become known throughout the industry as an advocate for lowering the carbon footprint of not only the stone industry but also the entire building materials industry. Darrell now sits on the Board of Directors at the Natural Stone Institute. Throughout all these positive developments, the people who quarry the Stony Creek Granite continue to quarry blocks for such notable projects as Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty Museum, Cleveland Clinic, Illinois State Capital, Montauk Lighthouse Revetment Project, The Battery Coastal Resiliency Project, and many others. Sustainability has become our brand. Natural stone has one of the lowest carbon footprints of any building material. Unlike many other mining operations, the quarrying of dimensional natural stone does not involve any chemical processes or cause any environmental pollution. Our reserves of dimensional granite are plentiful with 500 feet of Stony Creek Granite below the current quarry level. We may continue to quarry Stony Creek granite for at least another century while continuously developing and improving upon best practices as we adapt to our ever-changing world. At the Stony Creek Quarry, we consider education and outreach to be a central part of our mission. We actively welcome the outside world to visit and experience our working quarry. Each year we host several hundred guests including our Fall and Spring tours for our local community of Branford and Guilford, the local Branford

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Current Conditions at the Quarry

school system, trade schools of masons and stone cutters, Columbia University, Brown University, The Princeton Club and Yale’s School of Architecture, Forestry, Geology, and Art, Yale Occupational and Environmental Medicine, IRIS-Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services Inc, The New York City Parks Monuments Program, many architectural firms and associations like the AIA and ASLA, planners from the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, and groups from around the world including Italy, Canada, Germany, Greece, Norway, and China. Our outreach has made a significant impact on the market for natural stone as many young architects have never visited a quarry to understand how natural stone is quarried. Through this collaboration where students could witness the process in person, the teams have initiated new thinking and broadened our vision for the potential future of the quarry. Being involved in the creation and organization of the Yale School of Architecture studio was enlightening. The studio directed students to envision the future of the quarry as a more public site with more community access to the premises while still operating as a producing quarry to support its legacy of providing stone for the nation’s architectural fabric. Professor Carpenter’s total engagement and her process of leading critical inquiry and gently encouraging the students into our industrial environment and further into the unknown of design proposals was exemplary. We were honored to be invited to participate and be useful during the critiques where we could help ground the students with the reality of our dimensional quarrying context; the environment, the history, the quarry workers, and the local community all within the international world of natural stone and architecture. We are inspired to see student projects that are bold and imaginative but also realistic in that real conditions of the quarry environment and the community were all taken seriously. We sincerely believe that some of the proposals offer great potential for further design development. The studio helped shape a perspective, as well 12

as proposing designs and strategies that broadened our view to more multi-faceted possibilities for the future. We envision exploring collaboration to realize possible future interventions that expand our working model, but we insist that the work of quarrying the granite continue as it always has and that we do not simply acquiesce to a process of museumification of the quarry. There is something magical and evolutionary about the dimensional quarry process that modernity and our increasingly virtual lives still needs today. We believe that the process of humans working within the quarry at the origins of natural stone creates an expansive platform from which to experience the enduring and immutable quality of granite as well as a deeper understanding of our relationship to all materials in the built environment. We envision the quarry’s future as continuing to provide building stone for our clients of over a century and for the vigorous pursuit of high profile, meaningful projects that will define the character of the quarry in new ways still undiscovered. — Darrell Petit and Tom Cleveland Stony Creek Quarry, Branford, CT October 16, 2023

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

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Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

III. THE STUDIO The Art of Removal The coast of New England is filled with abandoned factories, storage facilities, cranes, cement plants, and other structures, which are visual evidence of an industrial past that no longer exists. Robert Smithson explained these are monuments with an aesthetic value that hold other stories behind them: 1 To consider these historic structures as entirely historic or entirely active denies the possibility of cycles of activity between periods of dormancy. Stony Creek Quarry holds these varied cycles of activity. In the Spring of 2023, I was the Teaching Fellow for Tei Carpenter’s graduate studio that speculated upon the potential for Stony Creek Quarry to be transformed and used for the local community and regional actors while remaining an active quarry site. Stony Creek Quarry has supplied granite to emblematic architectural projects along the East Coast. This dynamic of granite removal in the quarry and construction elsewhere generates a narrative of an inverted palimpsest that, instead of accumulating layers of information, subtracts slices of material and builds meaning in other locations. As Keller Easterling explains, subtraction is, “a set of exchanges and attritions and is capable of orchestrating the ebbs and flows– the appearance and disappearance – of buildings.” 2 The outcome is an impressive landscape of granite that continues to transform as part of the quarry’s operation. During our visits to this site throughout the semester, there was an aesthetic pleasure in viewing the activities of the quarry as stone was removed. Collectively, the students inquired about the evolution of the quarry, then in four groups they approached the quarry with different methodologies to envision potential futures for the Stony Creek Quarry:

Protocols: From the large scale of the nearby forest to the techniques and details of granite quarrying, Samantha Hrusovsky and Elise Kennedy produced a manual of instructions that defined the present and future of Stony Creek Quarry in different phases over time. Their project, Planned Perpetuation focuses on sustaining skilled quarry labor and connecting the quarry and its labor force to other quarries around the world. The project starts by connecting the existing Branford and Guilford Land Trusts to the quarry with a trail that encircles it. The second step in this set of protocols is the designed subtraction of the quarry through a rectangular grid using the maximum dimensions of a typical granite block. This follows Easterling’s definition of subtraction and allows the project to mediate between material removed from the site and the construction of new programs at the site. The heaviness of the stone is contrasted by the light tectonics of steel profiles and an open air roof: a scaffolding that holds different activities to steward forward the legacy of the granite. Ghosts: Tong Hsu and Amelia Lin developed a project that fluctuated between land art and the memory of the site, titled The Material Memory of Space Making. As a starting point, the project reconstructs the invisible history of the Stony Creek Quarry, making visible the history of the labor and the granite that traveled elsewhere around the world. Under a sinuous translucent roof, which continues the original topography of the site, they selected a series of granite ghosts: elements of architectural projects built with Stony Creek granite that are brought back to the quarry. These ghosts are not metaphors but physical recreations using a technique of ink rubbing that reproduces their surface textures. A gentle ramp brings

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visitors to this experimental museum from the highest topography of the site to a theater which overlooks the center of the active quarry, where quarrying continues and future ghosts are created to eventually come back to the exhibition space. Infrastructures: Stony Flow by Hwanil Chang, Alfred Wong, and Jinrui Zhang, proposed a series of interventions in the landscape that merged leisure with the activation of existing and new ecologies, using water as the connective element of the quarry. Their proposal is optimistic, mixing passive infrastructures, which filter rainwater and reinstate it into the overall system, and proposing temporary and permanent leisure events such as a quarry stage to attract people from the region. The infrastructural character of the project has different scales and gradients of ephemerality; while a permanent staircase combined the movement of people and the filtration of water, a series of movable devices create scenarios for sound and light projections, alongside an artist workshop and residency. Stony Flow emphasizes how infrastructure and technology can overlay to create an architecture that is a sustainable and creative platform. Reenactment: Erin Bascom, Khalid Hassan, N’Dos Onochie, and Felipe Palacio Trujillo based their architectural intervention Seam Building on the consolidation of the knowledge created in the quarry through a process of reenactment. An artist in residency program was inserted into the site to mediate the active industrial site with new public programming, while shepherding knowledge and histories of the quarry. A series of cultural, residential and administrative buildings were proposed, all built from Stony Creek granite, to exemplify the unique proximity to the material source, that coexists with the ongoing process of quarrying. The size of the subtracted blocks, the rough finishes of the stone, and the existing topographic levels have a sensitivity toward the site and a pedagogical intention to 16

imprint the technique of quarrying. The result is a project that sensitively inserts architectural interventions into the landscape by concealing the buildings and extending the existing topography into the new roofs. In parallel, the group designed different assembly systems for each façade as a pedagogical device for reusing offcuts and learning about natural stone construction. — Alberto Martínez García Teaching Fellow, “Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations” Studio M.E.D. Candidate, Yale School of Architecture

Smithson, Robert. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” Originally published as “The Monuments of Passaic.” Artforum Vol.6, No.4 (December, 1967). Easterling, Keller, Subtraction, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 3.

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Research

Top: Zoning map of Branford; Bottom: Former regional quarry map

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Progress

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Progress

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Planned Perpetuation Elise Kennedy

Samantha Hrusovsky

We interrogated the Stony Creek Quarry in Branford, Connecticut through the lenses of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure to explore the Quarry’s future and longevity. Through partnered research it became apparent that many pressures including the upcoming renewal of the corporation’s lease and fluctuations in supply and demand could suggest a loss of activity within the quarry. The most significant pressure we saw, however, was the potential depletion of skilled quarrying labor. As a result of this research, we proposed an inversion of the quarry from a material resource to that of a civic and institutional resource through a phased protocol; foregrounding the history of Stony Creek Quarry to perpetuate a culture of skilled quarry labor and the legacy of the material. The scaled protocol considers time, availability of material, and the people or sources of skilled labor and local knowledge in order to design multiple architectural insertions over time that occur in tandem with existing quarry activity. The final phase of our outlined protocol is a Skilled Labor Institute and Visitor’s Center within the quarry. In order to prepare the landscape for architectural insertion, a void was designed using the existing dimensional quarrying techniques, increasing both the supply of the physical material and the public institutional capacity of the site.

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Top left: Framework plan; Bottom left: Site section into the quarry; Top: Exploded axonometric of Skilled Labor Institute

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Top: Exterior rendering from inside the quarry Bottom: Interior rendering showing entry and workshops

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

The Material Memory of Space Making Amelia Lin

Tong Hsu

Quarrying is essentially an act of space-making: in sites using the stone, spaces are made through construction, while reciprocally in the quarry, spaces are made through subtraction. For over a century, the resplendent pink granite from Stony Creek Quarry has played a pivotal role in shaping numerous iconic landmarks across the United States. However, in the town of Branford knowledge of this history is invisible as quarrying activities have shifted with demand. As a memory device, the proposed living museum aspires to rekindle the intrinsic value of the quarry as a dynamic crucible of space-making. The roof, which gently covers a corner of the quarry following the existing topography, implies the “full” landscape that once existed. Underneath, a descending sequence takes the visitor down through a series of gallery spaces to a theater with the quarrying scene as its backdrop. Moreover, ink rubbing is introduced as a method of translating the material memory of the pink granite: both the raw stone and products with various finishes are transcribed onto screens and curtains that enclose much of the museum. At various junctures within the museum, visitors find themselves immersed within varying densities of Stony Creek granite. By introducing a museum to the active quarry, legacies of the past are kept, the quarry industry is honored, and memories of the collective are preserved. Concept model of the subtraction of the quarry

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Top: Rendering of theater space with quarry as background Bottom: Site Section showing relationship of historic quarry and active quarry

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Top: Model photo of roof and experimental museum

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Stony Flow Alfred Wong Jinrui Zhang

Hwanil Chang

Stony Flow envisions a future for the quarry industry that transcends the mere removal of heavy stones. It aims to transform quarries into dynamic hubs of culture while fostering a sustainable ecology for both humans and animals. This vision comes to life through the implementation of a novel economic model, forming the foundation for three major programs: a quarry visitor center complex featuring an art center, a water meditation stair, and a versatile outdoor concert space. The design methodology places a strong emphasis on highly modularized construction, drawing from locally-sourced materials, and preserving the time-honored craftsmanship associated with stone. At the heart of the project lies the bog-filter staircase, acting as the catalyst for all programs. Rainwater from both the historical and active quarries is pumped to the pinnacle of the staircase. As it courses through the filter, it undergoes purification, nurturing life for both humans and avian inhabitants. The concert space serves as a collective memory chamber, where visitors, artists, and performers converge to socialize and find inspiration in the historic quarry. Given the absence of an established electric infrastructure on the site to support stable power for concert lighting, speakers, and projections, an innovative solution has been devised. The adaptable stage and portable sound & lighting system offer a flexible alternative, capable of adjusting its scale and form in response to the demands of time, specific program requirements, and user needs. The concert stage floats in the water, gathering regional visitors for immersive concerts with the historic quarry as its backdrop.

Top: Diagram of gabion wall and bog filter assembly Bottom: Maintenance and construction diagram

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Exploded axonometric showing existing water system and new water system overlay onto the proposal

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Top: Model of water filtration experiments Bottom: Interior view of artist residency spaces

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Seam Building Erin Bascom Khalid Hassan

Felipe Palacio Trujillo N’Dos Onochie

The impending expiration of Stony Creek Quarry Corporation’s lease in the summer of 2026 prompts an imperative examination of its historical significance and potential for sustainable continuity. Our research found a spike in demand for Stony Creek Granite during the mid-1900s, when it played a pivotal role in construction worldwide, from Branford, Connecticut to distant sites including Germany and Australia. Presently, a shift in demand towards historic restoration and landscaping projects has ensued, marking a departure from its historical usage and structural capacity. As the sole remaining vestige of an expansive network of quarries, Stony Creek Quarry faces the specter of residential redevelopment, and so, its preservation necessitates strategic measures. A pivotal element of this undertaking is the establishment of a research residency program, designed to foster an enduring cultural narrative surrounding the quarry, its practices, and accrued knowledge. The appointed researcher assumes the role of a custodian, harmonizing the extant industrial framework all while engendering a deeper understanding of the quarry and its environs. In this prospective iteration, the architect functions as a mediator, between the material’s heritage and potentialities, as well as the circularity afforded by its proximity to the source. Architectural interventions are conceived not only as showcases of the stone’s structural aptitude but also as harmonious insertions, guided by the natural ‘seams’ found within the quarried landscape. This approach looks towards the terrain, paying homage to the site’s significance and the complementary role of architecture in enabling these innovative programs, with minimal interference with the quarry landscape.

Lease phasing map diagram

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Top: Sectional model of residency building Bottom: Plan of artist residency, studios and gallery

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Top: Exterior elevational rendering Bottom: Artist residency section and assembly diagram

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Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

IV. THE QUARRY CONTINUED

The provocative landscape of Stony Creek Quarry is the spatial consequence and built inverse of the demand for granite in building and architecture. The subtraction of this landscape has produced addition elsewhere. The geographical breadth of Stony Creek granite ranges from a few feet to thousands of miles—from Connecticut to New York and as far as Germany and Australia. Material specification, once limited to locally available goods, has now become a global exchange. While this global engagement has afforded architects and builders infinite opportunities, there has been a detachment from locality and with it, an ignorance to the origins and consequences of our specifications. In Fall of 2023, students from the Yale School of Art and the Yale School of Architecture (YSOA) were invited to the quarry as part of Issue 2, Volume 8 of Paprika! —a student-led publication at YSOA. In a caravan of 11 cars, we passed through the gates of Stony Creek Quarry and into the landscape we had spent the previous semester acquainting ourselves with. With a sense of pride, we shared the special place with our peers and watched as they too were filled with amazement as we passed through gravel piles and descended into the active quarry. From within the active quarry (which would have otherwise been inaccessible if it weren’t for the generous gravel bridge constructed by the quarrymen for the event) students were led through a series of engagement exercises. Arranged into a circle, facing outwards to the landscape, all of the students were instructed to, in collaboration with their neighbors, draw a slice of the quarry which would later be stitched together into an unrolled

panoramic drawing of the landscape. They drew diligently for the minutes to follow, sketching the contours of the rock, its texture and formations. While still organized into a circle, students then were asked to turn inward where a standard 4 × 6 × 10 dimensional block of granite was placed. From the scale of a landscape to the scale of an object, all 43 students then drew the same block—collectively creating a 360 degree catalog. This block was then split, by hand, using traditional quarrying methods. Before their eyes, students watched and listened to each successive blow as a small crack emerged and crept down the face of the stone. For the final exercise, students broke from their elliptical arrangement and disseminated into the quarry floor to make rubbings of the palette of textures around them. These textures have since been used in various media for the Paprika! publication. With these exercises we hoped to give students the opportunity not only to see and feel the powerful landscape, but also invoke a deeper reflection on the broader implication of material practice. We hope that they begin to notice the distinct pink hue of Stony Creek granite around the area, and with it, begin a larger practice of noticing, awareness and appreciation within their own work. Following the event, students were invited to think about reciprocal landscapes in their own lives and called to submit written and visual materials for the issue. Students were encouraged to consider these landscapes broadly—from global supply chains to the Hull’s run they made the previous morning, the backyard they grew up in, or something they saw during travel week and any other architectural, industrial, geological, social, cultural, interpersonal, political, real or imagined landscapes they could ponder.

YSOA 1022: Architectural Design 4

Core Studio, Spring 2023

Reflections and Continuations

We received a wide range of submissions, reflective of the relevancy of sites like Stony Creek Quarry in today’s pedagogical and design inquiries. Issue 2 will include: Playing with Fire by Yanbo Li about Burning Man, an experiment in temporary urbanism and creative exchange, wherein a city of 80,000 appears in the desert for a week and disappears for the rest of the year, following the principle of Leave No Trace; SEE-OH-BAR-DEE by Montresor Marina, a love letter to a 601 year old house as a manifesto of the art-at-large residency program that has been initiated there; The Spatial Footprint of International Law by Vasiliki Poula, investigating the idea of reciprocal landscapes as engendered (or prevented by) international human rights law, with a focus on the (under-explored) material footprint of UN peace-keeping operations; Frame III by Val Yueting Zhao and Owen Yixiao Wang, a collaborative artwork that parallels the urban tree to the metropolitan type of individuality in an attempt to project the feelings of an urban tree onto a human body, and vice versa; An original drawing by Yumemaru Kashino depicting a reciprocal relationship between the sky and the earth; A reflection on Mies Van der Rohe’s Resor House by Michelle Deng, discussing Mies’ first American commission and his use of local stone and rough masonry techniques as he conflated the site of material extraction with the site for architecture; A conversation facilitated by Tanvi Marina Rao with a garment fabricator, set designer, architect, and music producer about interdisciplinarity in design; Grandmotherly Beach Day by Shengyu Cai, written about beach days and conversations had with their grandmother while they lived together on Vancouver Island during the pandemic; The Town of Black Gold by Serena Liu, a piece on Ouro Preto, translated ‘Black Gold,’ where, during the gold rush in the 18th century, tons of gold were excavated from the ground, and the town was built with the rocks and clays removed from the mountains; Bagh-i Fin, Qunats & the Walled Garden by Tony Musleh about ancient water canaling systems originating in Iran which were used to 34

collect unproductive water streams and enable humans to inhabit otherwise hostile landscapes; Sanctuaries of the Dying Sea by Olga Kedya about the incidental artificial reefs that have developed on Long Beach oil platforms in an otherwise impossible barren clay environment as a demonstration of what new positive forms of coexistence with industrial heritage could look like. Issue 2, Volume 8 of Paprika! is set to launch November 3rd where the submissions described above as well as photographs and drawings from the visit to the quarry will be published. The immense success of this issue can be attributed to the magical night at the quarry and the quantity of inspiration that was generated there. We are continuously thankful for the generosity and enthusiasm offered to us from Darrell Petit and Tom Cleveland. They served as an endless source of knowledge and encouragement during the studio and have continued to offer their time and resources for ongoing interests in the quarry, including the Paprika! event. — Erin Bascom and Felipe Palacio Trujillo

Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations

Afterword The landscape of a quarry is an unforgettable spatial experience, one that is best understood in person. Quarries do not look alike, but many share qualities that resonate with one another connected to people, local craft and technique, and the pure scale of landscape. In China, my studio DnA_Design and Architecture revitalized nine rural quarries in a project called “Jinyun Quarries: Quarry as Stage” which recast abandoned quarries as stages and platforms for public life. We responded to the sites with minimal means to respect the magnificent character of the quarries. In the Fall of 2023, I met Darrell Petit who gave Tei Carpenter and me a tour of the Stony Creek Quarry when I was teaching an advanced architecture studio at Yale University. I was struck by Darrell’s passion about the Quarry’s legacy, the unique granite and the distinctiveness of the Quarry itself. The studio “Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations” is set within an active quarry and the students have enthusiastically responded with proposals that allow for the life of an active quarry to continue hand in hand with enriching the place with a public dimension, whether through art, education, or leisure. It is an approach that interweaves architecture together with the local community, its people, economy, and its past and future. This group of Yale architecture students have learned to expand their role as architects, by becoming stewards for the next generation. — Tiantian Xu DnA_Design and Architecture 2022 – 23 William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor, Yale School of Architecture

Acknowledgments The success of this studio is due in large part to our rich interactions with members of the community in and around Stony Creek Quarry. I am deeply grateful to Anthony “Unk” DaRos, Maureen White, Tim White, and Mary Lee Weber who generously shared their expertise and experiences through presentations and a tour of the Stony Creek Museum. I appreciate the remarkable encouragement and commitment of Darrell Petit and Tom Cleveland who played pivotal roles in developing the studio from the beginning. They were generous interlocutors for the students throughout the process, attending reviews, providing materials, and offering unparalleled access to the quarry site throughout the seasons. I would like to thank Dean Deborah Berke for the invitation to teach this Core studio last spring at the Yale School of Architecture and for her support in developing this publication. Heartfelt thanks to Core 4 coordinator Aniket Shahane, the Core 4 faculty members, and our guest critics for their engaging and thoughtful feedback during the process. I would also like to thank Tiantian Xu for the inspiration to pursue the quarry studio idea and for her enthusiastic and generous support. Alberto Martínez García deserves special recognition as he exceeded his role as the studio’s Teaching Fellow, demonstrating exceptional engagement with the studio and students. I would like to express deep appreciation to Erin Bascom who helped to skillfully coordinate, edit and assist with the making of this publication during all stages of the process. I am sincerely grateful to Willis Kingery who rigorously and beautifully designed this publication within a brisk timeframe. He brought a new layer of depth and insight to the studio materials and I’m thankful for his ongoing collaboration. Finally, I am indebted to the students for their unwavering energy, dedication and willingness to take on the complexities of the studio brief with spirit and imagination. — TC

Colophon Stony Creek Quarry: Future Transformations YSoA 1022: Architectural Design 4 Core Studio, Spring 2023 Edited by Tei Carpenter and Erin Bascom Graphic design by Willis Kingery Typeset in Maria, drawn by Phil Baber, 2010; and Bertram, drawn by Willis Kingery, 2017 Cover rubbing by Tong Hsu and Amelia Lin Photography by Erin Bascom, Tong Hsu, Gabriel Vega, and Tei Carpenter Printed at Conveyor, Clifton, NJ Yale School of Architecture 180 York Street New Haven, CT 06511 architecture.yale.edu Text and images © their authors. Printed and bound in USA.