Building in Stone Today: Voices and Commentaries

In recent years, structural stone in buildings has experienced a renaissance. This book offers a critical look at what the choice of stone is doing to contemporary architecture, in terms of both practice and form. Building in Stone Today takes observations of professionals at work – architects, engineers, quarriers, builders but also clients and their advisors – as its point of departure. The themes it addresses are stone’s perceived novelty as a modern building material; the politics of its provenance; the logic of its supply; the expertise it calls upon; the labour involved in its extraction and assembly; its haptic qualities; and finally, its capacity to last. Assembling voices and commentaries from Spain, Switzerland and England, the book adopts a storytelling format. Drawing on several case studies, it places everyday situations in working with stone at its centre. Analog photographs by the author recall the embedded nature of the research behind the book. Highlighting case studies from Switzerland, Spain and England Structural stone connects contemporary design with the depth of the natural landscape and vernacular tradition The attractive volume explores the rich and complex praxis of building with stone in Europe