Stone/Age Of Innocence
Welcome to Buildingshed. In this newsletter: Edith Wharton, brownstones, adaptive reuse, and building with stone
Welcome to Buildingshed, a newsletter about buildings, materials, land use, and climate change. Future emails will include interviews with architects, material scientists, and artists making the case for new ways of building; case studies highlighting local material economies; and explorations of the labor, land, water, energy, and cultures that produce the physical stuff our buildings and cities are made of. We’ll explore pathways to a future in which building materials like steel and cement no longer account for huge quantities of carbon emissions; in which local, circular economies are nourished; and in which the health and safety of laborers in construction and manufacturing are upheld. In short, a livable future.
But for my first letter in this series I want to write about a book I love that’s set in the past, and a brief descriptive passage in it that can be opened up to show how building materials--in this case, the stone a house is made of--relate to pretty much everything. We’ll begin with one grand, imaginary house in 1870’s New York, a mansion sticking out like a white tooth in a row of brownstones: the home of Mrs. Manson Mingott, grandmother to both the love interests in The Age of Innocence.
In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton wrote that the bold and self-sufficient matriarch of the Manson Mingott clan
...put the crowning touch to her audacities by building a large house of pale cream-coloured stone (when brown sandstone seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in the afternoon) in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.
The Age of Innocence is, as Wharton intended it to be, a story of an insulated world, a closed society, and an innocence enforced by a commitment to glossing over the harder facts of origins and transactions. The world the characters inhabit is given to them complete, with its social rules, preordained house façades, hothouse flowers in winter. (Throughout the novel, there are baskets and baskets of roses and carnations, some grown painstakingly and energy-intensively through the winter by unseen servants in the mansions’ hothouses.) The people outside that world (and those who labor within it) are close to invisible. In today’s globalized marketplace and luxury-driven design industry, construction materials and labor are similarly invisible: unless the geographic source of a material is an exotic selling point, it is unlikely to be mentioned. Even more heavily obscured are the supply chain and processes the material goes through before reaching the construction site.
Every pound or square foot of material in a building embodies its history: the energy used to produce and transport it, the emissions released, the water consumed, and the labor involved. It also holds, in that history, the wider impact of the land use choices and changes that led to the availability of raw components and a place for the product at the end of the chain. Clearly, Wharton meant something by the cream stone house set apart from the brownstones. And beyond the nonconforming personality Wharton meant the house to signify, there’s more to consider.
A brick and brownstone residence at 138 West 25th Street, New York City, c. 1855-1856, Source
If Mrs. Manson Mingott had built her house as a slightly younger woman—say, a decade or two before the book’s events begin—its construction would have coincided with the clearing of Seneca Village, near what’s now the West 85th Street entrance of Central Park. The “inaccessible wilderness” was at that time home to plenty of other people. Several hundred people lived in Seneca Village, mostly Black Americans and some Irish immigrants choosing to live at a distance from the unhealthy, crowded conditions, racism, and exclusion of downtown Manhattan. The City of New York was authorized by the state to acquire the land for Central Park through eminent domain in 1853, and required residents and former property owners to vacate by 1857. In a 2011 dig of the site of Seneca Village, archaeologists found remnants of the domestic lives lived there: an iron tea kettle, a roasting pan, a stoneware beer bottle, fragments of Chinese porcelain. A small fabric shoe with a leather sole.
1,600 people were displaced from land that became Central Park, including the several hundred residents of Seneca Village. In her lifetime, Wharton watched the wealthy New York families (her mother among them) build and move into houses further and further up 5th Avenue. Brownstones went up by the block, erected by speculators with easy access to the materials. And then, most of the mansions and single-family townhouses Edith Wharton knew on 5th Avenue—and wrote about in The Age of Innocence—were demolished in the first half of the 20th century, and replaced by skyscrapers and larger commercial buildings. The brownstone, once as common “as a frock coat in the afternoon” in that part of town, went the way of the frock coat in the afternoon (what is a frock coat?).
But brownstones stayed standing in other areas of the city. The brownstones of Harlem, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Fort Greene witnessed generations and movements, and accrued public cultural significance as the iconic backdrops of books, movies, and people’s lives. Now, the churn of development has entered these neighborhoods, too. But this time, the brownstone façade is often seen as worth keeping.
An 1856 drawing of the Cascades of the Ausable River, near Keesevill, New York, shows waterfalls framed by sandstone walls like those that were quarried to provide brownstone for rowhouses, Source
A traditional brownstone is a brick structure clad in sandstone veneer—usually brown in color, but sometimes pinkish, gray, or red. Historically, the sandstone was primarily quarried in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and shipped to New York by the Connecticut River (Brick Undergroud for more on this). Though the sandstone forms with lamination (a small-scale sequence of fine layers) parallel to the ground, people like the look of it oriented vertically on buildings, so that’s how it was set. This is one reason brownstones readily reveal their age. The vertical orientation, Old House Online warns readers, “allows water to penetrate through weakened mortar joints and flashing and into the stone's layers” and “the stone spalls or flakes off, roughening the once smooth surface.” Most brownstone repair in New York involves patching rather than replacement; over time, since these buildings are old, patching jobs from decades past commonly fail. In-kind replacement of the stone is preferable from a durability standpoint, though more expensive: it requires removing deteriorated portions of the stone and inserting new ones, chosen and shaped to match the original.
However a building is patched up or refreshed, the environmental impact of renovation is almost always much lower than impact of new construction. Retrofitting existing buildings to house more people and use less energy is preferable to all the glossy, glassy “green” new building developers can do. Brooklyn-based CO Adaptive Architecture, a firm with expertise in adaptive reuse and passive house technologies, has completed some ambitious renovations of old New York brownstones emphasizing energy efficiency and resilience. If CO Adaptive’s mission to evolve the existing building stock “to create energy efficient, beautifully articulated, and future resilient environments,” using and enhancing the “beauty contained in [the existing] city fabric,” is adopted widely, the world will be in better shape.
Incidentally, Wharton herself hated brownstones. She described the New York she grew up in as “cursed with its universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried." It’s plausible that the pale cream-coloured stone in which Wharton housed her story’s matriarch was meant to resemble Lutetian limestone, or “Paris stone.” By the time Wharton disparaged New York’s brownstones and invented Mrs. Manson Mingott’s house, she’d long established herself in France.
Paris, in the book, is the ultimate contrast to New York. It is a place of “golden light,” “pervading illumination.” It is in Paris, in a “modern building… many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured front,” that the Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska ( the thwarted lovers in the book) miss each other one last time, and where Archer imagines the “incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations” his distant and impossible beloved has lived among. As Claire Messud wrote recently in T, Wharton’s novels of manners are also novels of morals, in which the characters’s actions “in conventional early 20th-century society were, in fact, actions with moral consequences and foreseeable outcomes.” In the pattern of building fronts that made the backdrop of Archer and Olenska’s New York and Paris, another moral code emerged: the brownstone, quarried in New Jersey and Connecticut and transported to New York by boat, represented confinement and conformity, while the luminous Paris stone meant history, culture, freedom.
A 1908 map of the mines under and around Paris, Source
The original Paris stone was quarried right there, in mines beneath the city’s outskirts. This is what the older limestone buildings in Paris—those built before and during the 17th century—are made of. Thanks to spending most of its geologic history underwater, the Paris region has a rich and varied mineral composition, and there is evidence of mining as early as 1292. In the latter half of the 17th century, as the city expanded over forgotten mining galleries, collapsing tunnels and surface subsidence posed a danger. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who’s been called the inventor of financial politics, formed a commission to select a new stone and source to replace the limestone from the Paris mines. The commission found quarries 40 kilometers north of the city center, in the Val d’Oise, and chose the new stone Paris would be made of. The Independent, reporting in 2011 on the southern Oise region’s application to the French government to “become the first place to be granted a building stone Appellation Contrôlée – a badge of official regional excellence – like that given to a wine or a cheese ,” wrote that the “commission identified the stone from the southern part of the Oise – conveniently linked to Paris by river – as an almost perfect match for the city's existing monuments.”
In those monuments, stone served as both the structure and the style. And why not? Stone is classic. Pyramids and aqueducts were engineered from it. The ancestral Puebloans who lived on lands now part of Colorado and New Mexico may be better known for their multifamily residences carved directly into cliffs or constructed from adobe, but they also built with drystone and rock rubble walls.
Steve Webb of Webb Yates Engineers makes an elegant and well-supported argument for a return to stone in The RIBA Journal, citing the properties of stone that make it a structural component that can do things concrete and steel can’t, with a much lower carbon footprint than either (and even some advantages compared to timber). Stone’s “compressive strength means that it can supplant many concrete and steel applications. Its flexural strength, while not in the same league as steel or even timber, is still substantially higher than concrete, which means it requires far less reinforcement,” further reducing the need for steel. Used in the right way, Webb wrote, stone “has the capacity to be very slender, durable, and elegant.” Webb asks,
So why isn’t everyone building with stone already? The stone industry has been left behind, while billions have been invested in steel and concrete production. Relatively unsophisticated quarries produce stone with limited or no strength testing or certification. There are many stone cutters and installers who are geared up to provide decorative or highly aesthetic stone structures but are not mechanised for the large-scale production of structural stone components.
Perhaps it’s quarrying that puts people off, he suggests. Quarrying
…is clearly highly impactful and difficult to get permission for. But quarries can be backfilled with excavated spoil or simply returned to nature, unpolluted. Old quarries form new ecosytems for wildlife and play. Christina Godiksen, senior lecturer in architecture at Oxford Brookes, has spent many years studying the quarries of Alentejo in Portugal: ‘These beautiful landscapes are breathtaking, they are full of wild flowers, herbs, flowers, olive trees, cork oaks and marble sometimes filled with the most turquoise water. Some have been in use since Roman times, history is cut in marble, evidence of every technique, tool and hand. Each quarry unique and specific.’
The quarries pictured in the article are as lovely as Godiksen describes them to be. There are less lovely ones, though, with corresponding stories of exploitation, ruin, and injury. If building with stone emits less carbon dioxide than building with steel and concrete, build with stone. Meanwhile, remember what else is embodied in a material, and seek carbon reductions in tandem with improvement of labor conditions and responsible use of land, water, and energy.
But better yet, build less with new stuff, whether quarried or poured, and build more with salvaged, reused, and repurposed materials. If each quarry is unique and specific, each building that exists is too, and the rows of brick and stone in New York, Paris, and everywhere else should be seen as the valuable stores of material they are, even when they’re unfashionable. In a brownstone: the history of New York, of who stays in a neighborhood to benefit from waves of development and renovation, and who leaves. In a cream-coloured building of Paris stone: the growth of a city overlaid on an aging underground network of earlier explorations and exploitation, the origin of financial politics. And now, in any kind of stone, an alternative to the embodied carbon of concrete and steel; in any kind of building, an opportunity for later reuse. The age of innocence, in which cost, functionality, and appearance could be the sole factors weighting decisions between materials, is over.
Reading:
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (full PDF via Project Gutenberg)
“Why the time is ripe for a return to stone as a structural material,” Steve Webb, The RIBA Journal