Huge amounts of quarried stone never reaches the market due to unpopular color or visual flaws, though it remains structurally viable.
Despite stone’s ubiquity — throughout history and as a resource — steel and reinforced concrete have supplanted it as go-to structural systems, largely relegating the natural material to the task of facade cladding. That shift has had severe environmental implications — the production of steel and concrete produce over 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions annually.
Steve Webb joins Pierre Bidaud of The Stonemasonry Company and other experts to discuss the overdue return of structural stone with Matthew Marani for the Sustainability in Practice series in the Architectural Record.
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