![]() ![]() His sculptures have been installed at Socrates Sculpture Park, Riverside Park, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Peabody Museum of Art at Yale University, Chubu Museum and Cultural Center in Kurayoshi, Japan (a work in collaboration with Cesar Pelli and Associates), the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and more. When the rock is gone, the quarry will close.Īs we closed out our tour of Stony Creek quarry, we passed by a work-in-progress by Petit. As such, these are the last 55 acres, which are surrounded by land trusts from the communities of Guilford and Branford, that can be excavated. By contract, the quarry also cannot excavate below sea level. It is the last of the nearly two dozen quarries that once operated in the area. Like all quarries, Stony Creek Quarry has a limited life. Outside of New York City, Stony Creek granite can be found at Yale University, the Newberry Library in Chicago, South Station Headhouse in Boston, the Battle Monument at West Point, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., and a long list of more locations all around the country. The quarry is also involved in restoration work at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Stony Creek Quarry supplied the granite floor for the restoration of 550 Madison by architecture firm Snøhetta, contractor AECOM Tishman, and developer Olayan in partnership with RXR and Chelsfield. Johnson, who had become synonymous with glass curtain wall design, decided that the heat loss was “too great.” That, coupled with the skyrocketing costs of aluminum, made him seek out other materials. It was this building on Madison Avenue, with its “Chippendale” top that sparked a revival in stone as a building material starting in the late 1970s. The quarry has since supplied the granite for numerous university hardscape projects over the last decade, including the restoration of the entrance to Butler Library, the plaza in front of the Mathematics Building, and the restoration of the steps and plaza leading to Low Library.Īnother current is 550 Madison Avenue (originally the AT&T Building) which was built with Stony Creek granite by architect Philip Johnson. We are the material, but a big chain of events happens in between us, the farm, and the building,” Petit said. “I’ve seen how important it is to engage with the client and then the operators to stay involved. The university then instructed the architects to use Stony Creek, and now Columbia itself is one of the quarry’s primary clients. ![]() ![]() In fact, Petit said, the use of this particular quarry was an “ultimatum” by the original architects who used the quarry as a go-to source for projects like the Smithsonian Institute, Museum of History & Technology in Washington D.C., Columbia, and many more. Petit made a phone call to a professor he knew at Columbia who passed on the message that Stony Creek had supplied the granite for the original McKim, Mead & White campus. In the construction of the new Northwest Building at Columbia University, the granite was going to be sourced from Portugal. Stony Creek Quarry has also learned about the long-term benefits of working closely with its clients. Granite, a material that went well with the neoclassical architectural style popularized by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, ended up in bridges, parks, buildings, monuments, and more. It extended to memorials of past achievements, both in cemetery monuments and in prominently placed public art,” writes the contributors to Flesh and Stone: Stony Creek and the Age of Granite. The desire to celebrate in stone the achievements of families, private institutions, and governments did not stop with the creation of mansions and imposing institutional edifices. The stately yet malleable material “proved to be … particularly suited to expressing both the aspirations of the well-to-do and the civic pride of growing cities. Railway expansion, along with a building boom during the Gilded Age led to an increased demand for granite. Proximity to the Long Island Sound offered easy access to waterborne transportation for the unwieldy goods, weighing in the dozens of tons. The quarries provided a livelihood for newly arriving immigrants from Italy and Scandinavia, who brought their stone working skills with them.
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