Maybe you can't judge one by its cover, but Stone Work gives you a pretty good hint. Its jacket offers an open field of a rosy, rough-hewn sandstone, with the subhead and author's credit neatly and unobtrusively "chiseled" in. The main title block looks finely carved, and its subtly embossed letters are high gloss, like softly polished stone. Someone, you know, designed this book very carefully.

Now you can open it. If you're the reserved, organized type, just flip to lovely end plates, which offer an orderly quilt of different-colored stone wall applications. If you're the impetuous, carefree kind, fan the pages and get bowled over by the exquisite color photographs, many of them full-page and even full-spread, showing projects by author Malcolm Holzman's New York City firm, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. Either way, be prepared to fall in love—this book is drop-dead gorgeous!

Depth of scale
But of course you wouldn't just fall for a pretty face; this book has plenty of smarts and character, too. Through thoughtful, crafted essays, Holzman offers a career's worth of reflection and exploration of an ancient material and how it can be used in modern (and in the case of HHP, award-winning) ways. Each one has a rock-related title—"Grindstone," "Milestone," "Keystone," and the like, and in each one Holzman shares some of his practical experience and relates it to a particular building project.

Many say that architects learn best by case study, and such projects abound in Stone Work. They are tied directly into the essays, and then synopsized in the appendix. Buildings so detailed include:

• McClurg Hall, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., which employs sandstone split and cut stone with an unforgettable array of nine-foot-tall finials

• West Wing, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Va., which uses rusticated blocks of limestone

• Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts, Harrisburg, Pa., built of sandstone blocks

• Stokes Wing, the Cleveland Public Library, the subject of This Week's practice tips, which uses marble split-face blocks, fluted quarry block faces, and sawn dimensional stone, with granite lintels.

Weight of history
While most of the building examples are from HHP's lifetime, which began in 1967, Stone Work runs the gamut from ancient application to modern use, and even direction for the future. "The succession of construction techniques applied to stone buildings is as diverse as the history of architecture itself," Holzman reminds us. From the stone cutter and the mason, whose works of necessity gave stone buildings a human scale, stone ruled as a building material until manufactured products began their rise in the eighteenth century. Curiously, as manufactured materials and concurrent styles evolved, they gradually stopped prizing one of stone's most defining characteristics: depth. The culmination was the Modern Age: "A flat surface was considered superior to a three-dimensional one, and a flat surface with minimal detail was deemed even better."

Holzman tells us that it took only three decades (from 1960 to 1990) from the use of stone in buildings to "evolve" from the age-old method of blocks and mortar to thin-skin panels and adhesives. The new systems became popular because they are cheaper, yet "they bear little resemblance to stone's origin as a building material, giving no particular insight into its inherent properties." He offers this hope for the future: "For the current modernism to evolve, the use of stone should move beyond the expediency of panelization. It should embrace new technology and economics but it should also incorporate ways to espouse the lyricism, beauty, and human qualities that stone so eloquently expresses."

In Stone Work's introduction, Holzman says, "To raise public awareness about the material and to influence architects to redirect their attention to stone is my objective. They will discover, as I have, that it is sensuous to the touch, striking to the eye, and pleasing to the soul." Holzman made a good start on this mission with this book, which, if we may, is sensuous to the touch, striking to the eye, and pleasing to the soul.

Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.