The Stones! The Lovely Stones!
Richard Rhodes — 'STONE: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery', Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2025, 272pp
Strolling through the sculpture park of the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul de Vence a few weeks ago, the first work I noticed also happened to be one of the smallest on display. I’ve long been admirer of the work of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), but this was my first encounter with his Iru Harri, a granite work of 1966-68 (below).
It reveals, with simple precision, one of Chillida’s central preoccupations: to cut an unwieldy mass of stone in such a way that it suggests a kind of poetic syntax. Its sharply chiselled geometrical elements slot together with a crunchy visual logic while others frustrate through jutting architectural overhangs, unexpected angles, wedges and apertures.
Circling that lovely, chunky thing, I was immediately reminded of a work I first saw at the Sculpture by the Sea festival in Cottesloe, Perth in 2013. This was Embrace (Sentinel Series), (above) also in granite, this time by the Seattle-based sculptor, stonemason and architectural designer Richard Rhodes.
Richard and I met in Cottesloe that summer and have been in occasional communication ever since. A few years ago I had the pleasure of writing about his Resolute Arch (below), constructed from two dozen cylindrical elements, or voussoirs, in hand-carved granite. The Resolute Arch deploys clever engineering to create a structure that seems to disobey the most fundamental architectural principle: gravity.
I wrote at the time, referencing the long history of arches in architecture, that every such structure might be considered the progeny of the Arkadiko Bridge dating from around 1300BC on the Peloponnese peninsula in Greece (below).
A rare surviving example of Mycenaean masonry, the Arkadiko arch was constructed out of limestone boulders using no mortar, relying instead on the lateral thrust of its constituent rough-hewn blocks. This kind of construction is often referred to as “Cyclopean” after the mythological race of one-eyed giants said to have built the walls and arches of ancient Mycenae.
If you want to know more about these diverse uses and applications of stone in sculpture and architecture, look no further than Richard Rhodes’s new book — STONE: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery.
Rhodes is arguably better qualified than anyone to write this history, having been initiated as a young man into Italy’s guild of freemasons following a long apprenticeship. Skilled stonemasons working out of Siena’s Duomo don’t accept any Tomasso, Ricardo or Enrico into their brethren; yet they clearly saw in Rhodes a commitment not merely to their craft but also to its ancient noble lineage.
Now he emerges as our cicerone, guiding us through a history of stone and its use around the world before progressing to ‘The Rules of Bondwork’ — “the skeleton on which most masonry architecture in our history has been hung,” serving as “the technical basis for masonry practice itself.” This may sound dryly technical, but not the way Rhodes tells it.
How many of us, when passing a stone wall, pause to contemplate the notion of stone having a ‘grain’, much like wood? “Bedding the stone,” Rhodes informs us, refers to stone’s “primary grain orientation or bedding plane parallel to the earth.” This was all new to me.
I don’t know how many times I’ve walked round the massive pre-Roman polygonal stone walls of the Umbrian town of Amelia (below) and failed to register the precision with which the Cyclopean limestone elements were cut and assembled, without mortar, not to mention their primary grain orientation or bedding plane. I do now.
This is where Rhodes’s book expands our awareness, not merely of stone and its arrangement into buildings and other structures, but of its chthonic evolution over time as part of the planet’s organic “mountain-building” geology. Those processes of sedimentation over millennia have left visual evidence of time passing in the form of threads of differently coloured mineral deposits — the primary “grain” — that run parallel to the Earth’s surface.
After reading STONE I found myself looking with greater curiosity at dry stone walls in Burgundy…
…and rubble-packed edifices in Montepulciano in Tuscany (below) that seem flung together, generation after generation, out of a bricolage of slate, tile, stone, brick, aggregate, or whatever happened to be lying around at the time.
If you’re about to enter the architectural profession or building trade, or planning to embark on an extended apprenticeship with a Sienese stonemason, I recommend arming yourself with a copy of Rhodes’s book. It is as much an expert guide for architects and builders as an absorbing and beautifully written paean to a primal material, its history and uses over time. Illustrated with an abundance of colour plates and a helpful glossary of terms, you’ll never look at stone in the same way again.
Grazie, Richard!
