News

The 2018 Palladio Award for Public Spaces goes to Beyer Blinder Belle for their work on Longwood Gardens.

 
Quarra Stone did the decorative stone carving for the project, leveraging modern technology to machine cut and hand-tool 75 replicas of the Italian limestone bouquet fountains, ensuring historic integrity remained intact.

 
Click Here to learn more about the project.

 
Click Here to learn more about the Palladio Awards.

Quarra Stoone was recognized for the 2018 Tucker Design Award for the excellence in use of natural stone on the Kansas Statehouse Restoration. This historic restoration highlighted Quarry’s blending of traditional and new technologies to produce replacement pieces. Laser scanning coupled with traditional template making and a multi-axis robotic carver roughed out pieces that were hand carved to fit on site.
 
The main stonework required matching four types of limestone, including the reopening of a quarry in Junction City, Kansas that was shuttered in the 1950s.
 
Click Here to learn more about this prestigious award.

I AM A MAN Memorial project in Memphis, Tennessee honors the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 
“Metal Arts Foundry made the I AM A MAN sculpture and Quarra Stone digitally carved the marble gates and fabricated the black granite columns, granite timeline and Dedicatory Wall.”
 

Click here to read the full article

The 2018 Progressive Architecture Awards were published by Architect Magazine this week.  Shout out to Quarra’s visionary collaborators including:

Howeler + Yoon Architecture for the Float Lab

Young Projects for the Glitch House

WOJR for the House of Horns 

Click here to see the full article 

Stone: Jim Durham
Rock Climbing
by Cliff Gayley, FAIA
Principal at William Rawn Associates, Architects.

Recalling our climb to the top of Zervreilahorn, the 9,500-foot peak overlooking the Vals quarry in the Swiss Alps, I appreciate what makes Jim Durham of Quarra Stone a unique force in the world. A stone supplier without a quarry and no particular stone to market, Durham combs the globe for new variations and sources. He is a consultant who can do as well as teach, a fabricator with a forte for computerized cutting and shaping. Exuberant and thoughtful, curious and proactive, he is focused on listening to and acting on the goals of architects who seek him out. “I think stone is different from other materials,” he says, “because it is more of a place; it is a holder of meaning and of history.”

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“What Happens When Architects Design Furniture?”: A question explored by two furniture exhibitions displayed simultaneously at Friedman Benda Gallery in New York. The piece to keep an eye out for is the Heavy Rocker, Designed by Leong Leong. It’s fabricated from a piece of solid gneiss and is paired with a perforated steel counterpart fabricated by Zahner.

https://www.vogue.com/article/when-architects-design-furniture-two-new-exhibitions

Look out for the enlightened research of Ines and Shan is the Fabrication 2017 book, pages 106-113.  Link to digital copy of the book below:

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1546589/1/Fabricate.pdf

The more the merrier!  Join Quarra Stone Company and WOJR in celebrating the debut of the Other Masks exhibition at the gallery BALTS Projects in Zurich, Switzerland.  6:00 pm.

The body of work shown in the exhibition, Other Masks, stems from an ongoing project entitled Mask House, which offers a grieving man a hidden space of refuge in the woods. Included in the exhibition is a range of artifacts that explore the periphery of architectural representation; while orthographic drawings and a scale model provide the work with an architectural center of gravity, pieces such as a stone bas-relief and seven sculptural masks engage the overlapping domain of art.

Other Masks situates the artifact of the mask within the context of the discipline of architecture. An artifact is an object of intrigue that elicits close readings and analyses, which in turn may reveal evidence of its culture and its use. A close reading of an artifact involves examination of all of its physical characteristics, including its figural, structural, material, and decorative features. This study is done not only with the aim of identifying the cultural significance of the particular object, but also with the broader aspiration of understanding the rituals and values of the users of the object, and those of its makers. The most curious of artifacts are those whose features invoke multiple, competing interpretations of their cultural significance.

For WOJR, the making of architecture is the making of artifacts. To think about the design of a work of architecture as such is to regard the acts of making form and reading form as simultaneous and inseparable. Being attuned to architecture in this particular way has lead to a practice that is invested deeply, if not wholly, in the agency of architectural form as the medium through which cultural commentary is conveyed.

About WOJR Organization for Architecture
WOJR: Organization for Architecture is an independent design practice based in Cambridge, Massachusetts founded by William O’Brien Jr. in 2009. O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Founder of the collaborative design practice, Collective–LOK. He has been a recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. He is a MacDowell Fellow and an Aspen Institute Socrates Fellow. He was winner of the Architectural League of New York Prize for Young Architects and Designers. O’Brien studied architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he was a recipient of the Faculty Design Award. His background prior to architecture is in fine art and music theory.

Congratulations to Zain Karsan of MIT and Layth Mahdi of the the University of Michigan.  Quarra Stone Company is looking forward to the amazing creations these two will fabricate during their 10 weeks in Madison, WI this summer.

The 2016 Autodesk University (AU) convention, held November 15–17 in Las Vegas, offered plenty of motivation for innovative professionals to use Autodesk’s data-driven technologies. These can enable design teams to operate at peak productivity, creativity, and efficiency and the greater AEC industry (architecture, engineering, and construction) to embrace novel disruptive ideas. One of the highlights of the convention was The Generative Design pavilion, a creative collaboration between Autodesk, Quarra Stone Company, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, and the University of Michigan (photo by Nathan Miller).

Check it out! Quarra’s fine work was featured in Architectural Digest on May 31, 2015. The article is by Mayer Russ, with photographs by William Waldron. The house in Aspen, Colorado was designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Quarra worked closely with the architects, creating mock-ups, fabricating and installing the custom Valser quartzite for this stunning Rocky Mountain residence. See article

The sculpture was modeled full scale from a smartphone 3-D photo by the artist of a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s 15th century masterpiece in the Queens Museum. With the aid of robotics, Quarra carved a massive block of cement aggregate containing rubble, remnants and refuse collected around New York City. Pietà is a modern day fossil that exposes relationships between the abstraction of technology and the palpable effects of time.