The New Stone Age

This landmark exhibition at the Building Centre will explore the potential of stone to revolutionise architecture and construction in light of the current climate crisis. It may seem like an ancient building material but stone has serious sustainability credentials; with the ability to reduce a project’s embodied carbon by an incredible 90 per cent compared to typical steel or concrete frames. The New Stone Age will celebrate the sustainability, practicality and inherent beauty of the world’s oldest natural material.

The exhibition is accompanied by an experimental installation in the Store Street Crescent, in the form of a giant raised stone floor slab that will provide a public shelter and seating area outside the Building Centre. The prototype stone slab has been cut straight from the quarry and demonstrate that it is a viable alternative to typical building materials with a fraction of the carbon footprint. The exhibition and Crescent installation is accompanied by a series of public events exploring different aspects of stone, including free talks around the Crescent structure to activate it during the day.

Curated by Amin Taha of Groupwork, Steve Webb of Webb Yates and Pierre Bidaud from the Stone Masonry Company, the exhibition acts as a survey of the contemporary use of structural stone. The curators came together as architect, engineer and craftsman to make 15 Clerkenwell Close – a love letter to structural stone with its limestone façade and fallen Ionic columns where the fossilised coral, ammonite shells, quartz pockets and seams of the material remain. The building is widely recognised as a new London landmark.

The exhibition provides an opportunity to broaden the discussion of stone, to acknowledge past architectural achievements and introduce a new generation of architects pushing the boundaries of what is possible with a material that combines practicality and beauty. The exhibition features the work of a range of eminent international designers, including French practices Studio Lada and Carl Fredrik Svenstedt, the Palestinian-based AAU, Ensamble from Spain, as well as a host of highly-regarded British firms such as Hopkins Architects, Eric Parry Architects, Groupwork, Webb Yates and Arup.

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Cite: "The New Stone Age" 03 Mar 2020. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/934819/the-new-stone-age> ISSN 0719-8884

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