Building With What Is Already There

Quarry Chapel is the project people ask us about most, and the question is almost always the same: is it true that the building is made from the stone dug out to make its own foundation? It is true, and the reason it is true is less romantic and more practical than the story suggests.

The site was hours from the nearest supply of anything. Every truckload of material would have to travel a long, rough road, and the budget could not absorb many such trips. Faced with that constraint, the obvious move was to look down. The excavation for the foundation was going to produce a great deal of stone regardless. The only question was whether we treated it as spoil to be carted away or as the primary building material it plainly was.

Constraint as the brief

We chose to design the chapel so that the volume of stone excavated closely matched the volume of stone needed for the walls. That single decision set almost everything else: the wall thickness, the height of the room, the size of the footprint. The building's proportions are, in a real sense, a record of how much stone the ground was willing to give up.

This is not an approach we reserve for remote sites. Basalt Court is paved in setts reclaimed from the city's own decommissioned tram lines. Monolith House was formed with cedar boards salvaged from an outbuilding already on the property. In each case the material was not chosen for its story — it was chosen because it was already there, and the story followed.

The greenest material, the cheapest material, and often the most beautiful material is the one that is already on the site. We just have to be willing to design around it.

Designing this way is harder than specifying from a catalogue. Reclaimed and site-won materials arrive in the quantities and dimensions they arrive in, not the ones you would have ordered, and the design has to bend to meet them. But a building that is made of its own place has a rootedness that no imported material can fake. It could not have been built anywhere else — which, to us, is most of the point.