The Epic of Stone: From the Silence of the Mountain to the Memory of Civilization

Before there was architecture there was stone, waiting beside the mountain as the child of time, and this hymn of materials follows it from the first wall to the house. The Pyramids try to defeat death, Stonehenge stands before the sky, the Parthenon learns proportion, Rome learns the arch and Petra is carved rather than built, before Jerusalem, Damascus, the Umayyad Mosque, Aleppo, Cairo and the Gothic cathedral. The bridge, the fortress, the threshold, the grave and Michelangelo's stone that was waiting lead to marble, granite, limestone, travertine and local stone, and to stone's relation with heat, water, light and silence. Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Carlo Scarpa and Peter Zumthor bring it into modern architecture, and the book ends with the robot, artificial intelligence and stone declaring that it will remain.