Marble Madness and Mayhem

Several weeks ago I received an interesting email from a Danish engineer in regard to my story about the Aon/Amoco/Standard Oil building (Big Stan) in Chicago. He was concerned that I had given a jaundiced picture of marble as a cladding material. “You forgot to write that there are a very, very high number of marble facades performing extremely well in all kinds of climatic zones,” he wrote. He is absolutely correct that the vast majority of buildings clad in marble do not experience the panel bowing problems found on Big Stan. Marble is generally a sound choice, when used correctly.

But in the article co-written by my Danish correspondent, it is also clear that there have been what seems to me an unusually high number of buildings where marble cladding has failed. (Durability of Marble Cladding—A Comprehensive Literature Review, in Journal of ASTM International, v. 4 no. 4, 2007) These include La Grande Arch de la Defénce (see photo below) and SCOR Tower, Paris; Richmond City Hall, Virginia (all marbles panels removed and replaced by steel, painted aluminum, and granite); and IBM Tower in Brussels.

Two buildings stand out for the most notorious warping. One is the 310-foot tall Zagrepcanka tower in Zagreb, Croatia, unaffectionately dubbed “The hells tower,” due to falling panels that led to construction of a tunnel to allow employees to reach the entrance. (The smaller photos are of the Zagreb tower, by Jan Anders Brundin.)

The other is Helsinki’s Finlandia Hall, designed by the great architect Alvar Aalto. Completed in 1972 with 7,000 square meters of Carrara marble, the panels started to deteriorate with bowing, cracking, and spalling. The fine citizens of Helsinki decided to replace the panels and chose to reuse Carrara again. Within six months these new, supposedly ultrastrong, ultrasecure panels began to warp. Curiously, they warped convexly; the original panels warped concavely. To this day no can explain why.

Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, with Carrara marble panels, image from Wikipedia

Building stone has failed across climates from northern Europe to Cuba to Libya to Canada in marble quarried in areas equally as diverse, such as Vermont, Greece, Greenland, and Norway. Carrara marble, however, leads the field, in part because it is the most widely used marble in the world.

In their report, the authors made several observations:

1. The higher the temperature variations, the higher degree of bowing.
2. Higher humidity can lead to problems when water penetrates pore spaces.
3. There is no correlation between panel size and thickness and tendency to bow.
4. Bowing tends to be more pronounced on the southeast and southwest facades.
5. More pronounced bowing occurs on the upper parts of buildings.
6. No link has been found between anchoring system and bowing.
7. Marble color doesn’t impact bowing.
8. Pollution doesn’t impact bowing.
9. At least a half-dozen previous authors have noted that bowing depends on the grain boundaries of the marble, which ultimately depends on the geologic history of the stone.

The authors recommend the development of a series of guidelines to choose, test, and produce marble panels. They conclude that “technically acceptable properties should…have very high priority when choosing a marble type for a building project, whereas today aesthetical properties are often considered as being of greatest importance even though the aesthetic problems will change rapidly for a nonsuitable marble as it deteriorates.” In other words, no matter how pretty and elegant the Carrra marble looked on Big Stan, when they failed, it was a monumental screw up that could have been avoided if the builders had been more concerned with function over style. Once again, it pays to pay attention to geology.

Talk at Rick Steves

A quick last minute posting. For those in the Seattle region, I will be giving a talk on Thursday night (April 22) at the Rick Steves' Travel Center in Edmonds. The talk will run from 6 to 7 p.m. and will focus on the building stones of Italy. I will highlight the travertine quarried in Tivoli and used for the Colosseum and the marble of Carrara, best known as the favored sculpting medium of Michelangelo. I will also discuss the brilliance of Roman architects and engineers and look at how well they understood the building properties of the different building stones found around Rome.

The talk is free and open to all. It will be fun and informative, or so I like to think.

Even Dante was impressed with the Carrara marble. This quote is carved into a panel placed above a quarry in Carrara, which the great poet visited.

By combining tuff and travertine, the Romans were able to take advantage of each stone's strengths to build amazing structures, such as the Theater of Marcellus.

This panel of travertine is from the cutting yard of the Mariotti family quarry, which supplied the stone for the Getty Museum complex in Los Angeles.

Castle Car Wash: Part 2

Following up my posting about Castle Car Wash, I have learned a bit more about the stone used in the structure from Dave Clark, who operates a web site and blog devoted to Chicago and its transportation history, particularly along Route 66. Clark reports that much of the stone did indeed come from quarries in Joliet and Lemont, about 15 to 20 miles southwest of Chicago. Known variously as Lemont Limestone, Joliet Limestone, Lemont Marble, Joliet Marble, and Athens Marble, it is a dolomitic limestone deposited around 415 to 420 million years ago. Quarries are in the Sugar Run and Joliet formations.

Workmen excavating the Illinois & Michigan Canal discovered the stone in 1846, but it “was not then considered of superior quality,” according to A. T. Andreas’ History of Chicago. Within a decade, however, the buttery yellow limestone began to appear in buildings in Chicago, giving the city “a light, bright, and almost French appearance.” One of the most famous structures is the Chicago Water Tower built in 1869 and described by Oscar Wilde as a “castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it.” ( I wonder if the water tower inspired John Murphy to build his castle.)

And then that persnickety old cow of Mrs. Leary kicked over the bucket that caused the fire that burned Chicago to the ground and revealed that perhaps the original discoverers of the Joliet stone were right. (I know that this version of the fire is most likely an apocryphal story but I like it.) By the way, if you hadn't figured it out, the water tower survived the inferno.

The great conflagration had disastrous affects on the Joliet rock, which “seemed as though [it] actually burned like wood,” according to a newspaper account. Builders were so prejudiced against the local stone that in the first 30 days after the fire, most ordered brick, from as far away as Philadelphia. Yet by 1876, when the City of Chicago and Cook County teamed up to build a combined courthouse/city hall, to replace the buildings lost in the fire, the Board of County Commissioners adopted a resolution that builders had to use limestone.

One could look on the Board’s decision as local pride and an interest in helping local businesses but that would be naïve. The Chicago Tribune called the process “utter absurdity.” This was Chicago in the 1870s, where corruption had become an artform. The Board’s initial choice of contractor put in a bid of $895,000, or what would amount to a “at least a quarter of a million steal.” When that bid failed, the Board hoped to make their money by finding an architect who would help plunder the system. Despite repeated editorials in the Tribune against the “Ring,” the Board chose to use Lemont Limestone for building the courthouse.

Two years later, when work began on the City Hall part of the building, the Tribune again railed against the Board’s decision. The Alderman “cannot but bring disgrace upon the city and turn the public building of our enterprising young city into a monument of imbecility and stubbornness.” Eventually, builders turned to the Salem Limestone, which became the dominant stone in Chicago.

Clark wrote that no one knows where or how Murphy acquired his stone for his castle. Nor is it known when exactly he applied the stone façade, which is a two to three-inch thick veneer. It may have been part of the original 1925 building or during an expansion in the 1930s. And finally, Clark notes that there are some blocks of Salem Limestone, along with pieces of granite and marble, making the building even more intriguing in my eyes.

Castle Car Wash: Limestone? Sandstone?

I have long had an interest in strange little buildings made of stone, as evidenced by my obsession with the petrified wood gas station in Lamar, Colorado, thus I am happy to report on a recent discovery of mine. It is another odd rock-clad structure, this time in the North Lawndale section of Chicago. The building has held various names and businesses but seems most often to be called the Castle Car Wash.

Photo by David G. Clark (His web site has more info on the building.)

Castle Car Wash began life in 1925 as the John J. Murphy Gas Station. Murphy had purchased the triangular property on the corner of S. Hamlin Street and W. Ogden Way in 1924. According to a National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) nomination written in 2005, Murphy sold gas from 1927 to 1964. The property sold in 1970 and variety of gas stations, auto repair shops, and towing companies filled the premises until it evolved/degenerated into the Castle Car Wash in the late 1970s.

Murphy built the station on Ogden Avenue to exploit the road’s recent designation as US Highway 66, better known as Route 66, which terminated a few miles east of Murphy’s business near the shore of Lake Michigan. The early days of Route 66 were an exciting time as Americans began to rev up and hit the road. Between 1920 and 1930 the number of gas stations exploded from 15,000 to 124,000. By 1927, more than 20 stations dotted Ogden Avenue, along with garages, repairs shops, and dealers.

As I quoted in my chapter in Stories in Stone about Lamar’s filling station, “The gas station…is undoubtedly the most widespread type of commercial building in America,” wrote Daniel Vieyra in Fill er’ Up: An Architectural History of America’s Gas Stations. What had begun merely as a way to distribute gas, evolved into the full-scale sales and service center so familiar to the American roadside.

Vieyra breaks station designs down into four recurring themes. Most elegant were the Respectful buildings, which often resembled a Greek temple. Functional buildings catered to a motorist’s sense of efficiency, as exemplified by the simple, streamlined box. Domestic stations satisfied those seeking a more familiar or rustic look, such as an English or Tudor-inspired building. Domestic, Functional, and Respectful buildings did share one common theme; large companies designed them to foster a corporate image.

Some station owners eschewed corporate branding and endeavored to attract motorists with whimsy. They built stations out of old planes and modeled them after lighthouses and windmills. They made them look like tank cars, oversized gas pumps, Brobdignagian oil cans, and colossal shells. Vieyra labels this architectural style Fantastic and delineates its golden age as 1920 to 1935.

No one knows what inspired Murphy in his design but his little “castle” is definitely Fantastic, though the NRHP nomination describes it as Late Gothic Revival. The stone veneer building, with its corner tower topped by a crenellated parapet, must have been quite the sight in its glory days.

Photo used courtesy Charles Leeks

From a geological point of view, I cannot determine what stone was used on the building. It is clearly a heterogenous mix and I have been told that some of the rock is Salem Limestone but I have not seen such gray and yellowish blocks of Salem. Some of the blocks could come from limestone quarries in Joliet and Lemont, however, I am not familiar with what color stone comes from those sites. (Any observations that anyone has would be great.)

Photo used courtesy Charles Leeks

Like many other older, whimsical buildings, Murphy’s station has suffered through vacancy and minimal upkeep. And what has been done hasn’t been good, including boarding up windows and removal of the parapet, apparently for safety concerns. A recent survey has revealed that the castle is the only Late Gothic Revival station remaining on Route 66. In response, Landmarks Illinois, a non-profit devoted to historic preservation, listed the castle on their Chicagoland Watchlist in 2008.

Photo from Landmarks Illinois web site. Photo by Janine Wilkosz

Fortunately, the stone gas station building has apparently been protected, at least for now. A new owner has plans to open it as a restaurant and has hired an architect to help with restoration. The roof has been replaced and the building cleaned and tuck pointed, though the parapet is still gone. I do hope it will be preserved; the castle is a unique reference back to an important era not just of Chicago’s history but of our country’s history when the automobile was just beginning its long run into the fabric of our lives.

One last note, in researching John J. Murphy’s wonderful little gas station, I have discovered that North Lawndale is famous for its stone buildings, most of which were made from Salem Limestone. I plan to follow up soon with further information.