Desire for Craftsmanship Drives Demand for Masonry and Brickwork
St. Louis’ love affair with brick and stone work is reaching new heights and giving new attention to the not-so-lost craftsmanship of bricklayers and stone masons.
One of the charms for rehabbers and developers in the area’s dwindling inventory of old and vacant buildings is the buildings’ obvious brick and stone craftsmanship, transforming what are essentially boxes into works of art. The demand to recapture some of that charm in new buildings is giving St. Louis architects and designers the opportunity to create their own works of art.
“Brick and stone work in commercial and institutional buildings never went out of style,” says Jeff Leonard, who with his father, Donald Leonard, runs Leonard Masonry Inc., the nation’s ninth largest masonry contractor. “But there was a long period when the real craftsmanship was reserved for only very special projects, such as a federal courthouse or a cultural institution. What we are seeing now is the use of decorative brickwork and artistic stone masonry in buildings with more modest purposes.”
One example is the Stix Early Childhood Center, 647 Tower Grove in St. Louis, completed in 1997. Wanting to create a “fun” environment at a building being located in an industrial area of the city, the architect, Mackey Mitchell Associates, called for bold colors, checkerboard patterns in the brick walls, and projected ribbon courses.
“It wasn’t too long ago, for a school, we would have used one type of brick and one color of mortar and built a very useful if simple building,” says Leonard, whose company assigned bricklayer Austin Vaeth to oversee the project. “For this building, we used four different types of brick, including glazed brick, and a variety of mortar colors. It took a high level of craftsmanship to bring it off.”
Stone masons are also staying busy, with major projects such as the Thomas F. Eagleton Federal Courthouse downtown, to smaller, but equally impressive, structures such as Southwest Bank’s facility on Manchester Road in Des Peres. In the case of Southwest Bank, St. Louis Stone & Supply, Inc., literally went a long way to create the facility’s distinctive blend of classic and modern styles. The granite for the building was quarried in Minnesota, sent to Italy for polishing, and shipped back in time to meet the construction timetable.
Are today’s masons as good as those who built the city’s more cherished buildings? The answer might be found in the Graham Chapel at Washington University. The challenge for Leonard Masonry, which recently won an AIA/CPC Honor Award for its craftsmanship on the project, was to replicate the collegiate Gothic style in a seamless addition to a campus landmark.
Again, St. Louis Stone & Supply went on the road to match the building’s original stone, but only had to go as far as the original quarry near Ironton, Mo. Taking into account 90 years of weathering and exposure to the elements, Leonard Masonry’s masons replaced some of the original stones with the newly quarried granite and then blended the removed original stones into the new walls.
The chapel’s arched entrance with its carved gargoyles was relocated to the new entryway with granite custom blended around it. Inside the chapel, craftspersons worked hard to match the existing marble tile. The chapel’s original limestone faces were V-grooved. To match the grooves, which ran in different directions, the masons worked painstakingly on site with hand tools.
Other recent displays of St. Louis’ masonry craftsmanship abound. One example is a grand arch and diagonal pattern, both rendered in brick, surrounding a rose window at Manchester United Methodist Church. Another example is A.G. Edward’s new Frontenac office where a combination of brick and colored cast stone are used to match the architectural theme of Le Chateau Village.
Leonard thinks the new craftsmanship will stand the test of time. “People cry about the lost craftsmanship of the ‘good ol’ days,’ but years from now, people will point at the work being done today and hold up the craftsmanship and call these the ‘good ol’ days.’”