Playing With Marbles

April 06 · Asides, How to Talk Like John, Uncategorized · John Houshmand, marble

Every so often I get a hankering to bring in some new materials to work with and when it’s stone, there’s nothing quite like marble… Man has been using marble since the day he figured out how to cut and shape rock to do his bidding. I had some ideas on how it could do mine.

So you would think that The World’s Largest Marble Quarry would be in Italy (I’ve been to Carrara and Pietrasanta…. Driving up the coast road I thought that was snow in them thar hills until….) or in some other far flung place.

But it turns out it’s a bit more than two hours from the ranch in nearby Danby, Vermont. I had to go there and see for myself. It helped that a project in Singapore for the W Hotel chain wanted some boulders with polished faces.

They just don’t allow you in the quarry to kick some stones, especially if you’re looking to buy a few small boulders. But a few calls to the owner of the company (who became a fan of our work) and a bit of expansive discussion, and I got an invite, a tour, and a chance to pick out some large chunks.

I wandered up and down the quarry roads, peeking around piles of blocks, scree, and precariously balanced 20 ton hunks of scrap, looking for the perfect shape. This was a dream unlike any I’ve had. I have toured the Italian stoneyards, been to Crab Orchard Tennessee with Vicente Wolf, and selected limestone in Oaxaca for Edgar Bronfman’s bathroom… but this was a mother lode, literally. We need to know more, see more, understand more. Mike the quarry manager, who was one of the most genuine humans I’ve ever met jumped me into his pickup, we veered around the John Deere block loader (capacity 80,000 pounds) and headed underground into 40 acres of subterranean stone cutting operations.

There are quarries up and down the hills, and then there is the cave, manmade, hollowed out over a century of excavating, and with miles of roads, “rooms”, trucks, pools of wastewater reclamation, mountains of scrap and slabs, and spray painted signs reminding one of “EXIT,” in case you needed to get some air. 45 degrees year round.

Visions of marble blocks, slabs, boulders, sculptures last night. All night. Going back. ASAP. Have a plan….