Sermons in Stone

Jacquetta Hawkes is an archeologist in love with the earth and stone of her native Britain. Out of her studies and her warm prejudice has come an extraordinary book called A Land, tracing the relationship between man and rock. With its publication in the U.S. last week (Random House; $3.75), readers found that the book is also a refreshing document on stone and art.

To Author Hawkes, the "center of gravity of a people in any age" can be found in the way they build. "Neolithic communities hauled megalithic blocks to their communal tombs, Bronze Age men did the same for their temples, the Iron Age Celts amassed materials for their tribal strongholds . . . medieval society sweated for its churches . . . The Victorians moved unprecedented masses of stone for town halls, exchanges . . . factories, and docks."

Flake & Fall. Until the 17th century, says Author Hawkes, Britons seemed to understand their stone. Then classical ideas captured the imagination of the architects, and there began an insatiable demand for freestone (close-grained rock with no visible layering) "to build facades which were largely dependent on . . . clean surface texture." In the 17th and early 18th centuries, the architects rushed up so many new Oxford colleges that the stone was often used "unseasoned" and without regard for the lie of the strata in the quarry. The result: "Within a few decades the poor quality freestones began to blister, flake, and fall away . . . Whole buildings fell into a premature and degraded old age."

Thanks to the "profoundly irresponsible" Royal Commission, even the Houses of Parliament suffered. Once again the stone came in unseasoned and without regard for the original lie of the rock. "A few decades of exposure to the climate of London and particularly to its acid-charged rain, and the whole of that vast display of Gothic revivalism began to crumble and dissolve."

Select & Cut. Fortunately for much of the rest of London, Sir Christopher Wren did know the stone he used. As royal custodian of the splendid quarries in the Isle of Portland, he supervised the selection and cutting of every block. This Portland stone "was to spring up in the rich variety of Wren's towers and steeples . . . As its greatest glory, the stone was to grow, to blossom, into St. Paul's." For that job, Wren never used a block "unless it had been exposed for at least three years."

Today, says Jacquetta Hawkes, Britons are not so lucky. "The fatal discovery of Portland cement [no kin to Portland stone] was made about a century ago. I am aware that steel and concrete building can be good, that it puts all kinds of possibilities before us--such as houses wider at the top than at the bottom . . . [But] it represents that terrifying new phenomenon, man mechanized and living cut off from his land, from the rock out of which he has come."

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