By Jodi Paper

PROJECT TEAM Designer: Office of Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco Stone supplier: Chen-Ragen LLC, Seattle Stone installer: QuarryHouse Inc., San Anselmo, Calif.

The Sigmund Stern Grove is a longstanding landmark in the Sunset District area of San Francisco. The 33-acre park is home to an amphitheater, which for years has been used as a venue for free concerts and even the local ballet. As well as being selected as one of this year's Tucker Design Awards recipients, the Sigmund Stern Grove renovation is a winner for the community.

After almost 70 years of use, primarily in this public entertainment capacity, Stern Grove was in desperate need of reconstruction. The moody San Francisco climate and the popularity of the beautiful tree- and meadow-filled space left the site weather-beaten and eroded. In 1999, the Stern Grove Festival Association hired landscape architect Lawrence Halprin to redesign the park, giving him a budget of $15 million. Halprin then enlisted the help of QuarryHouse Inc. and allotted $3 million of the budget for stonework alone.

	Photographs © Edward Westbrook / QuarryHouse Inc.

"It is a project built to last for decades or longer," said Ed Westbrook, the founder of QuarryHouse and longtime collaborator with Halprin.

With the hallmark of QuarryHouse being "The Art of Legacy," it's no wonder Halprin selected the company, which Westbrook described as "an all-service traditional stone masonry company that works with clients sourcing materials worldwide and collaborates with quarries to help them incorporate old-world techniques of cutting stone." This includes hand-splitting and chiseling the granite with hand tools. Given that Stern Grove is such a historically, culturally and environmentally significant space in the middle of the city, QuarryHouse seemed the perfect fit for just such a restoration.

Photographs © Edward Westbrook / QuarryHouse Inc.

Westbrook, for his part, was thrilled to work again with the landscape architect. "Halprin has a real thing about stone," Westbrook said. "He likes to use it and work with it." Westbrook went on to further describe Halprin as highly collaborative. "He builds wonderful teams on projects. He works intuitively with lots of sketching and likes to work onsite in the field, directly with the people." The Halprin-QuarryHouse collaboration was certainly a match made in heaven for the project that lay ahead of them.

The two main elements of the renovation are grass and granite. Westbrook searched quarries all over the world, from Canada to Mexico to Italy, before finally selecting a stone out of North Central China, called Gabbro. "While the stage itself is built of wood and steel, the entire amphitheater is built out of this one stone," Westbrook said. "It's a tough, very strong granite."

Photographs © Edward Westbrook / QuarryHouse Inc.

Westbrook worked with 75 local villagers at the quarry, which is located in the Shandong province. Together they selected 326 boulders. "We wanted the boulders to be sculptural," he added. "Each had to be a unique and beautiful piece in itself."

Logistics were a very big part of the project. After locating the stone in China, where it was also fabricated, QuarryHouse had to make sure the material arrived at the San Francisco site on time. "We had to get it all done after the concert season, which runs from June to late August," Westbrook explained. "We transported 84 container loads over five months." That translated into a total of 1,700 tons of semi-finished and raw stone. "Given the quantity and that fact that we had one winter to build, we had to weigh and balance [all aspects of the project]."

Photographs © Edward Westbrook / QuarryHouse Inc.

Back in San Francisco, QuarryHouse hired a crew of 30 people to hand carve the stone. In sticking with the company's "old-school hand-chiseling methods," they used ancient tools like feathers and wedges.

"Structurally and artistically, the amphitheater had a lot of requirements for public access," Westbrook said. The overall timeline for the project was eight months, during which they sought to accomplish three things: "provide improved seating and sightlines through an amphitheatre of stone tiers gradually rising along the hillside; stabilize the hillside erosion; and improve handicap access."

The final result: tiers of stone create a bleacher-like layout throughout the amphitheater, which seats 10,000 people. Long, grassy knolls punctuate the space, in which large groupings of boulders separate the different areas, including banked terraces and short walls that intersect with paved walkways. Pillars 15 feet tall mark the entrance to Stern Grove and welcome the public into their new play space.

And the public certainly enjoyed it. On June 19, the newly renovated Stern Grove began its 68th concert season — the first of many seasons to come.

Photographs © Edward Westbrook / QuarryHouse Inc.

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