Latest news with #stonecarving
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Gloucester Cathedral to stage first-ever Stone Carving Festival
GLOUCESTER Cathedral is hosting its first-ever festival of stone carving. A celebration of traditional craftsmanship and heritage, the event is taking place over the August bank holiday weekend, from Saturday, August 23 to Monday, August 25, from 10am to 3pm. Stonemasons from across the country will gather on Cathedral Green to create carvings inspired by the theme of peace and remembrance, marking the 80th anniversary year of VE Day. Paul Synan, senior stonemason, said: "The Stone Carving Festival is a fantastic opportunity to show people the skill and craftsmanship that goes into carving stone at Gloucester Cathedral. "We are looking forward to welcoming carvers from around the country to try their hand at creating something truly special. "It's an extra privilege to know their work will be sold at auction at the end of the event." Visitors will be able to watch master craftspeople at work, including members of the cathedral's own team, and take part in hands-on activities suitable for all ages. There will also be a selection of food stalls on the Cathedral Green, including Box Kitchen, Smokingly Good BBQ and Mumma's Meals. The event is free to attend, with donations encouraged. Proceeds will support the Cathedral's East Cloister Project, which aims to preserve the 14th-century medieval cloister for future generations. After the festival, the newly carved stones—along with 12 historic stones that once formed part of the cathedral—will be auctioned online. Details on how to take part in the auction will be announced soon. Gloucester Cathedral has extended its thanks to the Cathedrals Workshop Fellowship, the Worshipful Company of Masons, and the Friends of Gloucester Cathedral for their support of the event. Cathedral stonemasons have looked after the Cathedral, a Grade I listed building, since 1089, preserving aspects of it to maintain its condition and adding intricate designs to the famous structure. Its stonemasons' team, historically known as the Workshop of St Peter, is one of only ten attached to Cathedrals in England. The team's work is crucial to ensure the Cathedral remains in the best possible condition for generations to come, and all listed buildings around the Cathedral grounds fall under their care. More information is available on the Gloucester Cathedral website.
Fast Company
14-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
AI robots can already carve stone statues. Entire buildings are next
Inside a cavernous 1930s-era warehouse on the northern edge of Brooklyn, the ancient and all-but-extinct art of stone carving is having a 21st century rebirth. This is the new headquarters of Monumental Labs, a quirky but audacious startup that is combining the meticulous chisel-and-hammer craft of stone carving with the prowess, speed, and efficiency of robotics and artificial intelligence. Using an $8 million round of venture capital funding, the 2-year-old company is turning this aging warehouse into a modern stonecutting factory capable of quickly producing highly detailed decorative facades, museum-grade marble sculptures, and towering stone monuments. And if founder Micah Springut gets his way, the company will soon be trying its robotic arms at an even grander project: reinventing the way buildings get built. Walking through the warehouse on a recent day, Springut shows off the 30-foot-high ceilings of the main fabrication floor, where more than a dozen seven-axis robotic carving arms will soon be chipping away at massive blocks of granite, limestone, and marble, turning them into towering sculptures and statues. When the 37,000-square-foot facility comes online in the fall, Monumental Labs will begin fine-tuning its stone carving process to quickly and affordably produce structural stone that can be used to build everything from private homes to multi-level apartment complexes. It will be a big step up from the space Monumental Labs currently leases outside of New York City. That's where the company produced its first significant projects, including restorations of decorative stone adorning Carnegie Hall and the Frick Museum, which are mostly cut by robots and then hand-finished by trained stone carvers. It's a process that can cut delivery times for sculptures and decorative facade treatments from months to weeks. But in its current location, Monumental Labs has only been able to deploy two robots, and its monument carving capacity tops out at 12 feet. 'We can't do an entire facade, we can't do an entire building, we can't do a monumental arch,' Springut says of the existing workshop. Behind him in the new factory, SUV-sized slabs of marble sit idly by, waiting for the robotic arms to be installed and activated. 'All of that kind of stuff, large-scale works, both public and private, could be done here now,' he says. The new factory space and capacity is made possible by the $8 million funding round, which was led by Seven Seven Six, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian's venture capital fund. Founding partner Katelin Holloway, who led the deal with Monumental Labs, says the company offers a perfect blend of technology and humanity. 'They're bringing craftsmanship back to architecture,' she says. 'This technology has massive potential to transform how we build cities, bringing back that artistic magic we almost lost.' Springut says the new space will help the company keep up with growing demand. It's currently working on several large-scale sculpture projects for private clients, decorative stone facades, and a set of gargoyles that will be added to a new building at an undisclosed university in the South. The big goal, though, is getting into structural stone. These are giant, Lego-like blocks of stone that are precisely cut to form thick and strong building bases and walls. With a lower embodied carbon footprint and a much longer lifespan than concrete, structural stone is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative construction method. It's also one humans have relied on for millennia. 'We basically built with stone for all of history until about 110 years ago when industrialization came and changed what became efficient to build with,' says Springut. 'The cost of fabricating stone, cutting it, and shaping it into the form you want became far, far more expensive than doing that with concrete.' Robotics and automation, he says, will dramatically lower that down to as little as 25% of the cost of building with concrete. The future of structural stone Andrew Lane can't wait. He's an attorney and prospective developer based in Austin who has become obsessed with the idea of using structural stone to develop new buildings—partly out of frustration with the aesthetics of modern buildings and partly because stone buildings have such longevity. Standing on his balcony in downtown Austin, he pans his phone's camera from the Renaissance revival-style Texas Capitol Building to the new glass-and-steel office and residential towers a few blocks south. 'America could rise, America could fall, that capitol building ain't going anywhere. That office building right there, that glass, that's gone in 70 years, max,' he says. 'I just don't understand why we want to build cities like that.' He's hoping to change course by building townhouses or apartments in Austin using stone carved by Monumental Labs, but is waiting to learn more about exactly how much it will cost. Springut says that's still an open question. Monumental Labs has other developer clients who are eager to get started, but everyone first wants to see what the company can produce with its new fabrication space. That's why one of the first projects Monumental Labs will work on once its new facility is up and running is a 30-foot-tall observation tower built out of structural stone and constructed right in the corner of its main fabrication hall. Springut says that should be enough to get some of these developer clients to commit to building. 'We've got a number of clients who are just ready for us to be ready,' he says. There's still plenty that's needed before Monumental Labs is actually ready, though. The biggest hurdle is refining the technology behind its stone cutting ambitions, and training its own AI systems to handle the now largely manual process of understanding the cutting paths and the tool heads needed to turn a multiton chunk of limestone into the building blocks of a townhome. 'We'll be using reinforcement learning to effectively come up with the optimal toolpaths to see a 3D model, and based on the curvature and the geometric forms, to choose what are the right tools, or what are the right angles of attack,' Springut says. 'And when we do that, that's what's going to bring the cost of fabricating stone down by 80% to 90%.' The company's proprietary software, he says, will learn from every carving project its robots undertake, getting better over time. This new facility will be part of building that institutional knowledge, using its new fleet of robots to crank out up to 100 life-sized sculptures per year, and possibly a few full-sized buildings. But that will have to wait until the robots can actually move into the building. First, Springut says, the 1930s-era complex needs some upgrades, including a reinforced foundation capable of handling the weight of the stones to be carved. Before Monumental Labs can revolutionize the world of building, it'll have to bring its own headquarters into the 21st century. The super-early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, July 25, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- The Guardian
The perfect break for mother and son? Stone-carving and wood-turning in Sussex
How best to bond with a teenage boy? When my son, Hugo, finished his A-levels, I knew I wanted to 'take a journey' with him, to have some sort of final trip before he left home. Ideally a journey that would leave both of us with a few happy memories. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Easier said than done: a midlife woman and a teenage boy are completely different beasts. I wanted to walk. He wanted to be driven. I wanted to get up early. He wanted to sleep in. I wanted unusual food. He wanted pub grub. I wanted to be safely active. He wanted to lie on a sofa or scramble along a vertiginous precipice. I wanted conversation. He didn't (at least not with me, hour after hour). The problem of where to go seemed insurmountable. But there was one activity we both enjoyed: making and building things. Could this be the answer to our 'bonding' trip? When I suggested we do a three-day stone-carving course on the South Downs and then a wood-turning class deep in an East Sussex forest, he nodded. We could spend our days together, but not conversing. The start time would be somewhere between his and my preferred rising hours. Our creative endeavours could be interspersed with eating at pubs that catered to each of our food preferences. And the travel requirements were minimal. We would base ourselves at my mum's in Lewes (but there's a great choice of local accommodation, including a youth hostel in a converted Sussex farmhouse in Southease on the South Downs that offers options from private rooms to bell tents). To boot, we may come away with more than just a few memories. Conran-ish wooden bowls and Hepworth-ish stone sculptures swum before my eyes. Yes, this could work, we agreed. And so, with a little trepidation, we turned up at the Skelton Workshop just after Hugo's last A-level exam. In a hidden crevice of the South Downs, not far from Hassocks, the Skelton stone-carving studio is near the home of the eminent, deceased sculptor and letter-cutter, John Skelton (students can visit Skelton's nearby sculpture garden during courses). The vast barn-style workshop looks over slanting vineyards which also contained – to our surprise and delight – a very cool wine bar and restaurant. The Artelium wine estate offers vineyard tours and tasting sessionsand, having discovered that the wines had won multiple awards, its alfresco terrace became our lunch spot (charcuterie boards and homemade bread) for the next three days. But first we had to choose whether we wanted to carve letters or sculpture. We both opted for sculpture. We then had to make another decision: what sort of stone? Hugo chose a beautiful green granite, while I selected a large block of Italian soapstone. Being disorganised, neither of us had arrived with any ideas. The course tutors provided books to inspire us and – after a little discussion with our eight fellow students – we both decided to go abstract. After three days of open-air chiselling, hammering, sanding and polishing, we had sculptures deemed good enough for the end-of-course show. To our (continued) surprise, a crowd arrived for the 'private viewing' in which our sculptures were publicly praised by the tutors. We celebrated with an evening meal in The Gun, a gastropub in Chiddingly that serves stone-baked pizzas and something it calls a 'gut-loving burrito bowl' composed of sweetcorn, black beans, guacamole and all the other things anathema to Hugo but much-loved by his mother. The next day, we drove 30 minutes east, to a privately owned woodland just outside Battle. Here, we hoped to master the ancient art of wood- turning using pole lathes, now a heritage craft. Green woodworker Amy Leake – youthful, petite, impressively muscled – had set up our pole lathes beneath the shade of a vast, spreading oak. After introducing us to our lathes (simple contraptions Amy made herself, in which sawn branches, rope and a treadle turn the wood), she showed us how to axe an enormous chunk of wood into something that would ultimately become a bowl. As sunlight poured through the green foliage above us, wood chips whizzed through the grainy air and sweat ran from our brows. Turning on a pole lathe requires strength, stamina and skill. Thanks to Amy's expert guidance, by the end of the day we were the proud (if exhausted) owners of two beautiful bowls. To recover, we headed to nearby Hastings for fish and chips on the beach followed by a game of crazy golf on the sea front. Tired after all that treadling it was then back to Lewes for some well-deserved sleep. I'm looking at our (proudly displayed) sculptures and bowls as I write. They always make me smile. Not because I see the embryonic makings of two artistic geniuses, but because they remind me of the connection Hugo and I made while working with our hands, of the shared blood, sweat and laughter. Besides, the bowls are perfect for serving crisps. I'll take that over a string of digital photographs any day. Skelton Workshops is running a three-day beginner's workshop from July 29-31 for £216 including all materials. Amy Leake runs a range of green woodworking classes (£200 for two people per day) including brush-making and spoon-carving
