I’m hoping to change that.

A quick disclaimer: I’ve known Jim Durham of Quarra Stone prior to this interview and have had the pleasure of talking with him on a number of occasions about how digital technologies are being applied in the construction industry. In many ways the conversation here is a doubling-back on some of those earlier discussions, reframing them to get a more holistic view of how Jim views the work that Quarra is involved with. I think it’s clear from this conversation that both Jim and Quarra are very much an architect’s fabricator, one that is not only fluent in their own area of expertise, but also fully aware of how it interconnects with the vision of their client.

Aaron Willette: Jim, it’s great to talk to you again. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Could you start with some of the backstory behind Quarra: its history and some of the more familiar projects it's been involved with?

Jim Durham: Quarra started 26 years ago, and very early on I wanted to do more architectural ‘heavies’: big heavy stones that are very difficult to fabricate. In ‘89 we bought some very high-precision automated equipment, which drew the attention of some of the largest fabricators in the United States and Europe. We started doing subcontract work for some of these companies, which quickly forced us to come to an international level of best practice. In 1990 we started collaboration with the Wunsiedel Training Center for Masonry and Sculpture in Germany. They have sent people here to train our employees and likewise we've been over to their facilities. We've had a number of carvers from that school stay for some length of time to work at Quarra. From there we began to do some bigger national projects on our own. Right now probably more than half of our work is done on the East Coast between Boston and Washington, D.C., centered around colleges and universities. We've done many projects with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and most of the big name colleges on the East Coast. We also did the Visitor Center for the Supreme Court of the United States, and the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center is the largest project we've done. We have good clients that gets us spread around the country.

AW: A defining characteristic of Quarra is that you have an expertise in both the processes and materials you use. You're really involved with understanding how those two things relate to each other for every specific project. Where in the design process do you typically get involved in a project? Are you contacted early on to assist with design development, or are you brought in at the later stages purely as a contractor?

We’re trying to be the hand of the artist; to understand how they look at things and what their needs are; and listen to them in terms of how they're trying to address a problem.JD: It's very much design assist with both historic preservation and modern projects. We’ve been able to maintain our relationships with architects we’ve worked with and often start working with them at the early stages of a project, even when they're just competing for a job. With the historic preservation side of things we're fielding calls asking, "Can you match a stone? Can you identify a stone? Can you identify a tooling treatment?" We've got a database of every operating dimensional stone quarry in the United States, Canada, and Northern Mexico that we can access to help architects match existing materials, and with our collaboration with the Wunsiedel Training Center we have access to all the historic tools and traditional methods. In any historic building we have the ability to match the finish. On the modern architecture side we’re involved early on with choosing and qualifying materials. But with digital manufacturing the questions architects are asking are more along the lines of, "Can this be done? Is there any way to do this?"

AW: Has understanding this relationship between material and process allowed Quarra to establish itself as global leader in stone fabrication?

JD: We're not so unique in that respect, as there's a lot of stone expertise among a number of companies in the United States, Italy, and Germany. I think what is unique with Quarra is our interest in architecture and how we approach things from the architecture side: we maintain dialog with a number of the most interesting architecture firms in the country and we're trying to help them. We’re trying to be the hand of the artist; to understand how they look at things and what their needs are; and listen to them in terms of how they're trying to address a problem. These discussions challenge us constantly, but they also allow us to be responsive and jump into the conversation about where architecture is going.

AW: As a construction material stone seems to have fallen out of favor in contemporary design. What are your thoughts on how designers are approaching the use of stone?

JD: I hope you're wrong about that first statement. I think it's changing – the use of stone moves around with fashion in architectural design. What I see is that the use of stone is still very large, but it now a lot of it has switched from walls to floors. It may be site work. It may be landscaping. I think stone use is still there, but it's changed in terms of how and where architects are looking at it. Right now the most exciting firms for us to work with are the ones getting into digital design and fabrication. They're asking us what we know and we're asking them what they know, that collaboration lets us feel closer to the design side and lets them feel like they can reach inside our company and make the stones the way they want them made.

AW: Quarra has traditional manual processes in close proximity to digital fabrication tools. What is the relationship between these two technologies and how does it play out in your approach to each project you take on?

So many things that we're able to do we don't yet know how to fully utilize, and every day we see a different use for different combinations of tools and techniques. It's really an exciting time.JD: They're remarkably similar, maybe not the same. Let's say you're doing historic restoration and you have a carving that's been worn or damaged. You can scan that and take it into a program like Rhino to repair the damage digitally. You then take your marble and rough that piece out with a robot or CNC machine and then finish it with hand tooling. That's using modern technology all the way up to the last step, and it's routine in terms of our process at Quarra. In a modern, digitally-designed project the advantage is that the architects are able to give you the model of the stone pieces. You don't have to scan anything, although you can do something like wrinkle up your napkin and scan that. The rest of the processes are largely the same as with historical pieces because even a modern piece might have traditional tooling on it. Like most architects we’re trying to catch up to the technology that we have. So many things that we're able to do we don't yet know how to fully utilize, and every day we see a different use for different combinations of tools and techniques. It's really an exciting time.

AW: One projects that Quarra was recently involved with is MIT's Collier Memorial, which was designed by Howeler + Yoon Architecture. I think it’s safe to say that this was an ambitious project that involved a sophisticated design methodology that incorporating the structural performance of the stone and put high demands on fabrication tolerances. MIT put out a video which goes into detail about the design and engineering of the project – what was that project like for Quarra as the fabricator?

The curiosity that students bring needs to be and will continue to be part of our company. We have a lot of that as it is, but you get juiced by working with students.JD: When I met Meejin Yoon and Eric Howeler it honestly felt like we had found somebody who spoke our language. It was a great fit and super exciting. I was very interested in the project because some tools like traditional shop drawings weren’t really relevant to that job. Instead there was a 3D model that both teams could adjust in real‑time. Meejin and I would go to the quarry to pick the stone for the project, and if we had a piece of stone in front of us that was just an inch short of what we needed, we could change the model right there to make design work with the piece. You can’t get closer collaboration than that between the fabricator and the architect. I don't know that there has been a building like Collier built in the United States. It really was taking old-time traditional building knowledge and applying it with modern engineering and modeling techniques. It could have been built a thousand years ago or at least 500 years ago, yet it's a structure that almost couldn’t be built now. It was a fabulous, very emotional, and very important project that forever changed the way that we see working with architects.

AW: This past summer marked the first instance of the Quarra Stone/Matter Design Fellowship, a collaboration between Quarra Stone and Matter Design which had students from MIT and the University of Michigan spending the summer in Madison and working with Quarra. What was it like to suddenly have two young designers coming in to your operation and taking things on head-first?

JD: It was fun… [laughter] Both of the students we worked with are very skilled. They can run CNC machinery and they can run robots, but at their universities they're just not able to work with this much weight, with this much scale. The schools just don't have all the tools associated with it, they have bits of this and bits of that. We've got the whole set here. With the skills that those guys brought and how they think about them the answer to every question was “yes”. Their enthusiasm and energy was absolutely contagious to the rest of our staff who didn't realize how cool their jobs were. The curiosity that students bring needs to be and will continue to be part of our company. We have a lot of that as it is, but you get juiced by working with students.

AW: You’ve been able to quickly to the changes in the design and fabrication industries – how do you see Quarra developing in the next 5 to 10 years?

JD: We're at a high level of quality, but we need to be at a higher one. It's a little bit more boring than buying the newest machine or looking at some new tooling, but process improvement is where we need to focus, tearing apart how we do things to make them better. We bought our first robot in 2004 and I still think we're at the very beginning in terms of being able to take advantage of all the capabilities that we have. You need to have to have the right people to do this and stone companies don't traditionally have those kind of people. We have architecture graduates from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Michigan on our staff full-time, enabling us to work seamlessly with cutting edge architectural practices. There may be a limited number of these types of firms in the country, but hopefully we'll find them or they'll find us.

Quarra Stone Process: Höweler + Yoon Architecture from Adam Smith on Vimeo.