The Architecture of the Nordic Marble 'left-over'

This project investigates the materiality of marble through a focus on quarried ‘left-overs’ - the enormous quantity of material that is either too small or the wrong color to attract an industrial buyer. The global commodification of what was once a high-value, low-volume craft industry has led to the reduction of marble to a luxury finish, one that is often extracted in Europe, processed in the developing world, and shipped back to the West as countertops and bathroom tiles.

In spite of the (literally) superficial use of marble today, it remains one of the most widely admired materials for its heterogeneous depth, aesthetic imagination and historical associations. New technologies in digitization, robotic fabrication, and computational analysis offer the possibility to capably process small ‘left-overs’ and re-engage with marble’s historically-embedded fascinations, encouraging locally sustained, micro-extraction over the global appetite for marble as an index for luxury and kitsch.

Two works are proposed as a single installation in dialogue, each expressing contrasting material potentials employing ‘left-over’ pieces of Nordic marble. Starting from centuries-old marble expressions such as rustication, book-matching, and translucency, Column and Wall display the rich vocabularies possible when re-interpreting old practices using new technologies. Both works utilize marble ‘left-overs’ under 150kg from the still active marble quarry in Fauske, Norway, which are commercially available in two types: Hermelin (grey and white) and Norwegian Rose (pink, white, with hints of green and orange).

In Column the ‘left-overs’ are assembled through concepts in tooling, patterning, and chance: aspects that were historically captured in the architectural concept of ‘rustication’. After digitizing each ‘left-over’, a hammer drill is attached to the robotic arm for precise, creative control of the drilling pattern, yielding a book-matched pair that connects with other pieces through a unified tooled pattern. Waste is minimized to what is removed to for the horizontal bed joints. Other faces of the column are understood through aleatoric thinking, whereby chance relationships emerge in relation to the mirrored properties of the tooled face.

In Wall the translucent capacity of marble comes alive through precise shaping and machining. The signature pinkish-red interior of Norwegian Rose, immersed within a matrix of snow-white-dolomite, offers a dialectic between hot and cold, fire and ice. Computational analysis enables an optimized wall coursing based on the Roman technique of opus pseudoisodomum, minimizing waste. Each ‘left-over’ is sliced into a sequence of 70mm slabs, then shaped into a rectilinear block before receiving a single, ruled surface cut with a custom-built robotic wire saw; revealing a translucent interior while retaining the structural stability of an interlocking, stacked wall.