Cheaper than Concrete: the New Stone Age | Originals

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Two hundred years ago, stone was the structure of a city. One hundred years ago, it was the facade. Today it's a luxury countertop. Not because taste changed, but because humans got expensive. The army of cheap artisans who built Paris and the Upper West Side is gone. Micah Springut — a software entrepreneur who picked up stone carving as a hobby — has spent four years and raised $18 million making the case that the loss was arithmetic, not destiny. Now he's trying to build a new age of stone — using a factory filled with giant robot arms.

The robot is carving a human face, and it cannot see.<br>It works in a 1930s warehouse in Mt. Vernon, New York — a seven-axis arm the size of a small car, the kind that spot-welds chassis in Stuttgart, bowed here over a block of Carrara marble cut from the same mountains Michelangelo climbed to pick his own.<br>A diamond bit on its wrist turns at six thousand revolutions a minute. A jet of recycled water rides the cut so the diamond doesn’t burn itself away. The arm carries no cameras. It does not know there is a face. It is executing a path computed hours ago from a three-dimensional model — the same x-y-z arithmetic that mills an engine block, turned on a four-hundred-year-old art — and it would run that path with exactly this much tenderness if the file described a cylinder head instead of a brow.<br>We are built to find a human face in almost nothing — three marks on a wall — and the machine cutting this one, with what looks from across the room like patience, finds nothing at all: a sorted list of points in space, hit in order, all night, without fatigue. The figure doesn’t rise out of the stone so much as the stone is carried away from around it, until a shape we know is standing where a block used to be.<br>I wanted to be an architect in a golden age that no longer exists.<br>Subscribe now

It is an astonishing way to make a statue. Micah Springut is not really in the statue business.<br>He is 42, wiry, restless, with the manner of a man who has spent his life taking apart systems that don’t work — and he despises almost everything about the way we build now: the thin aluminum window frames, the optimized glass, the gray concrete and the disposable panels bolted onto it. To fix it, he has bet his career on the most aggressively modern tool on earth: a giant robot arm.<br>He is fighting modernity with modernity. The statue is a sideshow. What he is hunting is everything around it — the city itself, reimagined and rebuilt in stone, beauty returned to the ordinary building instead of reserved for the occasional monument.<br>Paris Everywhere<br>Here is the fact the whole company turns on. Concrete is the most-used substance on earth after water, and its cement is cooked stone — limestone, torn out of the ground, then roasted past 2000 degrees until the carbon bakes out of the rock and into the sky.<br>Springut’s proposition is to skip the oven. Cut the limestone instead of burning it; stack the cut blocks, thread them with steel, torque it tight, and raise the structure itself — columns, beams, floors, up to fifty stories — out of solid stone, for less than a concrete frame costs. Not a stone façade hung on a concrete core.<br>A building made of stone: trucked to the site pre-cut, reinforced with steel and stacked like Legos.

He means to make the splendor of the nineteenth century cheap again — cheap enough to build with, by the block, by the city.<br>And that building does not exist yet. The robot is real and the marble is real; the city is a wager, and the people who pour concrete for a living are the first to roll their eyes at the timeline. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is the story. To understand why a software entrepreneur is standing in a marble warehouse making this particular bet, you have to go back to the dream he gave up at seventeen.<br>A Teenage Dream<br>Springut is not a sculptor. He holds no degree in architecture or engineering. The wound is older than any of that.<br>His first job, two summers at an architecture firm in high school, was dragging HVAC ducts around a screen in AutoCAD. The drafting itself wouldn’t have bothered him, he says — what killed the ambition was what it was in service of: the same cheap boxes going up everywhere.<br>For the first time in a century, the price of carved stone is falling.

He gave it up. “What I really wanted,” he says, “was to be an architect in 1910” — when you built with stone, with ornament, with craftsmen, and the results still stand. “I wanted to be an architect in a golden age that no longer exists.” So he gave it up and did, by his own count, a million other things instead.<br>The story of Monumental Labs is the story of a man spending twenty years getting back to that internship — and arriving with a machine.<br>Labor and The Cost Disease<br>Almost everything humans make has gotten better and cheaper over time. Computers, clothing, food — newer is better. But the most...