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Introduction to the Stone Cycle and the Conservation of Historic Buildings

This Thematic Set of papers relating to the life cycle of building stone was initiated by a call for papers in order to better recognize the contribution that the disciplines, and practitioners, of engineering geology and hydrogeology make to the conservation of historical buildings, which is intrinsically multidisciplinary. The call for papers particularly focused upon the issues of different stone types used in historical buildings, as well as the performance, durability and conservation of stone in historical settings.

The response was overwhelming, with many more abstracts submitted than could possibly be published in the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology ( QJEGH ). Accordingly, the papers were divided into two sets, with one set destined to appear in QJEGH as described herein and the second set to appear in a Geological Society Special Publication (Cassar et al. 2014). The presence of a particular paper in one set or the other is not a reflection on quality, but merely a reflection of the need to divide the papers into two sets each of which reflects subtly differing themes.

History has been written in stone, from prehistoric monuments to modern-day buildings, and all types of stone, limestones and sandstones, granites and marbles, have been utilized to build, to clad, and to decorate. The buildings that are symbols of a city, a region, or a country are mostly built of stone. We immediately think of England when we see an image of Stonehenge; the Acropolis symbolizes Athens; the Coliseum Rome; Machu Picchu Peru; and the Taj Mahal India.

The immense varieties and diverse properties of building stone, its workability and its (im)permanence have been observed and studied since time immemorial. Vitruvius, in the first century BC, writing in the Ten Books on Architecture , Chapter VII (Stone), says the following: ‘The stone in quarries …