Exhibit - The New Stone Age: Towards an Ethical Architecture

The University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is hosting a free exhibit exploring stone as a sustainable, load-bearing material in contemporary architecture.

The New Stone Age: Towards an Ethical Architecture champions the versatility, sustainability, and beauty of stone as a load-bearing material in contemporary architecture. Curated and produced by UK-based architects GROUPWORK, The Stonemasonry Company, and Webb Yates Engineers, the exhibition features three large-scale stone-and-timber installations that showcase the possibilities of building with ‘augmented’ stone. Alongside these structures, the exhibition traces the historical use of stone and features projects by leading international architects. Seen together, The New Stone Age argues that stone is a viable, low-carbon alternative to conventional building materials such as reinforced concrete and steel.

Le Corbusier published Towards a New Architecture over a century ago, introducing the ‘free plan’ and ‘free façade’ as the result of material innovations in reinforced concrete and steel. Today, this system has become the default building strategy worldwide, applied indiscriminately across both single and one-hundred story structures. Such blind assumptions have come under increasing scrutiny in the era of climate crisis where the construction industry drives 40% of global carbon emissions, and in the next 50 years, the world’s building stock will double. Unless we radically rethink how we build, this growth will lock in catastrophic levels of emissions. Stone offers a compelling solution. Compared to reinforced concrete and steel, stone can contain up to 95% less embodied carbon, be assembled more quickly, and more cheaply.

This exhibition is a call to action – inviting students, architects, engineers, contractors, planners and manufacturers to rediscover the potential of structural stone and to help build a more sustainable future.

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