"Stories in Stone": a geological tour of America's buildings

With "Stories in Stone: Travels through Urban Geology" (Walker & Co., 288 pp., $26), David B. Williams has chiseled an interesting work of nonfiction out of a heap of rocks. Just as sculptors speak of their art in terms of releasing the spirit from the stone, Williams teases ancient and fascinating stories out of buildings both grand and humble that dot the American landscape.

Williams' talent for lithic divination was evident in his lively 2005 guide, "The Seattle Street Smart Naturalist." In a chapter in that book, Williams, who contributes regularly to The Seattle Times' book-review page, coaxed readers to take a closer look at the stone that clad some of our familiar downtown buildings, and to consider it from a geological perspective.

Now he extends the invitation into a larger landscape. Whether it's a Minnesota liquor store, a Colorado gas station or the monumental Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Williams proves that walls really can talk — provided they're built of stone.

Where most of us wouldn't be able to discern much beyond the color of a building stone, Williams sees granite, limestone, slate, travertine and — the veritable great-granddaddy of masonry — 3.5 billion-year-old gneiss.

But he begins with brownstone, a building material used so ubiquitously in 19th-century New York that, Williams says, "it was the aluminum siding of the day."

What propelled builders to use the material so extensively? And whence was it obtained?

Williams' approach is half geology textbook, half cultural history, as he discusses the impetus behind the demand for brownstone, the challenges in procuring it and the conditions that led to its creation 200 million years ago during the time of the dinosaurs.

But even a provenance that venerable cannot withstand the vicissitudes of fashion. After a 50-year fascination with brownstone, architects and builders had their heads turned in 1893 by the classical buildings of the "White City" at the Chicago World's Fair. And then the rush was on for limestone and marble.

And so the story goes. Williams travels to quarries from Indiana to Italy, and traces the industry from its dangerous and labor-intensive past to the technology-driven operations of today. He tours state-of-the-art mills where computer operators guide the machines that cut quarried stone into the panels, sills and keystones required by the building industry. And he talks with master carvers who still toil at workmen's benches and use the cutting tools of yore for precision work.

In addition to covering the major building stones of America, Williams detours into some offbeat topics.

In a chapter on coquina — the shell-studded stone-in-gestation that the Spaniards used for their fort at St. Augustine, Williams delves also into the intriguing international politics that embroiled Florida for centuries — and manages to stir Sir Francis Drake, John Jay Audubon and Burt Reynolds into the mix!

A chapter assaying petrified wood also investigates America's love affair with the car.

And Williams devotes an entire chapter to Robinson Jeffers and the personal metamorphosis the poet underwent as he built his home in Carmel from "sea-orphaned stone" retrieved from the beach.

"Stories in Stone" occasionally risks losing even amateur-rockhound readers when focusing too intensely on serious rock-nerd detail. And the book's organization is haphazard. Williams could have improved readability simply by arranging chapters chronologically (in either geological or historical time) or geographically. But taken individually, these multifaceted stories of urban geology rock.