A Natural Way to Clad the Lab

“They said they knew of a local quarry, so our team went with Layton to look at the stone, and we decided this was it,” he says. “It’s a beautiful stone and it’s got a nice sandy hue to it; it has some reddish tones that fit nicely into the desert landscape.

“We selected it based on the quarry visit.”

Click photo to enlargeFrom there, the question became one of writing the specifications and designing with the stone, Gassman adds.

Prescott Muir’s Robertson says the design team came up with several different proposals to utilize the stone. However the client wasn’t interested in the first set of concepts.

“Many of the proposals initially called for it to be used in a more-machined incarnation,” says Robertson. “In other words, we looked at cut-stone panels hung off the building. The owner was uncomfortable with the machined quality of the stone and felt it didn’t have the character, the warmth and the approachability that it should have. They wanted a laid-up expression of the natural stone.”

The university’s McNary describes the cut-stone panels as “reflecting an urban look.” And, because several of the other buildings on campus are done in brick, he says the decision to lay a range of stone sizes in random ashlar courses was a good one.

“There were issues relative to the campus culture, and we didn’t want it to be so diverse,” he says. “The ashlar nature of the job provides a little bit of a framework and a little bit of formality to it.”

Nor did it hurt that the stone’s supplier, Heber City, Utah-based Delta Stone Products, indicated it would prefer to provide the stone as dimensional material.

“Their production method made that as economical as any other way to deliver the stone, and we liked the idea of it being dimensional in terms of unit height and depth,” says Robertson. “That would give us a little better control in dimensional precision than we might have with a slabbed-out material.”

However, the actual fabrication of the stone used on the project depended as much on the skills of the masons. Robertson says when the first round of pricing for that component of the job came back, it was over budget.

“We went and engaged directly with the masons and said, ‘Okay, what are you recommending that we do to get the price down?’” he relates. “Each masonry company had its own ideas of how to get the price down. As part of the value-engineering we listened carefully to what they said about what they could achieve.”

Layton’s Charves says his company was getting feedback from two or three masonry firms early in the process to help on the budgeting phase. As part of the value-engineering, the bid specifications were written with what he calls a base bid, and then added different options dealing mainly with how the stone would be cut (sawn versus guillotine), the size of the mortar joints and the height of the courses.

“All the masons on the qualified bidders list priced out and answered questions related to it so we could really understand if they had had roughly the same quantities and what their material costs and their labor costs were,” says Charves. “We went through some different iterations to get to that point, but there was quite a bit of mason input in the process.”

GETTING IT DONE

The selection of Heber City, Utah-based RJ Masonry Inc. came based on the numbers that company presented. RJ Masonry is a sister company of Delta Stone and has a long history of doing projects with Layton Construction.

However, RJ Masonry’s Paul Ballif says the company’s interest in the project went considerably beyond that.