Stone’s Green Look on Campus

Ultimately, Fond du Lac Stone was chosen to supply the project in a bid situation, although company sales manager Jason Hestekin feels there was more to his company’s selection.

“I think some of it was a strong feeling by most of those involved  that after we had the meetings with the architects and school officials we had the best grasp of what needed to be done and we had the right product for this job,” he says.

And, Hestekin says Fond du Lac Stone also did some value engineering to help keep final costs down as much as possible on what turned out to be a $35 million project.

Click photo to enlarge“We did three different sizes are far as heights, and we tried to do longer lengths,” he says. “Even though it’s more physically demanding installing something 16” high by 4’ long and 4” or 5” front-to-back, it’s a lot of square footage per piece versus many small pieces to cover the same area. Ultimately, the masons were able to install at a more-efficient rate, which helped keep their costs down.”

Hestekin says his most-memorable experience working on the Lawrence project came as everyone prepared to sign off on the stonework. The contractor did a mock-up that included the foundation and footings, as well as a sample window and sills.

At that point, the school’s dean and several other decision-makers came out to do an inspection — on a bright, sunny winter day when the wind chill happened to be about -50°F.

“It was incredible,” he says. “We were laying this out, and we had to all look like crazy Eskimos all bundled up. Afterwards, it took me at least an hour with the heat on in my truck at full blast to thaw my toes, but we wanted to verify that everything was right.”

“A TERRIFIC ADDITION”

The job involved installing the stone over a mix of concrete and block surfaces, and the sizes and finishes played important roles in the final look of the building

“It’s a pretty typical job with stone anchors – dovetail stone anchors I call them,” says Uihlein/Wilson’s Stein. “There’s a steel relieving angle and stone anchors every so often. We had 16’ floor-to-floor, so we had a relieving angle at each floor line.”

The finished joints were then caulked. Stein adds that the job incorporates a mix of split-face and honed finishes for the stone, with the honed pieces used to accentuate other elements of the building.

Boldt’s Swanlund says the exterior-pieces anchors were installed on the ground, with a forklift moving the stone to the scaffold.

“After that, it was pretty much the brute strength of the masons getting these up and installed,” he says. “We did have a tower crane on the project that also helped service the masons, but we had a forklift devoted just to them to bring the stone pieces up.”

Swanlund adds that during the early work on the façade it wasn’t just the masons on the scaffolding, either. Both Hagee and the architects were there, as well.

“As the masons started and got the feel of their random-ashlar patterning going, we did a lot of inspections and a lot of work with the masons on the size of the pieces,” he says. “We compared them to our mock-up to make sure we were giving the customer what we told them we were going to do, and it seemed to really pay off.”