Masonry Magazine January 1980 Page. 16
This view of the facade of the East Building looks east from the West Building across the National Gallery Plaza. The Plaza is paved with "Belgian block" granite cobblestones and features seven glass tetrahedrons and a fountain 52 ft. long. The tetrahedrons serve as sculpture for the Plaza and as skylights for the concourse connecting the East and West Buildings underground. At the far right, two stone walls meet at a sharp 17-degree angle. The fine edge of the corner has been rubbed smooth from the touch of thousands of inquisitive visitors in the time since the building building was officially opened on June 1, 1978.
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
There is, for example, the exterior corner of the building where two stone walls meet at a fine,sharp 17-degree angle. In the year since the East Building opened, the fine edge of the corner has been rubbed smooth by tens of thousands of fingers being run over it by marveling visitors.
The museum-goer may stand inside the building, gazing over several thousand square feet of floor, and noticing how every joint between the thousands of triangular blocks of stone that make up the floor surface, lines up exactly with every other joint, and unfailingly lines up evenly with every vertical joint in the walls.
"There's not a single place, anywhere on that floor. where a corner of a triangular piece of marble has been snipped off, just to make it fit," says Leonard Jacobson, project architect for the firm of I. M. Pei and Partners.
"You could crawl on your hands and knees looking for an imperfection, but you won't find it. The floor is made of triangular pieces of marble that intersect at six-way points, with one-sixteenth-inch joints," Jacobson continued. "Yet over thousands of square feet of floor area, every joint is aligned perfectly. And where the floor meets the walls, the floor joints line up exactly with the one-eighth-inch vertical joints in the wall."
The challenge to the stone masons and other masonry craftsmen who built the East Building is indicated by the fact that there is not a single right angle anywhere in the building-not even in the elevators.
The craftsmen knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime building. "I brought my whole family here and took them through a two-hour tour of the whole place." said one member of Local #2, D.C., Stone and Marble Masons. International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen. The members of Local #2 teamed up with Atlas Tile and Marble Works, Inc., the stone contractor, and mason contractor John B. Kelly of Philadelphia, to meet all of the East Building's formidable challenges.
"When I walked away from this job," the stone mason continued, "I stood in the street and took a look at it. It will always be here for me and my family to see."
On top of the challenges posed by the materials, the masons had to execute, for the first time anywhere, an entirely new building system invented by I.M. Pei especially for the East Building. The need for a new construction technology arose from the nature of Pei's design, Jacobson said. The design featured large, flat stone walls of immense mass and with no visible interruptions.
"Clearly, this was not going to be a classical building of 40 years ago, and so we have a lot of blank, flat planes. with no moldings or shadows," Jacobson said. "We have a big building. subject to major thermal stresses, shrinkage and expansion. And since we don't have all kinds of breaks and changes in wall planes, there was no architectural way we could have visible expansion joints to allow for this movement."
Over the length of a 400-foot wall, Jacobson said, accumulated movement and stress could develop into a major problem. The final solution was ingenious, and unprecedented.