This monument is really unique and amazing. A few years earlier, I was commissioned to build another monument for an apartment complex in Vancouver, WA – Millennium Park – from a large sandstone material recently introduced from a Utah quarry. I noticed it had some very unique properties while it was being worked, that I had never before encountered: it was resilient, meaning it had the ability to bend and flex considerably without breaking: not something one normally encounters in a natural stone. What made this material even more unusual, was that it was showing up in slab lengths unheard of: in excess of 23 feet long, 5-7 inches thick, and 3-5 feet wide. Astonishing. When I was approached by Renaissance Custom Homes to design a new monument for the Boat Club HOA, I showed them pictures of the completed monument in Vancouver and photos of the stone slabs at the yard with these amazing dimensions. They were as excited at the possibilities as I was and agreed to my design of long, continuous slabs making up a very craftsman-like assembly of stone.
The only problem was they didn’t have the budget to work with we had become accustomed to during the building boom. Life was decidedly different for all of us after the bust. Given the unique attributes of the material, I suggested we could save a dramatic amount of cost by losing the concrete footing that would normally be used to support such a massive monument and consider constructing the entire monument mortar-less. The idea would be to use compacted gravel, coarse sand, rubber pads, Geo-fabric, and stainless steel pins to assemble the entire monument. I had never seen anything like this done before at this kind of scale, but I developed a plan that was approved for construction and went to work building it from these unusual, monolithic slabs. It turned out fabulous and has proven to be sustainable and as you can see, it fits beautifully into the environment and aesthetic of the HOA. This entire monument from the cutting of rough slabs, to delivery to the job site, to installation and construction, including all of the carving, which is traditional V hand-cut lettering was performed in studio and on-site by the principal artisan, Peter Andrusko.