Venue

: The Mehdi Reading Room
: 1119 8th Ave
Seattle, 98101 United States + Google Map

Event Format: In-Person

Note: Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM.

Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.

Arts & Culture

From our residences and infrastructure to our tools and artworks, stone has been a crucial medium throughout history. Stone, after all, has been the primary building material for more than five thousand years of human history, and it continues to record our triumphs and failures to this day. But how did this natural resource evolve into such a meaningful foundation for the human experience across global cultures? And why is this important now, in a world that holds so many more modernized materials? Sculptor, stonemason, and scholar of stonework Richard Rhodes seeks to answer these questions and share the storied path that stone has carved in our civilizations in his upcoming book Stone: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery.

In this perceptive and illustrative look at both the expressive and practical applications, Stone unlocks the underlying principles of this ancient material and how stone is best used today and throughout history. Combining meticulous research and an expansive breadth of photographic examples with his own expertise, Rhodes crafts an immersive study of stone as a pillar of mankind’s relationship with nature, engineering, ritual, and design. Stone also presents the first-ever detailing of the closely guarded “Sacred Rules” developed over centuries by the medieval Freemason guild, previously available only to the initiated. Rhodes implores readers to chip away at the notion that stoneworking is a craft of the past and explore the essential qualities of stone that emerge from the Sacred Rules. In the face of modern materials and technology being prized for speed, streamlining, and widespread urbanization, Stone unearths a hand-crafted trove of traditional knowledge and offers insights as to how the power of the medium could be thoughtfully recaptured in generations to come.

Richard Rhodes is a sculptor, stonemason, entrepreneur, and international scholar of stonework. As the first non-Italian admitted into Siena’s ancient masonic guild in 726 years, he is known throughout the sculpture and stone community as the “last apprentice.” He is a nationally acclaimed lecturer and educator, having addressed the national conventions of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association of Professional Landscape Designers and presented educational series to the Institute of Classical Architecture in both New York and San Francisco.