Will Stone Replace Steel and Concrete? - by Brian Potter
A recent viral tweet by Micah Springut, founder of stone-carving startup Monumental Labs, argued that it will be cheaper to build buildings with stone than with steel or concrete within the next 10 years.
Stone has of course been used for thousands of years as a construction material, and is still used today for things like building cladding. For instance, the Empire State Building is clad in limestone. But for the load-bearing structure that holds the building up, stone has been almost entirely replaced by modern materials like concrete, steel and dimensional/engineered lumber.
Why should we expect stone to get cheaper than concrete or steel? The basic argument is that stone is expensive primarily because of the high cost of finishing it: it requires skilled masons to carve quarried stone into the proper shape, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. As automation gets better, these costs will fall, making stone construction substantially cheaper than it is now. Springut’s company, Monumental, makes robotically-carved stone statues, and he thinks incredibly cheap automated stoneworking is near.
Most folks in the building industry will immediately roll their eyes at this claim, but there are actually some good reasons to believe that stone might be cheaper than concrete or steel if labor costs fall enough. Stone has an arguably simpler supply chain than concrete or steel, and it can potentially eliminate certain on-site construction tasks.
