Fault Line

A quarried limestone bench split along its own bedding plane rather than sawn, so the seat is a surface no tool has ever touched.

Quarried limestone · 2021

Letting the stone choose the line

Fault Line was not cut to length. It was split — driven apart along a bedding plane laid down in the stone roughly three hundred million years before anyone thought to sit on it. A row of feathers and wedges set into a line of drilled holes, tightened a quarter-turn at a time over most of a morning, until the block opened itself. Where a saw would have given us a flat face and a decision, the split gave us a surface that was already there and simply had not been seen yet.

Fault Line detail — DetailStudio photograph

Two halves, one of which was wrong

A split produces two faces, and only one of them was any good. The block opened slightly off the plane we had read, leaving one half with a shallow step across its width that no amount of argument would remove. That half is still in the yard. We have never been able to decide whether it is a failure or the more honest of the two.

Material study

Dimensions & specification.

Fig. 01 — elevation dimensions, Fault Line. Not to architectural scale.

Title	Fault Line
Year	2021
Material	Quarried limestone
Dimensions (H × W × D)	2,400 × 460 × 440 mm
Weight	1,090 kg
Edition	Unique
Catalogue no.	MN-021-06
Status	Acquired — civic collection, London Borough of Havering

On sitting on something older than sitting

The seat is left entirely unworked — no honing, no polish, no sealer. It is faintly dusty to the touch and will stay that way. Limestone takes a slow polish from use alone, and after five years in a public square the two places where people actually sit have begun, very quietly, to shine.