Marabar on the Move: Relocating a 225 Ton Granite Art Installation
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Spring 2024 edition of Building Stone Magazine.
All photos courtesy of Rugo Stone, LLC.
The call came to internationally known sculptor Elyn Zimmerman in 2018 with no preamble: a breezy message from an architect’s assistant. “We’ve been hired by the National Geographic Society to remodel the plaza and garden area of their building in Washington, DC,” the caller told Zimmerman. “We’re wondering if you’re interested in retrieving your sculpture.”
The sculpture in question was Zimmerman’s 1981 sculpture Marabar, which featured more than 225 tons of granite.
Marabar, an arrangement of shaped and polished Dakota Mahogany granite boulders that interacted seamlessly with a reflecting pool, had become an unfortunate obstacle to a grand remodeling project at the National Geographic building’s front plaza on 17th St. NW. Disposing of the famous and popular sculpture became too controversial, so eventually the district’s Historic Preservation Review Board and DC-based The Cultural Landscape Foundation joined forces with National Geographic to find a new home nearby—one that would provide a tranquil setting and access to power for lighting and water circulation while remaining in the DC area to facilitate a smooth move.
Remarkably, a new site presented itself quickly. The American University (AU) campus had just the place for it: an arboretum designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the greatest landscape architects in the nation’s history. Zimmerman used the setting to design a new configuration for the boulders and their interaction with a new reflecting pool—maintaining the sculpted shapes of the boulders, but taking advantage of a wider, airier setting.
“When I designed the first piece, it was for a long, narrow area,” she said. “I got to redesign the pool, make it a little larger, and landscape around it.”
National Geographic funded the entire project, eliminating what could have been a significant obstacle to rehoming Marabar. With the funding and a plan in place, the greater challenge began: finding contractors who knew how to relocate the sculpture without damaging the boulders, the National Geographic site, or the new site at AU.
Heavy Lifting
The lion’s share of the planning and execution went to James G. Davis Construction (DAVIS), the general contractor for the project, and to Rugo Stone, a company with extensive experience in working with natural stone.
“First thing, Brett Rugo and his team opened up the existing site to explore how the boulders were resting below the surface,” said Steve Manlove, a retired architect and consultant to National Geographic for the project. “Rugo scanned the boulders to determine how we could move them. They weren’t cut flat on the bottom—each one was different, and there were a lot of irregularities. This was a work of art constructed like a fine piece of jewelry.”
Just picking up each 45,000 to 55,000-pound boulder required expertise, patience, and some of the largest and heaviest equipment in the construction industry. “We were really having some trouble figuring out how to get the boulders moved,” said Maxwell Wnorowski, project manager with DAVIS. “The site logistics at National Geographic were really, really tough.”
The lawn on which Marabar sat looked deceptively sturdy, but beneath it were four stories of occupied space, Wnorowski said. “There were three garage levels, a printing room, and office space,” he said. “Usually you don’t roll a 450-ton crane onto that.”
DAVIS brought in a shoring contractor with specific expertise in stabilizing ceilings and floors to brace the site against the weight of one of the largest cranes in the region. “We installed shoring pieces all the way down to the lowest grade in the garage,” Wnorowski said. “It was a lot of coordination. We needed to make sure we were siting the crane in the exact spot where the shoring was.”
Before the process began on the surface, DAVIS worked with National Geographic to relocate everyone who normally worked below the site—including the security team’s central command office. “We went through ten or twelve logistics plans for the whole project,” Wnorowski said. “Moving everyone was just one more logistics plan on our end.”
In addition to shoring beneath the sculpture, the site itself needed special preparation to be able to support the cranes. “It was originally five feet of topsoil, so that’s not a compacted material,” said Wnorowski. “We exported all that topsoil and brought in crushed concrete, and did compaction testing to make sure it wouldn’t break. Then we had to re-waterproof the site, because it was part of the underground building’s structure.”
“The boulders are very irregular and very fragile at the same time,” said Brett Rugo, founder and owner of Rugo Stone. “We had to field-measure and basically design these to fit into the new pool basin. Two have polished faces that Elyn did back in the 1980s. They have this foot-thick fragile element that can’t be broken off, because they go below the pool line. It’s just very slow, tedious, methodical work.”
The boulders themselves required some care even before the moving process could begin, Rugo noted. “We had to repair a lot of old lifting holes,” he said. “We had to cut new dutchmen to stop water from going in and cracking the stone. We did some hand polishing at the site, to remove iron stains, calcification, some biological growth. But we did it all without changing the patina of the actual boulder. We didn’t alter the original look—we just restored it.”
Moving each individual boulder required a triangulation of three chain hoists to center the load in a basket sling, balancing the stone carefully before picking it up. The three hoists merged at the center pick of the crane, converging to maintain that sensitive balance. “You have to get the center of gravity just right,” said Rugo. “If you don’t do that, it would topple right out of the sling, and could have killed someone, or broken the crane.”
One by one, the boulders—each weighing forty to sixty thousand pounds—rose into the air in the embrace of the chain hoists and settled gently onto flatbed trucks for the ride to their new site.
“My rigger, David Jonke, took it as a personal challenge,” Rugo said. “He did a terrific job and executed the plan seamlessly, which resulted in a perfect transfer.”
A New Home
Preparing the new site for installation proved nearly as complicated as removing the stones from their original location.
“There were things going on underground,” said Manlove. “There was a main communications line that goes right under the site, so we had to be careful to engineer around it. Utilities were not readily available, so we had to run over to another building and create a trench. The fountain runs twelve months of the year, so we had to bring over heated water. And the water had to be filtered and cleaned.”
The terminal system uses ultraviolet light and ionization to clean the water, he said. “It’s all automated. The base of the pool is lined with 4-inch-thick granite slabs, ten feet long and four feet wide. They are raised from the base of the pool, and the grout joints are left open—so large debris stays up at the top and won’t make its way to the drain. It makes for a very clean look.”
Before pouring the foundation for the new site, the team moved the boulders into place there to see exactly how they fit, and what kind of footings they needed. “If we had poured the concrete first, it would have been a lot harder,” said Wnorowski. “But Rugo knew how to do this.”
Now in its new home, the installation has been renamed Sudama, after a large rock-cut cave at Barabar Hill, India. “Marabar was named for a fictitious cave with polished walls in the book A Passage to India,” said Zimmerman. “Now we’ve changed the location and the shape, so I changed the name. Sudama is a huge, barrel-vaulted place, all polished three thousand years ago with no mechanical tools.”
As challenging as it was, Zimmerman said, she is both relieved and delighted that her artwork has a new life. “I can come up with all kinds of ideas, but I need people to help realize them,” she said. “I so appreciate what Steve did and what Brett was able to accomplish. I feel very fortunate.”
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