The Mercury Fountain

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in the 2025 edition of Building Stone Magazine.

In the heart of Reston Town Center, a mixed-use development in the suburbs of Washington, DC, a grand fountain has formed the centerpiece of an open plaza since 1990. A bronze statue of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce, travel, and messages, crowned the ornate structure and drew the eye upward—creating enough visual interest to keep many people from noticing the toll that time had taken on the fountain below. 

The fountain’s pedestal, bowl, and topper—the sculpted piece on which Mercury stood high above the fountain’s bowl—were the work of internationally recognized sculptor Saint Clair Cemin. All three of these pieces had been carved from gleaming Carrara marble from a quarry in Tuscany, Italy. Carrara marble earned its stellar reputation as Michelangelo’s stone of choice for his sculptures David and Pieta, and more recent artists chose it for General Grant National Memorial in New York City and buildings on the Harvard Medical School campus, among countless other artworks and structures. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the quarry’s supply of the finest Carrara marble had been depleted. The modern marble from Carrara does not quite measure up to the historic stone’s durability. 

In the ensuing thirty-plus years, Reston’s weather caused severe deterioration of the fountain’s bowl and pedestal. Boston Properties, the Town Center’s management, realized that the time had come to replace the marble structures with new elements. The refurbishment of the fountain also offered an opportunity to adapt the space to the way visitors use it now. Originally imagined as an inviting meeting place for residents and visitors, the plaza needed to play an active role in inviting people to stop and linger there. “They wanted more of an occupiable, quotidian public space,” said Chris Hardy, senior associate with Sasaki Associates, Inc., and the landscape architect for the Reston Town Center project. “Also to have it be more water-efficient, while being more animated.” 

In the original sculpture, water cascaded from bronze spouts positioned all the way around the topper and into the bowl, where it spilled evenly over the bowl’s lip and into the main pool at the base. Over time, the bowl and pedestal developed a lot of cracks, making the fountain look rundown and damaged. “We wanted to make something that was smaller with more contained pools, but that had more movement and more relief to it,” Hardy said. 

From Marble to Granite

It became clear from the outset that the fountain bowl needed to be replaced, as did the pedestal beneath it. “A lot of the stone had started crumbling,” said Hardy. “With marble you can get a lot of architectural fracturing, and there’s a lot of heat variation in Reston in the winter season.” The logical solution was to replace the bowl and pedestal, and to use a natural stone more resistant to Virginia winter’s freeze/thaw cycles. “Marble doesn’t hold up as well as granite,” said Hardy. “Granite has a crystalline matrix, and it doesn’t have the same risk from fracture planes.” 

Granite would be different visually from marble as well—and some of the original marble pieces would remain part of the fountain, making a close match difficult to accomplish. To achieve this, Hardy and the clients worked with Structural Stone, LLC in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, and Lorton Stone LLC to find a granite that would work cooperatively with the remaining marble topper. The selected granite, Bethel White, comes from a quarry in Bethel, Vermont, said Hardy, and its color provided a satisfactory complement to the Carrara marble. “The client, the architect and the contractor all went together to pick the specific blocks for the stone,” he said. “We went through about 60 blocks in the quarry to choose the ones we used.” For the fountain’s monolithic concrete base, the team chose a veneer made from Jet Mist granite, quarried in Virginia just sixty miles from Reston Town Center. The redesigned base includes tiered splash ledges, weirs, and a feature wall, sandblasted with an abstract Caduceus pattern, the traditional symbol of Mercury, with two snakes winding around a winged staff. Water pours over the Caduceus- patterned wall throughout the spring, summer, and fall. 

“We wanted more visual interest in the stone, because the fountain is off for almost half of the year,” Hardy said. “There’s an infinity wall on one side so kids can touch and interact with the water. Then we did a similar Caduceus texture for where the water drops down several terraces. It’s a simple system with just one primary pump. But it’s all done with a very controlled infinity edge, so you have some free drop, some cling, and the textured relief on the face of the veneer.” Originally the designer modeled the faded Caduceus pattern in 3D, seeking millimeter-level resolution in the fade of the pattern, Hardy said. “During shop drawings and mockups, Lorton Stone informed the designer that the nature of granite’s crystalline matrix, which is great for hardness and durability, limits CNC routing resolution. In the end, the designer and fabricator had to collaborate on the graphic and approach, with Lorton using templates and sandblasting to get the effect.” 

The redesigned base includes tiered splash ledges, weirs, and a veneered feature wall all constructed from Jet Mist granite sandblasted with a Caduceus pattern, the traditional symbol of Mercury, with two snakes winding around a winged staff.

“The final Caduceus pattern was all sandblasted by hand,” said Dan Sennewald, vice president at Lorton Stone LLC. “There was no machining to make the pattern. A stencil was applied before sandblasting the stone’s surface. The worker with the sandblasting nozzle controlled the rate at which the nozzle passed over the stone. Where the pattern is deeper, it required a slower rate and/or a higher number of passes. The key was repeating the procedure from stone to stone so that the depth of the sandblasting and the fading effect were consistent across the entire wall. This pattern is on the infinity wall, but it’s also on the splash ledges and the weir, just below the pedestal. We had to make sure the pattern lined up during installation.” 

Structural Stone used CNC machining to duplicate the pedestal, a process that took three weeks to complete.

The redesigned base also includes planter walls, and a lower pool made of Bethel White granite. Blue glass paving tiles finish the underwater portions of the base. Once the stone had been selected, Lorton’s team visited the site and made digital scans of the fountain to aid in replicating its original design. From these scans, Lorton made three-dimensional models of the pedestal and bowl and passed these on to Structural Stone to make shop drawings. Lorton also managed the salvage of the existing materials, carefully removing the topper and the statue of Mercury and storing them for reinstallation later. 

Replacing the Pedestal

With the goal of recreating the original design of the fountain’s pedestal, Lorton and Structural Stone worked together to ensure that the new pedestal remained faithful to the complex, twisting shape of Cemin’s sculpture. Beginning with the laser scans the Lorton team made before disassembling the fountain, Structural Stone developed a three-dimensional digital model of the pedestal and bowl. Structural Stone then transferred this model to CAD/CAM software and created shop drawings, which were then used to program their CNC system. 

Meanwhile, Lorton removed all the fountain’s elements from the town center as the site work got underway. With the pieces in hand, the Lorton team made a plaster cast of the pedestal to help Structural Stone see every detail of the original sculpture. “The fabricator had to exactly match what the pedestal looked like,” said Sennewald. “For the most part, they used their digital model for the CNC machining, but we sent them the plaster cast to have something they could look at and touch to get the final details correct.” It took three weeks for the CNC machining to carve the granite into an exact replica of the original pedestal, and another three weeks to create the new bowl. Structural Stone used the plaster cast to refine the machined pedestal until they had achieved the goal of a perfect match, with all the final finishing done by hand. 

The 9,000-pound bowl took another three weeks of CNC machining to create from the Bethel White granite.

With the pieces ready for reinstallation, Lorton scheduled the project for a series of evenings, choosing times with minimal residential traffic to allow a massive crane to come into the area to lift the pieces into place. The 6,000-pound pedestal came first, with skilled crane operators and stone installers guiding the piece and “threading the needle” over the fountain’s supply plumbing. “There was quite a bit of coordination between the plumber and us,” said Sennewald. “Fortunately, the plumber was responsible for making the connections.” 

Each piece posed its own challenges, he noted, including the 9,000-pound bowl. “With the bowl, we had to make sure everything was level, so the water flows evenly over the fountain,” he said. “Even trickier was having multiple stones for a long stretch below the bowl and pedestal. The weir stone made it a little more difficult.” The topper, the most prominent piece from the original fountain, seemed designed specifically to give the plumbing crew headaches. During the disassembly of the fountain at the beginning of the project, Lorton’s installers had to cut the connections between the fountain’s plumbing and the many small bronze horns on the outside of the topper. “The topper had to align with the horizontals that were installed onto the riser that fed the horns,” said Sennewald. “It was a bit of a challenge for the plumber to make those connections again as it was reinstalled. They didn’t have a lot of room, but they worked their magic.” 

The process of setting the new pieces in place involved “threading the needle” over the existing plumbing.

Finally, the statue of Mercury returned to its place high atop the fountain, about twenty-eight feet above the paving stones of the Reston Town Center common area. The iconic fountain, made more robust with its new, carved granite features, is expected to last for many decades to come. Hardy notes that the project proceeded with very few hiccups, from design to stone selection to fabrication and reinstallation. “We had a really great contractor team, and they were really proactive,” he said. “If they would find something in the field, they would immediately call me, and we’d work through it. We got through a lot of things quickly that could have led to long, protracted processes. You don’t know what’s underground in a retrofit project; you’re going to find stuff, but having that proactive approach made it possible to get it done on a schedule that made the client happy.”  With its thoughtful restoration, the Mercury Fountain not only preserves a key piece of Reston’s history but also continues to serve as a gathering place for generations to come—a testament to the town’s vision of community and connection. 

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