Dear Houston PCA,

In our last episode of Building Peace – the first in our new series documenting the Peace Corps Park journey – we told you about a landmark donation from Reed Hastings and took you to the shop floor of our fabrication partner to show you where those contributions go.

Today I want to introduce you, properly, to that partner, Quarra Stone Company, because they are pretty special.

They would have to be, to justify the logistical and financial burden of shipping ten 40,000-lb blocks of granite halfway across the country from Atlanta, Ga. to Madison, Wis., just to send them all the way back to Washington D.C. for installation.

Lead designer Larry Kirkland had not previously worked with Quarra – nor with any other robotic carving partner – but the team’s hope to produce the new federal memorial entirely in the U.S. inspired him to find the best of what this country had to offer.

“I knew of no hand-carving studio in the United States that could do this,” says Kirkland, who has worked almost exclusively with experts in Carrara, Italy in his long career. “So we began to have a dialogue with Quarra and they showed us some of the things that they were working on with these digital robotic carving tools.”

Quarra's robotic CNC milling can achieve geometries and tolerances that most fabricators simply cannot touch. And where the machines reach their limits, their craftspeople take over by hand, finishing the stone the way it has always been finished: with skill, patience, and care. 

Jim Durham, President of Quarra Stone Company, says he actively seeks out projects that explore the edge of what’s possible. 

“Our idea here at Quarra is that we like to be challenged by the most difficult and complex geometry, and a good project for us is one that starts out with someone saying, ‘can you really even do that?’,” Durham said. “Then we have a pretty good idea that that might be a good fit for us and our capabilities.”

The result will be granite worthy of what it represents.

“For a project like this,” Kirkland says, “which is a really minimal, quite simple thing: It's these three elements around a plaza. If the details don't sing, then the project's not going to sing.”

And that’s what the in-person visit last month was about: To inspect mockups of every element, using every fabrication technique that the thoughtful and precise design calls for to ensure that once we are ready to fund the next phase and green-light fabrication, that everything is executed to the highest standard.

“The most valuable thing the team learned, I think, is that Quarra can produce what we want them to,” says Kirkland. “And they have become partners in the creation of it, not just fabricators. And that's what I look for in any company or any individual that's going to be bringing what my imagination wants into reality.”

We chose the best partners we could find because a world-class mission calls for world-class execution. And we couldn’t be happier to see the Park taking shape, stone by stone, in the hands of some of the most skilled fabricators in the world. 

If you'd like to be a part of bringing Peace Corps Park to the finish line, we'd love to hear from you.

Yours in service,

Glenn A. Blumhorst
Chief Advancement Officer
Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation

GBlumhorst@PeaceCorpsCommemorative.org

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