St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn.

October 2, 2002

Take, for example, St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. This small, private school, affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), was founded in 1875. Virtually from its inception, campus buildings made use of the Lannon stone common in the area.
As the school has grown through the years, Lannon stone in a random ashlar pattern remained a popular look for campus buildings – so it’s not surprising that it’s making a strong appearance on the school’s latest addition, the Tostrud Center, which opened last month.
Pete Sandberg, director of facilities for the school, says use of Lannon stone is one of the key planning principals guiding construction on campus.
“We’ve always used a certain set of materials, and one of the main parts of that set is a local limestone known as Fond du Lac Limestone,” he says. “For the first 100 years or so of the campus it was quarried locally, but now it comes from Halquist Stone Co., of Sussex, Wis.”
In this case, the desire to use the stone was also reinforced by the donor family and by the nature of the building itself, Sandberg adds.
“They pretty much specified they wanted to see significant stone on this,” he says. “Plus, while this is a discrete building attached to a 1960s-era athletic facility, the building it’s attached to is almost 100-percent limestone.”
The only problem: The Tostrud Center, at approximately 97,000 ft², is designed as a field house and athletic center, and “most of it is just a big box,” says Sandberg.
Fortunately for the school, the design for the project was placed in the hands of a St. Olaf alumnus; Chris Strom, a 1995 art graduate who earned his architectural degree at the University of California at Berkeley, and now works as a project designer for Ellerbe Becket Inc. in Minneapolis.
Strom says he was very aware of the role Lannon stone plays in the look of the campus.
“Probably 90 percent of the buildings use this same stone, and all of them are done in a random ashlar pattern,” he says. “They vary a bit based on the era they were built and the part of the quarry the stone came from, but for the most part the buildings are very consistent and it gives the campus a real sense of place because all the buildings relate to each other.”
At the same time, Strom says he realized that to put stone – especially in a hand-laid pattern – on the entire surface of this big-box structure would be an expensive process. The trick, he decided, would be to use the stone efficiently where it would be the most effective for giving the structure some shadow and texture.
Helping him meet that goal, Strom says, was the decision to utilize two stone walls of the existing structure as interior surfaces, relating the new spaces to the old. As the new entrance to the Tostrud Center, that area became an integral part of one of the new structure’s main features – a 45-foot-tall climbing wall.
“The climbing wall is built into the stone wall that forms part of the field house,” Strom explains. “Visitors pass through this stone plane after descending the entrance stairs. Even though the climbing stone is a different color and texture from the Lannon stone, the one seems to grow out of the other.”
He explains that the climbing wall itself is fiberglass-reinforced concrete with changeable routes. The remainder of the interior of the new center is made of burnished block.
To carry the Lannon stone random-ashlar look to the exterior of the building, Strom concentrated it in two main areas. Along the south wall of the center, the stone is used to accentuate the steel columns that hold up the roof on that side of the building.
“They project quite a bit on the exterior, and we clad those in stone,” Strom says. “The rest of the space in between is precast concrete, and the stone elements give a lot of depth and rhythm to what would otherwise be a long, long wall.”
The second place Strom placed Lannon stone was on the center’s west wall, which measures about 200’ X 40’.
“It’s on a slight taper and there’s also a radius curve at the top so it slopes down the hill with the grade change, and then it extends past the end of the building,” Strom says. “That breaks up the mass of the box quite a bit, too.”
Once the design for the project was complete, the project was turned over to The Boldt Company of Appleton, Wis. Boldt has been the contractor for projects at St. Olaf for the past dozen years. For the first time during that period, Boldt put the job of masonry subcontractor for the project out to bid.
“For our last couple projects, we negotiated with a mason who’d worked on still-earlier projects,” says the college’s Sandberg. “However, the owner was getting ready to retire, so we bid this last one.”
The low bidder for the job turned out to be A.J. Lysne Contracting Corp., of Owatonna, Minn. Even then, because of the nature of the work involved, the contractor went through some negotiations before hiring Lysne.
“We wanted to make sure that we had the right quality of work for the job,” says a Boldt spokesman. “The buildings we’ve done at St. Olaf over the last 12 years have had a high quality of stone and masonry work and we wanted to make sure Lysne could perform and provide the level of quality we needed.”
Lysne’s masonry superintendent, Dean Tatzel, says his crew began work on the project in January and finished at the end of July. As many as 14 people worked at the job, which involved setting the interior block as well as the exterior Lannon stone.
Tatzel estimates approximately 500 tons of stone was involved in the project.
“Some of the stones weighed upwards of 160 lbs., and it’s all hand-placed, so it’s quite heavy lifting,” he says. “There’s a lot of hand-picking and imagination involved in setting a random ashlar pattern.”
Beyond that, he describes the process as, “nothing out of the ordinary.”
However, the college’s Sandberg says he’s quite pleased with the design and the work. Not only does it integrate well with both the building it’s adjacent to and the campus as a whole, but he believes the appearance of the stone will last long into the future.
“There’s certainly a case to be made for sustaining and maintaining that Lannon stone,” Sandberg says. “We’ve got a nicely anchored appearance due to the stone, and it’s certainly easier to tuck point it occasionally than do some other things.”

Client: St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn.
Designer: Chris Strom, project designer, Ellerbe Becket Inc., Minneapolis.
Contractor: The Boldt Co., Appleton, Wis.
Stone Supplier: Halquist Stone Co., Sussex, Wis.
Masonry Subcontractor: A.J. Lysne Contracting Corp., Owatonna, Minn.