Rugo Stone designed this altar in conjunction McCrery and the parish and they describe the process from conceptualization through to fabrication and installation as follows:
This project is perhaps one of the finest examples of marble craftsmanship in recent years. The inspiration came from the Cathedral of Florence, Italy, specifically the high altar of the Baptistery of Saint John. The architectural firm that designed the church, McCrery Architects, designed this new church in complete respect for the Catholic tradition of sacred art and architecture...
Rugo worked hand-in-hand with the Architect to select the marble colors, and fine-tune the design so that the result was a true Capolavoro masterpiece. Working with McCrery’s design drawing, Rugo’s team developed detailed shop drawings to create the column and capital design, as well as the sophisticated inlaid Cosmati design of the recessed panels. This entire process took 11 months from concept to installation.
A truly noble altar; noble in both design and materials. Of course, it takes a lot of planning to actually get to this point, so today we're going to look at the process involved in designing and creating an altar (or any other such polychrome stonework for that matter) such as this.
Obviously the first step is that one has to have a design concept from which to work. Here we see the initial conceptaul design of the altar coming together. These designs have to consider not only the basic form of the design, but also the colours of the stone that can be used and what will best work together.
Such stone each have their own particular nuances and character -- for example, the 'grain' of the stone as much as the dominant colour of the stone are all design factors to be considered in terms of how the end result will appear. Here was the stone that was ultimately selected for this present altar.
Following this, the stone need to be cut into the respective shapes (think of it a bit like a jigsaw puzzle) so that they can be assembled together into the whole. This type of work is called opus sectile or pietra dura and it has its roots in the Roman empire. In this next photograph, we can see the cut stone pieces being pieced together, much like the tesserae of a mosaic work are, into their envisioned design.
When all of this is assembled, any external pieces, such as the columns and their capitals are also affixed in their respective positions.
