Elias and Yousef Anastas are Anne Holtrop’s guests for reviews of the autumn semester HS20 MATERIAL GESTURE: STONE at the ETH in Zurich.

By Anne Holtrop
It all comes down to this: stone is a piece of rock made usable for men – a portion of rock used as building material.
Rocks can be defined as extensive mineral bodies, composed of one or more minerals in varying proportions. Minerals are the building stones of the earth’s crust. They are stony mixtures of one or more elements (from copper, to iron, sulphur, gypsum and carbon), that man has found in the earth’s surface and its rocks. Running to a depth from a minimum of four kilometers under the ocean to one hundred kilometres under the continents, the lithosphere constituting the ‘crust’ is made up of rock produced by solidified magma. The three main types of rock are igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic, and all result from a continuous geological cycle of being formed, worn down into pieces, and then formed again.