Over the course of nearly five decades, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented almost every type of industrial architecture-from water towers and steel mills to gas tanks and grain elevators-primarily in Europe and the United States. Whether presenting single shots or their signature typological grids, the Bechers created a photographic testament to the industrial revolution that so emphatically shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, however, they also captured a much-older manufacturing tradition: the quarrying and processing of stones.
Since time immemorial, rocks and stones of all manner and composition have been extracted (usually in opencast mines) and used to build houses, churches, bridges, walls, and roads. Before stone can be employed in construction, however, the raw material has to be processed: washed, sorted, broken up, and sometimes pulverized in stone-crushing plants. Lime needs to be refined further in a series of steps that has been practiced for thousands of years: fired in special kilns and slaked in water basins, it is transformed into a construction material with a wide variety of applications.
This volume, an essential addition to the the Bechers' body of work, is devoted to their photographs of rock-processing plants and lime kilns taking in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Great Britain throughout the 1980s and '90s. Each structure is unique, its details dependent upon the region and the date of its construction, and the book features buildings whose essential function is ancient but which remain important today. Although a small number of these images have been included in previous monographs, this is the first publication to showcase a comprehensive collection of the Bechers' study of stonework and lime kilns.