Portland Stone: A material consideration of place, collapse and disruption

The island of Portland, in Dorset is a site made by the material needs and uses of architecture; it is a landscape constructed by absence and disruption. This almost-island barely tied to the mainland by Chesil beach is an uncertain edge. This paper investigates Portland as place and material inscribed by time through multiple histories and disciplines. My particular focus is on the potential in architecture to retrieve links to absence, disruption and collapse.

This paper starts with the source of the stone; Portland as history, material and place is followed and its significance for pre- and post-Enlightenment architecture is established. The absences left by the process of quarrying create a series of double absences: quarries are constructed absences, the use of stone for building and memorials is a manifestation of absence materialized in the traces of its destruction; this is epitomised in the use of Portland stone for WWI and II memorials. The methodology reaches back to eighteenth century philosophy, theories of the earth, and architectural accounts of Portland alongside contemporary theories of place. The site is viewed as one of perpetual change and the spaces left as the outcome of quarrying are imbued with meaning. This unique site at the edge shows that the complexity of cultural meaning found in Portland offers deeper understandings of the history of architecture.