Minnesota Military Family Tribute
St. Paul, Minn.
Client: Minnesota Military Family Tribute (MFT), Golden Valley, Minn.
Project Designer: HGA Architects and Engineers, Minneapolis
General Contractor: Meisinger Construction Company, Inc., South St. Paul, Minn.
Landscape Contractor: Margolis Company, St. Paul, Minn.
Stone Engraver: Stone & Steel Design, Minneapolis
By K. Schipper
ST. PAUL. Minn. – U.S. military veterans can’t be honored enough, but a Minnesota organization decided there’s another group – often unsung – that deserves public plaudits: the families of those serving our country in uniform.
The Military Family Tribute (MFT), dedicated in June 2015 on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol, makes a strong use of natural stone, although rather than relying solely on Minnesota granite or limestone, it incorporates many types of boulders to represent all of the state’s 87 counties.
DEEP MEANING
To show their appreciation for the folks providing support from home, the Minnesota Military Family Tribute, a non-profit, organized itself more than five years ago with the idea of creating a tribute.
Ted Lee, associate vice president for Minneapolis-based HGA Architects and Engineers, served as design leader on the project, which he calls a career highlight.
“I have a very personal connection to the project,” he says. “My oldest son, Andrew, was stationed in Iraq at the time we found out about the desire to build this tribute. When I saw the RFQ (request for qualifications), I told our team that we were going after the project, and we were going to win it.
“It had very deep meaning for me and my family.”
As Lee recalls it, the RFQ was released in July 2010. A juried competition with three other architect/design submissions was held that November, with HGA being unanimously to design and oversee the construction of the tribute.
“At that point, the MFT organization had to raise $1 million before we could complete the design process and start construction,” Lee says. “The submission was just a conceptual design.
“Then, they finally finished raising the money in early 2014. We spent a lot of time on the design construction documents phase, and construction started in June of 2014.”
Although Lee served as design leader, he says the actual team was made up of a mix of primarily architects and landscape architects working in a collaborative environment.
The project is actually made up of three major elements.
The first is the “Thank You Military and Veteran Family Walkway.” The tree-lined arc embraces each of the Minnesota veteran memorials. The Walkway connects the Story Stones on the east and a Gold Star Table on the west.
This path, shaded by maple trees with red flowering gardens at each end, reminds us to Remember Everyone Deployed (RED).
The second element is the Gold Star Table.
“The idea behind using a table came from how we as families interact,” says Lee. “We gather around a table to eat, play games and celebrate. There’s also a spiritual quality because it’s like an altar.”
The Gold Star Table recognized the supreme sacrifice of Gold Star Families. A gold star, used since 1917 to acknowledge the loss of a loved one while in military service, provides the foundation for the table.
The third element is a collection of 87 “Story Stones” representing each of Minnesota’s 87 counties. A story was engraved onto each of them, and the story came from that particular county. To further make a unified whole, the stones – actually large boulders – are tied geologically to the counties.
While initial plans called for a stone donation from each county, the logistics of such an approach soon became overwhelming. Instead, many of the boulders were taken from the excavation for the then-under-construction U.S. Bank Stadium.
“A lot of that was glacially deposited in the last ice age,” says Lee. “That way, in essence, we got stone from northern Minnesota that had been pushed down here. The majority of it is probably granite, but there are a lot of other types of stone, as well.”
In some cases, stone was obtained from specific counties. For instance, pipestone (Catlinite or Sioux Quartzite), a brownish-red carvable rock worked by Native Americans, was supplied by Rock County and used to represent three of the counties in southwestern Minnesota where the stone originates.
“Minnesota also has a lot of limestone, but a lot of it doesn’t weather well,” Lee says. “However, we chose some denser Dolomite limestone to represent Winona and Le Sueur counties because that’s where a lot of our limestone comes from.”
Getting the right people to help Lee pull this vision together wasn’t all that difficult, he says. Because the project is prominently located on the grounds of the state capitol, the work had to be publicly bid. However, he says he made several different contractors aware of the work so they could submit bids.
“All the people were selected based on cost and competency,” Lee says. “However, we were hoping to get the right people involved and things went well. The landscape contractor was the guy we wanted and they were able to get the trees we wanted. And, the stone engraver is just a craftsman par excellence.”
Dave Kleinhuizen, vice president and chief financial officer for St. Paul-based Margolis Company, the project’s landscape contractor, says his firm was one of those recruited by Lee and became involved early in the process.
“We worked with the landscape architects early on to plan and help write the specifications that were tight enough to guarantee the quality of the project they wanted,” he says.
When it came time to bid the project, a total of seven contractors attended the prebid conference, but Margolis was the only firm to actually submit bid documents.
A Tough Placement
Kleinhuizen explains his company’s involvement with the job was twofold. The first was for the procurement of the large trees and plants for the project, which was done several months before the actual installation, and then plant them at the appropriate time.
The other component of Margolis’ work was involvement with the placing of the Story Stones and installation of a stabilized aggregate surface around them, as well as irrigation and turf establishment.
Kleinhuizen adds that by far the biggest hurdle was the placement of the Story Stones.
“The capitol grounds people wrote some limiting language into the specs that allowed us access into the site with a one-ton truck,” he says. “Many of our boulders were in the 9,000-11,000-lbs range, and you can’t do that with a one-ton truck.”
The other problem: there was simply no place to stage the work. Ultimately, the boulders were delivered to Margolis’ yard, which is located about four miles from the capitol grounds.
“We brought 97 preselected boulders to our site, and then through a process with Ted and his associates we numbered them to create a layout plan,” Kleinhuizen says. “Because we had tight conditions, we started in the back corner and worked our way out with the boulder placements.”
Once the plan was developed, each boulder was picked up at the yard, taken directly to the site via a boom truck, then carried to its particular spot with a loader and finally set in place with the rotating head grapple on a backhoe. This approach allowed all 87 boulders to be set in two days.
The Next Level
Once the Story Stones were set in place, Brian Rosen, president of Stone & Steel Design in Minneapolis, and his crew, entered the project.
Rosen explains that 10 years ago, when he started his company, he began doing onsite stone engraving, as well as cutting steel for ornamental and decorative purposes. Over time, the business has evolved, and while it still does one-offs of custom steel pieces, stone engraving has become the firm’s bread-and-butter.
“There aren’t a lot of people who do what we do, and we’ve taken it to the next level,” Rosen says.
He adds that Lee sought him out for this project, which involved a lot of up-front work before Stone & Steel Design took to the capitol grounds with its compressor and stencils.
“Half the job – or more – is done before you get out onsite,” he says. “A big portion of the work is meeting with the client, figuring out the artwork, getting the details done, designing the layout and then doing it on the computer.”
In this case, selecting the artwork – stories submitted by a veterans’ services organization group in each of the counties – involved reading the submissions, collating and curating them, and then making final selections.
“I was also on the committee selecting the stories for the stones, and we met over a two-month period to select them,” says Lee. “Then, they were proofed to include the county it was from, and the year when the story was shared. Our stories range from 1862-2014.”
“Once that was done, we got into the process of making our stencils,” Rosen explains. “They were done on a plotter/cutter using big rubber rolls of material.”
Stone & Steel Design also had to do work at the site before the actual engraving could be done. Rosen says that included following the state’s requirements for safety in the area, such as protective fencing and dust management.
“One of the biggest things we had to tackle was that most of the stones needed to be ground,” he says. “They had to be ground down to a flat enough surface to be able to engrave on it. Some
of the stones had quite a nasty surface. After we achieved our surface, we would sandblast the grind marks out – we call that flashing – as well as any mar marks that might have occurred when the stones were set.
“Obviously, we had to get it to a natural look but we had to be delicate because the architects wanted to keep some of the moss and other things that were sitting on the stone,” he adds. “They wanted to protect the natural aspects of the process.”
Once the grinding and flashing was completed, Rosen and his team were faced with applying the stencils to the stones.
“Everything has to be taped or tarped off so you’re not sandblasting areas that you don’t want sandblasted,” Rosen says. “Still, with three of us working at the site, were able to engrave the 87 boulders at the site in two weeks.”
Plenty of Challenges
Rosen himself handled the actual engraving, carrying his onsite engraving equipment – an air-compressor, pressure pot and supplied-air hood – in a trailer.
“Everyone had to wear a respirator, and we used garnet in lieu of silica sand, which can cause silicosis,” he says. “We still had to be careful because there are certain granites, for example, that have a percentage of silica in them, and we’re releasing that as a dust during the grinding and sandblasting.”
Working with so many different stones also presented its challenges.
“The harder the stone, the longer it takes to engrave it,” he says. “You can’t always get as deep into it, either; if you start going deep you burn your stencil. And, where the stones were chalky, it was difficult to get the adhesives for the stencils to stick, and we’d have blow-offs.”
The engraved areas were then color-filled before the stencils were removed, and Rosen says the final step in the process was going back through to do touch-up work where paint had gotten behind a stencil. Rosen says that work is done either with a knife or a Dremel® tool.
“There’s always touch-up work after everything is done,’ he says. “Some of it was due to the nature of the rocks we were working on. I won’t say they were terrible rocks, but on many they didn’t have engraving in mind when they chose them.”
While not the biggest job Stone & Steel Design has done, Rosen says it was one of the most-demanding. And, he appreciates that his company was chosen for the job.
“I think I gave the confidence that the job would be done right,” he says. “Now, everybody’s just ecstatic over it, and we’re getting all kinds of calls because of it.”
To finish the area around the Story Stones, Margolis Company came in and installed an aggregate stabilizer from Phoenix-based Stabilizer Solutions.
“It’s a binder agent that’s blended with granite aggregate, and then thoroughly saturated with water,” says Margolis’ Kleinhuizen. “It causes the binder to firm up and create a resilient surface similar to concrete that’s ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessible.”
And, to make sure the product maintains its 8% to 14% moisture content, the company added a zone of spray irrigation to the area to augment natural rainfall to keep it firm.
Probably no one is more pleased with the project than Lee, even though he describes the years between when he first learned of the project and its funding as “tough.”
“But, we knew it would be worth it; the deep meaning behind the Tribute and the stones is just unbelievable,” he said.