Hospital's Stone Is Monument to Saving a Life

By Martha Groves

July 31, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Twice now, doctors at UCLA Medical Center have saved the life of Carlo Mariotti. The 76-year-old Italian has thanked them in a way few others could: with more than 3 million pounds of putty-colored travertine.

When architects went searching for the right stone to enwrap the new UCLA hospital, Mariotti served up 15,000 stone panels from his family’s quarry in Tivoli, Italy. To clinch the contract, Mariotti first calculated his price without any profit, then donated $1 million of the cost.

Construction workers are still fitting out the high-tech operating and patient rooms in the massive facility designed by Pei Partnership Architects. But the travertine already encases the outside walls, adding one more structure to the global list featuring Mariotti masonry, including Chicago’s Sears Tower, New York’s Lincoln Center, Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall and Getty Center, and Beijing’s new Bank of China headquarters.

The new $900-million UCLA hospital -- scheduled to open in 2005 as the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center -- might lack the drama of cloud-piercing towers bearing Mariotti stone in Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, but it holds a special place in Mariotti’s big heart. After battling cancer for 14 years, he feels lucky to be alive to see it.

“You have in front of you an alive dead guy,” the grateful patient said earlier this year on a visit to the construction site at the campus’ southern end.

A jolly dumpling of a man, with flyaway wisps of white hair and twinkling eyes, Mariotti has worked with a who’s who list of architects and called many of them friends: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Minoru Yamasaki, Philip Johnson.

Mariotti joined the family business 57 years ago, though as a boy he studied piano in Parma under Giuseppe Verdi, a nephew of the opera composer of the same name. “It was the only place I could smoke,” Mariotti recalled. “I didn’t learn anything about the piano.”

He returns periodically to Los Angeles, but lives with his wife, Titti, at the family villa near Rome -- or as he says, savoring the word, Rrrroma. Appropriately, the house opens onto private gardens with a moss-shrouded portion of an ancient aqueduct.

Stone from Mariotti & Figli -- now run by Mariotti’s four offspring, the fourth generation -- has helped give scores of buildings their distinctive looks, inside and out. Yet, outside design circles and Italy, few people know his name -- which would seem an unfortunate oversight. Many architects and industry writers view Mariotti as perhaps the best stone artisan of his time. He has the knack for selecting just the right stone to soften a building’s modernist edge or enhance its classicism.

“The travertine that comes from the Mariotti quarry is better than or at least as good as any in the world,” said Franz Schulze, an architecture author who wrote two eponymous coffee-table books on the Mariotti business.

Bruce Graham, designer of the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center, also in Chicago, credited Mariotti with making Roman stone a fixture of U.S. construction starting in the 1950s, after a long pre-World War II period when “we lost touch with the concepts of permanence and lasting values.”

Mariotti was one of the first to use machines to turn out large quantities of what had been primarily a hand-crafted product, Graham wrote in an introduction to the first “Mariotti” book.

Copious amounts were certainly called for in the Getty project, which, Mariotti said, required enough travertine to build another Roman Colosseum -- and sparked some testy back-and-forth with architect Richard Meier.

As Meier was seeking an exterior stone in 1990, Mariotti was at UCLA Medical Center, recovering from surgery for his first cancer, sarcoma.

“I’d like to be involved if the cancer lets me be alive,” he recalled telling Meier.

Meier -- known for sharp-edged, stark-white designs but under orders to use primarily stone for the Getty -- was leaving no stone unturned in his quest for the perfect cladding to wrap the buildings, considering Canadian granite, Indian red sandstone, French limestone and many others.

Mariotti urged Meier to consider travertine, but the architect dismissed the stone as too bland.

Meier told Mariotti: “I’m the architect.” Mariotti retorted: “But I’m the marble man.” That first meeting, Mariotti recalled, “was terrible.”

Mariotti’s six-month recovery from the sarcoma, meanwhile, had given him time to devise a guillotine-like machine (“It makes the French Revolution look like nothing”) that split blocks along their bedding planes. The technique created the rough finish Meier wanted, with an unexpected bonus: It revealed many more fossils -- leaves, feathers and shells -- than would be seen in normal banded, polished travertine.

When the Getty complex opened in December 1997, architectural reviews were mixed, but the stone got mostly high marks. To this day, visitors seem compelled to trace the outlines of the fossils with their fingers.

Meier keeps a chunk of travertine, embedded with a ram’s horn, on his desk in New York.

“It’s what we wanted from the very beginning,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “A distinctive look and a sense of permanence and durability.”

Three years ago, a year after Mariotti began promoting his travertine for the new hospital, UCLA doctors discovered that he had cancer again -- this time in his prostate. (“I got so affectionate with the hospital, I decided to have another cancer,” he said.)

Aggressive treatment seemed to fight off the disease. Last year, however, during a checkup in Rome, doctors discovered a tumor in his liver.

“I thought, ‘That’s it,’ ” Mariotti said. “Immediately, I left Rome and came back here.”

UCLA doctors determined that Mariotti was not a good candidate for a liver transplant. They recommended an experimental regimen that involved squirting chemotherapy drugs directly into the tumor’s blood supply. Tests in October were highly encouraging.

As Mariotti was undergoing treatment, construction workers were affixing $2 million worth of Mariotti travertine (a rock-bottom price, one might say, given an initial projection of nearly $14 million) to the “curtain wall” of the new UCLA hospital.

Aware of budget constraints but determined to give back to UCLA, Mariotti had proposed an inferior grade of travertine called ambra light.

The stone features pronounced gray-green and white veins, which normally would be viewed as fatal flaws. Yet I.M. Pei, 87, a design consultant on the project who has worked with Mariotti on many other jobs, understood that, to get travertine, “we’d have to lower our standards drastically,” said Stephen Achilles, a Pei Partnership architect.

The budget limits proved fortuitous. The peasant stone’s “visual strength,” Achilles said, suited the hospital’s substantial scale. Also helpful was a 2 1/2-inch “reveal” around the panels, serving as a dark-gray frame for the 3 1/2-foot-square stones. The heavy veins, rather than being distracting, keep the building from looking monolithic.

Mariotti likes the effect.

“I’m very satisfied,” he said, “which means a lot.”

He was also proud of the gleaming Mariotti travertine inside the World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan, designed by his friend Yamasaki. Seeing images of the buildings tumbling down on Sept. 11, 2001, Mariotti said, felt like losing a child.

Mariotti does not make this comparison lightly. Twenty years ago, Mariotti’s oldest son, Fabrizio, was kidnapped by Mafiosi. The family paid a steep ransom and an emaciated Fabrizio, now 43, was released after more than seven months in captivity.

Fabrizio and his three siblings now run an enterprise that dates from about 1890, when Luigi Bartolini, Carlo Mariotti’s maternal grandfather, bought land in the quarry district of Bagni di Tivoli, about 12 miles east of Rome.

Primo Mariotti, Bartolini’s son-in-law, succeeded him. One of Primo’s three offspring was Carlo, and he joined the family business at 19.

By 1955, while in his late 20s, he took on his first full-scale assignment in the United States: fashioning an arch and cornice in the Renaissance style for high-tone jeweler Harry Winston on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

Cancer has slowed him. On doctors’ orders a few years ago, he reluctantly gave up the white wine he loved. He also cannot stay on his feet for long. The fatigue is difficult for a man who in his prime thought nothing of gamely riding his motorcycle 50 miles to a meeting.

Regardless of what comes, Mariotti, the Marble Man of Tivoli, can rest assured that his legacy is safely set.

Four years ago, he donated travertine for a remodel of the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, which then renamed its central outdoor area Patio Mariotti. When his beloved Rome set about restoring its cherished but crumbling Spanish Steps, Mariotti donated the travertine, matching the stones used 280 years ago.

And then, of course, there is the UCLA hospital. Said Mariotti: “I’m part of the veneer.”