"They stipulated that it be restored accurately, and that it be open to the public at certain times, which it will be," says Davis. "And then we went to pick them up and that was it."
The chapter house stones, of which between 50 percent and 60 percent have been identified, are now being stored in the brick-floored barns where Leland Stanford used to store his brandy kegs.
Amy Douglas
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"It's in the works. We're hoping to break ground next fall," says Father Paul Mark, one of the New Clairvaux monks. "We'd like to build a permanent church. We have a temporary church that was built 40 years ago, with the hope of it lasting 10 years. If we're going to raise the money to rebuild this chapter house, we thought, we could just as well raise the money to build a permanent church as well."
The task of rebuilding the chapter house is one of the more challenging historical restoration projects Italian specialist Soroush Gharamani says he has seen in his 15-year career. The numbers and other markings Hearst's workers had written on the stones for purposes of reassembly burned off long ago. As many as half the stones have disappeared, and many of those left are broken. So assembling the old monastery is much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces, and no precise template for what the puzzle should look like when it's done.
"We take the dimensions of the stones with calipers. These are very high-precision measurements -- we work with many zeros," says Gharamani, who has been hired to work on the chapter house restoration.
Once the dimensions of the stones are determined down to fractions of a millimeter, a computer program will be adapted from photographs of the Ovila monastery and architectural drawings of similar monasteries. Each stone's dimensions will be entered into the computer, which will compare them to a software template made by combining information from the photographs and drawings. If everything goes according to plan, the computer will spit out instructions on which stone should go where.
"We have some old pictures of the old chapter house and the monastery itself, so we are able to use those," says Gharamani. "And we have the drawings of Viollet-le-Duc, the 19th-century French architect who wrote about medieval architecture. He gave construction details of each general style of Gothic building."
Margaret Burke, an architectural historian who has been studying the Ovila stones for 20 years, had originally estimated that some 65 percent of the chapter house stones remained usable after the fires and years of neglect. But Gharamani is finding his trove leaner than Burke had estimated.
"I'm starting to realize that we don't have 45 to 50 percent of the stones to build the chapter house," he says.
Some of the chapter house stones are probably still buried at Golden Gate Park, says Burke. Park officials told her that they'd give her a call if they found any more.
But park workers have been excavating for several months now, and she's heard nothing. Meanwhile, the stones are being mortared into retaining walls, cut into fountains, and otherwise used as landscaping material. The Abbey of Santa Maria de Ovila is slowly being reduced to curbs and paving stones.
"They belong to the museum. This goes way back to the last of the fires," says Burke. "The museum director said it was OK that the Park Department take the beat-up stones. They misinterpreted that, and took any stones they could. It's been going on since then. They have continued to use them in that way."
Burke speaks with the tone of resignation of someone who has been struggling 20 years in hopes of seeing the stones somehow restored to a facsimile of their former historical grandeur.
Gharamani the Italian architect, however, speaks with the indignation of a restoration specialist from Europe, where destroying ancient historical fabric is widely prohibited.
"These stones are eighth-century stones and we have to respect them, and leave it for our future generations," says Gharamani. "To lose them to landscaping, that makes me feel very sorry."
Gharamani seems to be alone in his sentiments. Father Davis allows that landscaping "may be the best use" for the remainder of the stones. And San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums, which presumably owns them, isn't likely to complain: The museums' director has been quoted referring to the stones as a "white elephant."
So stonemasons will continue to chip away at hand-carved bits of the abbey, turning them into raised planting beds and such. This is not precisely in line with a monastic life of contemplation.
But walking past the retaining wall in the Japanese Garden, along AIDS garden pathways marked by fluted rib-stones, or past the arboretum's entrance at nightfall after the stonemasons have gone home, the shadows of the trees, the texture of the stones, and the smell of the ferns do cause the mind to drift. Thoughts seem to dissipate, and an unearthly calm begins to permeate the mind and spirit. Walking still farther through the fragrant redwoods and lacelike ferns, one can almost feel, if for only a moment, the warp and the weft of the moral fabric of the universe.
