Stone-Ideas.com 
The international symposium “New Solution With Stones” on May 13 and 14, 2025, in Portugal aims to shed light on a market for the natural stone sector that has often been neglected to date: It is about stone in architecture and, above all, about new ideas on how the material can be used in ways other than simply for decoration on facades or floors. The idea behind this is to use stone in a way that corresponds to its outstanding properties, which are weight, compressive strength and hardness.
Mind you, the aim is not to demonize the existing uses of stone but to develop new possibilities and place them alongside the familiar ones.
The symposium, now in its third edition, is characterized by the fact that university scientists and engineers play a central role. However, here it is not the geologists but civil engineers and architects.
Another special feature of this symposium edition will be female: Women will play the leading roles among the speakers and in a panel discussion, and it will be interesting to see how they influence the topic.
They are:
* Catalina Sánchez, CEO of Rosal Stones (Spain), who does projects with students on solid construction with stone;
* Regina Vitório (Portugal), who realized the mega project of translucent marble facades for the Perelman Arts Center in New York City with her medium-sized company LSI Stone;
* Margarida Sousa (Portugal), Managing Partner at Dimpomar and design company Tons de Pedra.
As a representative of the other ladies‘ enthusiasm for stone, we quote Margarida Sousa‘s statement on Linkedin: “My day-to-day life is all about marble and natural stone, for projects or in slabs and blocks. I’ve always been doing it. It’s what I know and I love it.“
Despite the international character, the event has an Iberian feel: It takes place in the cities of Pinhel and Covilhã in eastern Portugal, is organized by the University of Beira Interior there, the Pinhel city council, and the Portugal Mineral Resources cluster and many of the speakers are from Portugal or Spain.
There will also be workshops on practical issues relating to modern natural stone constructions. A special event on the afternoon of the first day will show just how the approach is: A laboratory test will be used to clarify one of the many questions that arise when using stone as a load-bearing material.
At the first edition of the symposium in 2023, a spectacular laboratory test on the strength of a granite pillar had already been carried out:
The other speakers are:
* Wendel Sebastian, Professor of Structural Engineering at University College London (UCL) with a focus on sustainable construction;
* Marine Bagneris, co-founder of STONO, France, a studio specialized in the usage of numeric tools to simulate material structures‘ behavior;
* Klaas de Rycke, France, Partner and Managing Director at Bollinger+Grohmann, associate Professor at UCL, Ensa-Versailles.
The event‘s organizer is Clemente Pinto, professor at the University of Beira Interior, conducting research focused on the forces that occur in a building.
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