One of the least likely structures to be built of stone is a gymnasium, but the building above is the Recreation Hall (and sometime city offices) of Arco, Idaho. The Rec Hall was built as a WPA project in 1937 and 1938, and renovations including a new roof in the 1990s allow basketball and other activities to continue in the Rec Hall today.
Another unusual feature of this building is that the stone is vesicular basalt. Basalt, or "lava-rock", is a dark volcanic rock formed when mafic magmas reach the earth surface and flow across the landscape. Magma, or molten mineral material, contains gases that usually escape to the atmosphere. However, sometimes the gases haven't time to escape and form bubbles or vesicles in the rock, making the porous or vesicular texture seen below.
 

    

           Basalt is a very hard rock, and it presented many challenges for this building. One challenge during the construction process was that the WPA's masons couldn't hammer the basalt into regular blocks for a tightly fitting wall. Instead, they mortared the irregular stones together and then traced small "seams" in their mortar to give the appearance of tightly fitting stones. A challenge that continues today is that the porous basalt leaks a little water when it rains, so that moisture appears inside the walls. That could be a huge problem, but Arco gets only an average of about 10 inches (25 cm) of precipitation per year, some of it as snow, so the leakiness of this stone isn't the issue that it might be elsewhere.