Stop C: Mint Museum Plaza - Building Stone Walking Tour of Uptown Charlotte (sitios de interés)
Descripción del sitio
Stop C: Mint Museum Plaza
500 South Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC 28202
Opened on October 1, 2010, the Mint Museum Uptown is a five-story building designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates of Boston. It houses the Mint Museum of Craft + Design as well as American, contemporary, and European art collections.
The plaza in front of the Mint Museum Uptown is covered with a checkerboard of pavers composed of intrusive igneous rocks including gabbros and diorites (Figure 8).
C1: Gabbro pavers
The dark-colored gabbro pavers have interstitial pyroxenes and plagioclase feldspar with bladed laths (Figure 9). The upper platform also has smaller pavers composed of this rock.
C2: Lighter pavers
The diorite pavers contain xenoliths (pieces of ‘foreign’ rock that get incorporated into
the magma without completely melting) of at least two different rock types, mostly fine grained basalts and diabases (Figure 10-11).
Who in your group can stand on the biggest xenolith? We found one that is 8 cm in length!