Forty Concrete and Culture Intro

I started thinking about concrete in the latter stages of writing a previous
book, Words and Buildings, which was about how people talk about
architecture. Compared to the fugitive, ephemeral world of language, it
seemed a relief to turn to something that had substance, where there were
physical objects to see and touch. The novelist Graham Greene used to
distinguish between his serious works of fiction and those which he called
‘entertainments’: this book was to be an ‘entertainment’, giving me reason
to travel widely, and justifying a visit more or less anywhere. What I did
not anticipate were the intellectual difficulties I was letting myself in for –
although possibly at some subliminal level they were what had attracted me
all along. Like language, concrete is a universal medium, found in different
forms all over the world, and the problems concrete presents to study are
Copyright © 2013. Reaktion Books. All rights reserved.
not unlike those of language. Just as with language, it is no good looking at

any particular instance unless it can be related to the general condition of
the medium: the difficulty, with concrete as with language, is to discover
the rules for the general condition.
In so far as there are any accepted principles for concrete, they have
generally been assumed to belong with its technical properties, and indeed
the bulk of what has been written about concrete has come from engineers
and chemists. Most histories of concrete begin with the Romans and their
discovery of naturally occurring pozzolanic cements, and continue with
the rediscovery of concrete in the nineteenth century and the subsequent
invention of steel reinforcement. More interesting to me as a starting point
is the description by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia, first published in 1516,
of the houses of the Utopians:
Forty, Adrian. Concrete and Culture, edited by Adrian Forty, Reaktion Books, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1127624.
Created from usyd on 2017-03-08 18:05:44.
all the homes are of handsome appearance with three stories. The
exposed faces of the walls are made of stone or cement or brick,
rubble being used as filling for the empty space between the walls.
The roofs are flat and covered with a kind of cement which is cheap
but so well mixed that it is impervious to fire and superior to lead
in defying the damage caused by storms.¹
More had imagined, long in advance of its invention, a perfect, cement-

based building material that would transform people’s lives. Not only
does More’s description mark the beginning of a long-standing association
between concrete and utopian movements of all kinds, but it makes clear
that concrete has a metaphysics as well as a physics, an existence in the
mind parallel to its existence in the world. It is the place this medium
occupies in our heads that interests me more than its technical properties,
and that this book tries to give some account of.
At the period that I became interested in concrete, I was spending
a good deal of time in northern Italy and went to see a large number of
post-war buildings, many of them built of concrete. A high proportion
of these buildings used concrete in ways that can only be described as
‘decorative’, in that there was no particular structural reason for many
of the features, and they did not correspond to how, according to the
architectural orthodoxies that I was familiar with, concrete was supposed
to be used. I had read Peter Collins’s Concrete of 1959, for many years
the only substantial book about the modern architectural use of concrete,
and Collins had nothing whatsoever to say about these Italian buildings,
or about their non-conformist applications of the medium. That there
seemed to be such a large body of work lying off the edge of the map
seemed good reason to look further.
Surely there could be a history of concrete that did more than simply
repeat the doctrines of architects, most of which in any case, when examined
closely, turned out to be full of contradictions? Collins’s book, published
50 years ago, although informative about the early years of concrete, was
not a good model, since it was so determined to promote as an orthodoxy
the very particular approach to concrete of one individual architect, Auguste
Perret, whose Parisian apartment building at 25 bis rue Franklin, completed
in 1904, is often regarded as a prophetic work for architecture in concrete.
There were few exemplars for the sort of enquiry that I had in mind,
whether about concrete, or any other building material. Richard Weston’s
Materials, Form and Architecture (2003), an admirable study of architectural
ideas about materials, concentrates exclusively on the architectural perspective,
and treats concrete as only one among other building materials. Recent
surveys of brick and of corrugated iron are certainly global in their scope,
but are essentially gazetteers of notable examples.² Two exceptions, closer
to what I was looking for, and specifically about concrete, are the German
author Kathrin Bonacker’s Beton: ein Baustoﬀ wird Schlagwort (1996)
and the French historian Cyrille Simonnet’s Le Béton (2005), the latter
published well after I was into the project. Both have been valuable to me.
Many of Simonnet’s ideas coincided with my own, and reading him did
much to make my own thoughts clearer; his book, of which I have made
extensive use, has made my own a lot better than it would otherwise have
been. At the same time, the work of two other francophone historians,
Gwenaël Delhumeau on the Hennebique archive, and the Canadian
Réjean Legault on architectural attitudes towards concrete in France
in the early twentieth century, have both been exceptionally useful.
But I never wanted to write a book just about architects, nor one limited
to only one section of the world – part of the interest of concrete is that
it is so ubiquitous and, for the most part, so innocent of architecture.
Architects and engineers do not have a monopoly over concrete.
My wish was to think about concrete in all the diversity of its applications,
not just those controlled by architects and engineers, but to deal with
its presence everywhere, whether in the work of self-builders, sculptors,
writers, politicians, entrepreneurs, photographers or film-makers. For this
foolhardy undertaking, there were no precedents.
Concrete is often regarded as a dumb or stupid material, more
associated with death than life. Figures of speech in many languages take
advantage of this. In German, ‘Beton-Fraktion’ is used to mean an intrans-

igently stubborn political group; ‘Beton-Kopf’, literally ‘concrete head’, a
reactionary political opponent.³ In Sweden, Hjalmar Mehr, the powerful
Social Democrat leader of Stockholm’s city government responsible for the
drastic redevelopment of the inner city in the 1950s and ’60s, was referred
to as ‘betonsosse’, a ‘concrete socialist’.4 In French, the street slang ‘laisse
béton’, an inversion of ‘laisse tomber’, means ‘drop dead’. In Kate Grenville’s
novel The Idea of Perfection, the boringness of the main character is communi-
cated through his being a concrete engineer: ‘Concrete! ’, people would
exclaim at parties, ‘and their eyes would start to flicker past his shoulder,
looking for someone better to talk to’.5 In a book of improbable literary
titles, we find Highlights in the History of Concrete, which draws a smile
in a way that Highlights in the History of Oil, of Coal, of Steel or Glass
would not.6 And often, when I told people that I was writing a book about
concrete, they would raise an eyebrow as if to say, ‘you can’t be serious’.
These and many other negative associations interest me. A side of
concrete has always been repellent. ‘There is an undoubted prejudice against
the look and even the feel of Portland cement’, wrote the English journal
The Builder in 1876, and things have not changed much since, despite
there being a lot more of it about.7 An element of revulsion seems to be
a permanent, structural feature of the material. Much of what has been
written about concrete has tried either to ignore this, or to convince people
that their feelings are mistaken. It is not my purpose to try to explain away
the negativity that concrete attracts, nor to persuade people that what they
find ugly is really beautiful. This is not an apology for concrete, meant to
win people over to it. The many attempts, mostly originating from the
cement and concrete industries, to put a better face on concrete strike me
as misguided and pointless. There is more sense, I believe, in accepting
the dislike people have for concrete for what it is, and in finding room for
that repugnance within whatever account of concrete we are able to give.
This is not a history of a material in a way that a ‘history’ is normally
understood – the reader wanting that should turn to one of the various
existing historical studies.8 I find it more productive to think of concrete
as a medium than as a material, and the book is an attempt to make sense
of a medium that has a history, without itself being a history of the medium.
As a medium, through which all sorts of ideas, some of them architectural,
have been communicated, concrete has been resistant to understanding
largely on account of its tendency to slip between most category distinctions.
‘What then should be the Aesthetic of concrete?’, asked the American
architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1927,
Is it Stone? Yes and No.

Is it Plaster? Yes and No.
Is it Brick or Tile? Yes and No.
Is it Cast Iron? Yes and No.
Poor Concrete! Still looking for its own at the hands of Man.9
And Wright went on to call it a ‘mongrel’ material, hardly the most com-
plimentary description. The refusal of concrete to stay securely within any
one class is one of its recurrent features. From many of the usual category
distinctions through which we make sense of our lives – liquid/solid, smooth/
rough, natural/artificial, ancient/modern, base/spirit – concrete manages to
10
escape, slipping back and forth between categories. It is this resistance to
classification that is, I suggest, part of the cause of the repellence that people
feel for concrete; the book is organized around some of the polarities through
which our cosmology is arranged, and looks at concrete in terms of the part
it has played within these. To say that concrete has a tendency to ‘double’,
to be two opposite things at once, is not a particularly original observation.
Many other commentators on concrete have noticed the same thing, though
they have often been at a loss to know what to do with the insight. The
applications of concrete I most enjoy, and which strike me as most satisfying,
are those where there is a knowing recognition by the creator of the slip-
periness of concrete – of, as Wright recognized, its reluctance to stay firmly
within one or another conventional scheme of classification.
The book has turned out to be more about architects and architecture
than I would have liked. Yet there is a good reason for this, in that architects
have paid more attention to the interpretation of concrete as a medium
of culture than any other occupation. It is also in part because of my own
disciplinary affiliation as an architectural historian, which makes me more
familiar with architecture and architectural discourse than I am with some
of the other fields touched by concrete. True to the articles of the discipline
to which I was introduced by Reyner Banham, I have tried to avoid writing
about works that I have not seen. Yet this strict attention to the observation
of the physical need not limit us to the earthbound world of pure matter that
the medium’s French name, béton, might lead us to suppose is the extent of
its existence (béton, like bitumen, comes from the Old French betum, a mass
of rubbish in the ground). On the contrary, cursory inspection of even the
most debased lump of concrete rapidly takes us into a fugacious world of
beliefs and counter-beliefs, hopes and fears, longings and loathings.
11
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I started thinking about concrete in the latter stages of writing a previous

not unlike those of language. Just as with language, it is no good looking at

More had imagined, long in advance of its invention, a perfect, cement-

advantage of this. In German, ‘Beton-Fraktion’ is used to mean an intrans-

architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1927,

Is it Stone? Yes and No.

beliefs and counter-beliefs, hopes and fears, longings and loathings.

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