Contents Vainglorious utopianism
06-07
Sublime in scale and robust in detail
10-11
A medium without history
12-13
Hacked around shabbiness
14-15
The source of all social evil
16-19
Orgiastic celebration
20-21
Banal in its ubiquity
22-23
“ Concrete can be any shape that you can make moulds for, boxy or sculptural, rational looking or expressionistic.� Barnabas Calder
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Introduction Concrete remains to be the most wide-spread building material in the world. Reinforced concrete has completely transformed our cityscapes enabling bold and unusual structures, repetitive forms and endless variations. Concrete is a bit like Marmite when it comes public opinion: either loathed for being banal in its ubiquity, its inherent ‘greyness’ and the uncompromising brutalist structures that were built in the sixties and seventies or praised sometimes exactly for the same qualities. As a lover of concrete, I find beauty in its applications as it mouldable quality enables a plethora of structures ranging from small and large-scale buildings, interiors, whole urban landscapes, sculptures to street furniture. With my subjective selection of concrete objects, I would like to question and examine the sweeping generalisations and different opinions thrown around in public discourse based on some epithets encountered during my exploration of the subject.
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utopianism
Vainglorious
The post-war need for emergency reconstruction and the abundance of allocated public funding and resources brought about a major paradigm shift in London’s architectural landscape. The Architect’s department of the London County Council (LCC) became a hot-house for ambitious young architects who were ready to challenge what buildings meant to look like and how they were used. Designed by the architect Denys Lasdun, the National Theatre has divided public opinion since it opened in 1976. In 1989 it was voted ‘the runaway winner as the worst building in the country’ in a poll of Observer readers. According to an anecdote, a taxi driver once took Lasdun an alternative route not to have to see the National Theatre. Despite the criticisms and the thirteen years it took to realize, the last great building of public sector architecture may also be the most beloved Brutalist building in Britain. Lasdun viewed the project more like an urban landscape than just a building: “a single bed of sedimentary rock where public interior spaces merge with the terraces outside with the city as a backdrop.”
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“ A clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting.” Prince Charles
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Staircases at the National Theatre
Cavernous grandeur The National Theatre is not only a breathtakingly fine piece of abstract architecture from the outside but also painstakingly detailed and opulent space on the inside. The foyer resembles a complex cave system with vertical axes shooting up in an unexpected, irregular fashion. Symmetry is present but broken up frequently with cutaways in the decks. Lasdun designed the building by consistently taking the future users into consideration. Douglas fir was chosen for the wood texture for its resistance to distortion and beautifully flowing grain, wooden planks with different thicknesses were used to create a strong texture. The concrete craftsmen achieved an extremely high-quality finish by making sure the concrete was mixed precisely to have the same appearance and structural strength. Air bubbles were carefully eliminated by vibrating the concrete gently. When completed following an epic effort, the National Theatre has become a democratic space for high culture for all and its spaces are enjoyed by the public to this day.
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Columns in the foyer of the National Theatre
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Sublime
in scale
The transformation of Southbank At the end of the second world war, the Southbank where Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery now stand was little more than a derelict industrial wasteland despite its central location and magnificent views. The Festival of Britain in 1951 transformed the area but only for a short time, once the temporary structures were removed Royal Festival Hall was left on its own standing in an architectural vacuum. A new complex of buildings was commissioned 1961 with the construction work beginning in 1963. A group of rebellious young architects working for the London County Council were given the assignment to plan the new contemporary concert hall and art gallery and they have been granted nearly absolute freedom to experiment. The focus was predominantly placed on creating great interiors for the venues, where people could enjoy art and music.
Sprouting mushroom column, Queen Elizabeth Hall
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and robust
in detail
Bathroom interior with exposed concrete column in Queen Elizabeth Hall
“ People don’t fall in love with the buildings, they fall in love with the activities that are made possible because of the buildings.” Dennis Crompton
Power to the people Queen Elizabeth Hall is an undoubtedly thrilling mixture of octagonal mushroom columns, abstract geometrical shapes and waterfall-like terraces. The buildings that rise like ‘dirty icebergs’ are outstandingly detailed throughout. The concrete was poured Baltic pine moulds to replicate the rough texture of wood, which was a technically demanding and long process and required the work of hundreds of highly-skilled craftsmen. Crushed Cornish granite was chosen to complement the distinctive tactile experience of the complex. Since their opening in 1967, these spaces have always offered a diverse, progressive music and dance programme by pushing boundaries. The undercroft of the foyer is a popular location for skateboarders and graffiti artists and the complex also features a riverside roof garden and bar. Queen Elizabeth Hall have recently reopened after three years of refurbishment works funded by the Arts Council.
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A medium without history
The rapid emergence of concrete as the dominant building material in the 19th and 20th century meant that architects could break free from tradition, but the public and sometimes even historians struggled long after to make sense of it. The birth of new forms enabled by the mouldable nature of concrete left people puzzled as concrete buildings were not easy to catalogue in history books. The lack of a single morphology led to a hybrid ‘xenomorph’ identity. Paradoxically, a material without history became popular to build memorials to prolong human memory due to its indestructibility. Rachel Whiteread’s Turner Prize-winning artwork ‘House’ (1993) was cast inside an entire three-storey house at 193 Grove Road in Mile End – previously scheduled for demolition – deals with the themes of memory and absence of the people living there before the increasing gentrification of the area. Her similarly themed work Demolished (1996), a series of twelve duo-tone screenprints, was intended to serve as a record of the tower blocks and their residents and marked the end of the golden era of social housing.
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Demolished (1996) , Rachel Whiteread
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Hacked around
shabbiness
Concrete and sculpture Concrete seems to be the perfect choice for sculptures: as it is mouldable one can create any shape or form with it. However, apart from external adornments of brutalist buildings or socialist memorials where joints were preferred to be invisible, concrete was a marginal material until the late twentieth century. Considered as ‘inferior’ to stone or not natural sculptors did not embrace concrete which required a completely different process that lacked the act of carving and had to be cast in situ. However, sculpture’s long-standing conventions were turned upside down with the arrival of the minimalist movement emerging in Europe and North America in the 1960s. They also often delegated the production of the actual piece to others to get rid of the myth of the artist’s touch. Concrete ticked all these boxes: it was an industrial material with no morphology or distinct identity attached to it and it required skilled tradesmen to be produced. Minimalists believed that a piece of art should have its own reality rather than just being an imitation of some other object and the medium from which it is made should be part of the artwork’s own reality.
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“ Concrete is stone that we make, much more beautiful and more noble than natural stone.” Augustine Perret
Square the block by Richard Wilson RA is one of the rare concrete sculptures to be found in London at the corner of LSE where Sardinia Street joins Southhampton Row. Hanging unassumingly above street level, many passersby do not even notice the presence of the peculiar mass above. Unveiled in 2009, the sculpture “evokes a building in transition which appears to have been twisted by giant or tectonic forces”. Wilson reportedly said that the copied slices of the walls placed together “make no functional and architectural sense other than completing the corner.”
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The source of all
social evil
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“ The ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.� JG Ballard, High Rise
Optimistic hyperactivity Concrete has long been associated with the politics of the left, especially in eastern European countries after the second world war where the preference for concrete as a building material was more of an ideological choice. However, in western Europe the popularity of concrete was predominantly economically driven and the social housing provision helped social democratic governments maintain their electoral advantage. In Britain there was no dramatic difference between the motivations of the left and the paternalistic benevolence of the right wing tradition. There were differences in opinion whether public housing should be a standard option for middle income people or a relief for those who could not afford to buy or rent at an economically viable rate. Both sides agreed that building vast amounts of social housing was an urgent cause as post-war population explosion, rapid city growth created crowded slums with woefully inadequate conditions caused by coal fires, damp and the lack of running water. Stills from Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971), Thamesmead Estate
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Balfron Tower, Erno Goldfinger (1965)
Alton Estate, Roehampton (1958)
“ Like a huge and aggressive malefactor, the high-rise was determined to inflict every conceivable hostility upon them.� J G Ballard, High Rise
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The golden era of social housing Despite the disagreements over the role of the social housing provision more than four million properties were built by both consecrative and labour governments during the post war period council housing building boom. Reinforced concrete offered millions of people access to high standard housing with central heating, fitted kitchens, bathrooms with a hot water tap and flushable indoor toilets. In the beginning high-rise social housing block were celebrated by their residents creating the illusion that life was undergoing accelerated change for the better. New council housing was considered as a privilege for which to be grateful.
Falling out of love with concrete The confidence in concreted quicly evaporated due to the explosion at Ronan Point in 1968 which caused the collapse of the corner of the building which was made of improperly joined prericated concrete panels. Although it was an an isolated incident, the optimistic outlook on housing estates soon turned bitter for various reasons. Badly lit alleayways, lack of security and an increasing number of crimes committed on the estates gave concrete a bad reputation. Working class culture completely disintagrated by the 1980s, as people embraced the cosumerism and individualism of the Thatcher era with open arms, and dystopian depictions of social housing in film and art became dominant. The first residents of Thamesmead
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Seamless spatial continuity Roca London Gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects is located at Imperial Wharf. Roca is a leading international bathroom products brand and a manufacturer of ceramic wall and floor tiles. The gallery is one of the finest examples of the fluidity of forms concrete enables. Zaha Hadid purposefully made the movement of water the main theme of the design based on the building’s location and the business of the client. The indoor and outdoor spaces mimic the effects of water erosion, it looks as if water transformed the entire continuous space by flowing through the gallery without interruption, carving out dynamic spaces. The grey panels are cast from glass reinforced concrete (GRC) and blend in seamlessly with the elegant bathroom fixtures. The gallery has a very contemporary, futuristic feel but seems natural and organic at the same time. It is open to the public and regularly host architecture exhibitions.
Orgiastic
celebration
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“ Unlike so called ‘traditional’ materials, whose meaning used to be thought inherent and embedded in them, concrete is entirely fluid and mutable, made by circumstances of history.” Adrian Forty
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Banal in its
ubiquity
Tate Modern extension Tate Modern which is housed in the former Bankside Power Station designed by Giles Gilbert Scott has been the highlight of London’s cultural life for nearly two decades. In 2012 architects Herzog & de Meuron have uncovered and converted three underground concrete tanks to create new spaces for art and performance. The huge industrial cylinders that were previously used to store oil for the turbines at the time the gallery used to be a power station, but have been left empty since the building was decommissioned in 1981. The Tanks which were opened alongside the new extension, Switch House in 2016 increased Tate Modern’s size by 60% and provide more space for contemporary art, photography, film, video and performance. Herzog & de Meuron used concrete as a connective tissue to create generous and tactile interior spaces.
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Concrete tranquility A list of common criticisms mentioned regarding concrete that it is boring, grey and creates a bleak atmosphere. Nevertheless, a large number of art galleries around the world, including Tate Modern, make use of these characteristics to their advantage. Polished concrete floors and surfaces create quiet, neutral interiors where visitors can enjoy art without any distraction. The monochrome nature of concrete makes it a more conceptual medium which works perfectly with gallery interiors. Due to its monotone greyness it responds well to lighting and its even surfaces do not reflect or refract light. A beautiful array of shades can be created to achieve a calming, peaceful space, where one can relax and contemplate.
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“ 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.” Frank Lloyd Wright
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References Image credits Whiteread, R. (2018). Demolished. [image] Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/whitereaddemolished-66016 [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. A Clockwork Orange. (2010). [image] Available at: http://stills. notcoming.com/2010-03-10 [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. Balfron Tower. (n.d.). [image] Available at: http://dono5hgmjj8is. cloudfront.net/photos/balfron _ tower.jpg [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. Donat, J. (1960). The Watchers - Alton West Estate, Roehampton. [image] Available at: http://scavengedluxury. tumblr.com/post/150162827539/jamesusilljournalthe-watchers-detail [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. Tottenham & Wood Green Independent (2018). Thamesmead 50th anniversary: Photos show town in the 1970s. [image] Available at: http://www.thetottenhamindependent. co.uk/news/16167764.[Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. Hufton + Crow (n.d.). Roca London Gallery - Zaha Hadid Architects. [image] Available at: https://www.arch2o.com/roca-londongallery-zaha-hadid-architects/ [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. TimeOut London (2016). Have you seen the photos of the new Tate Modern building yet?. [image] Available at: https://www.timeout. com/london/blog/have-you-seen-the-photos-of-the-newtate-modern-building-yet-052416 [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018].
Books and websites Forty, Adrian. (2012). Concrete and culture. London: Reaktion Books. Calder, Barnabas. (2016). Raw concrete. London: William Heinemann. Mull, O. (2018). Brutalist buildings: National Theatre, London by Denys Lasdun. [online] Dezeen. Available at: https://www. dezeen.com/2014/10/06/brutalist-buildings-nationaltheatre-london-denys-lasdun/ [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. Smith, Dr. Otto Saumarez . (2018). Concrete Dreams - celebrating the brutalist buildings of Southbank Centre. [online] https:// www.southbankcentre.co.uk. Available at: https://www. southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/concrete-dreams-celebratingbrutalist-buildings-southbank-centre [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. Lse.ac.uk. (2009). LSE unveils new Richard Wilson sculpture, Square the Block - 09 - 2009 - News archive. [online] Available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/news/ archives/2009/09/RichardWilson.aspx [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018]. Frearson, A. (2017). The Tanks at Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron. [online] Dezeen. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2012/07/16/thetanks-at-tate-modern-by-herzog-de-meuron/ [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018].
Colophon Design and photography Anett Eszter Salyik Postgraduate Certificate Design for Visual Communication London College of Communication 2018 The photographs in this publication were taken by Anett Eszter Salyik unless otherwise stated. Typeface: Foundry Gridnik Printed and screw bound at the London College of Communication on Colorplan Cool Grey 135gsm. Cover: Colorplan Smoke 700gsm lasercut at LCC
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