Concrete
B 3.2
formwork and powerfully highlight the material of the facade and interior. One building in which concrete was expertly used in the facade’s modelling is the Goethe anum in Dornach (1928) by Rudolf Steiner, although building such plastic, organic designs involves a great deal of work and sophisticated artisanal formwork techniques.
B 3.3
B 3.4
B 3.5
108
In the 1950s concrete became a mass-market building material, used in all kinds of con struction tasks. One main driving force was Le Corbusier, who sought to highlight concrete’s immediate, “raw” materiality – “Béton brut”. He used it skilfully as a design medium in relief and /or plastic facade surfaces, such as the Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette priory (1960) in Éveux near Lyon (Fig. B 3.2). While Swiss firm Atelier 5 used raw exposed concrete for (small) residential buildings in building the Halen housing estate near Bern (1961), Louis Kahn chose very smooth surfaces for the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla (1965). Kahn was also the first to structure concrete facades along orthogonal lines by using shadow joints and carefully positioning formwork ties, making the facades’ production process legible. In the 1960s and 1970s many architects increasingly used the options concrete offered for moulding exterior walls and buildings and the various design possibilities of its surfaces. Unique buildings from this period include the Pilgrimage Cathedral in Neviges (1968) and the Town Hall (Rathaus) in Bensberg (1969) by Gottfried Böhm. These buildings – especially the church – model a plastic, rugged structure with powerful, opaque surfaces whose fine texture of formwork structures prevents them from appearing monotonous (Fig. B 3.3). Another very plastic use of concrete as a material is evident in an office building by Barbosa & Guimarães Arquitectos in Porto (2009) (Fig. B 3.5). Here polygonal facade surfaces determine not only the building’s outside appearance but also its interior spaces. While Carlo Scarpa explored concrete’s mouldable qual ities in an almost (skilled) craftsmanly manner, especially in the Brion family monument in San Vito d’Altivole near Asolo (1975), Paul Rudolph
used industrial textured formwork for the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University in New Haven (1958 – 64) (Fig. B 3.1, p. 107). The fluted profiling of its coloured surfaces, alternating smooth grooves with rough, broken piers, creates a sophisticated play of light and shade. Adding locally available materials to concrete and/or structuring damp surfaces can open up further design options, as Auer + Weber demonstrate in their ESO Hotel at Cerro Paranal (2001) (see p. 123) and Herzog & de Meuron at the “Schaulager” art storage facility in Basel (2003) (Fig. B 3.8). More recently architects have often sought to express the impression of a monolithic construction method, down to the last detail. The avoidance of any construction joints, dispensing with visible formwork ties, and structural components with extremely pared-down cross sections and novel appearances has subjected this high-performance material to enormous technical challenges. Prefabrication
Producing concrete on a building site has structural and technical disadvantages, so efforts have been made to break structures down into similar, transportable elements that can be serially produced in prefabrication plants. These make it possible to work in any weather and ensure higher quality and greater precision in production and higher standards in surface finishes. The first field factory for precasting concrete elements opened in France in the early 1890s. In 1896 French stonemason François Hennebique made the first building prefabricated in a series, using a transportable cubicle made of 5 cm thick, reinforced concrete slabs. From 1920 assembly-based construction methods using steel-reinforced concrete became increasingly important. Architects like Ernst May, who applied a system of wall blocks of various sizes that he developed in a series of housing estates in Frankfurt am Main (Praunheim, 1927), and Walter Gropius, who used a small-format construction method and hollow slag concrete blocks for the Dessau-Törten estate (1927), worked on con-
