COR-TEN Steel - A Trigger or A Stagnation

Key Words

COR-TEN Steel

Australian Center of Contemporary Arts

Human Exceptionalism

Performative New Materialism Material Matters

Linjing Zhang 860179

Abstract

COR-TEN Steel is the trade name of the weathering steel, which was first produced by United States Steel in the 1930s.1 It is a low-alloy steel that was initially used for the support structures (Corten B) of rail way bridges and was first used (Corten A) by architects in 1960s. 2The original idea behind the creation of resistant steel was that it did not require much maintenance. It was able to protect itself from the falling rain by a process of rusting on its outer skin, which protected in the process its interior.3 Architects preferred it because the colour of it blended better with nature and requires low maintenance. Weathered steel is primarily made from iron ore, a material that has been around since the birth of the earth. Initially, iron was refined to produce steel that transformed the world from the industrial revolution onwards. Iron accompanied human development, became an excluded being when human exceptionalism arose. The emergence of human exceptionalism drove the emergence of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene is a name proposed for a geological era that registers the massive impacts made by human industrial activity. New theories, including the environmental humanities, posthumanism and new materialism seek to reassess the impact of humans at a planetary scale. These shifts are also reflected in the use of Corten steel by architects, from the refinement of metals to make factory machines, weapons and transport structures, to the use of weathering steel in architectural design. When architects use weathering steel in architecture, I argue, it is because they are trying to integrate the building into its natural environment. Corten steel does not need to be painted, it simply stands there, reacting to the wind, the rain, the air and changing colour. Wood Marsh, an Australian architecture company, designed the ACCA (Australian Centre of Contemporary Arts) cladding by Corten steel. It was designed not only as a building but also as a sculpture that attract people and cooperate well with the sky in photos.

This essay follows the journey of the weathering steel from the original extraction of steel in Ngwenya Mine, to the process of making Australian Steel (Steel supplier for ACCA) weathered steel. The use of Corten steel will be studied in a specific architectural example, ACCA, Melbourne, designed by Wood Marsh architects. I will discuss two questions by borrowing the ideas of the three key points of new materialism from "What is new materialism"4 and the Katie Lloyd Thomas’ ideas of form and matter. Can Corten steel brings people to move into the era of the new materialism, and how? If the specification of Corten steel brings us closer to natural environments or further away?

1. “What is Corten Steel?” Distributor of Corten Steel, 13 March 2022, https://www.corten.com/what-is-corten-steel.html.

2. “Why Corten Steel Is An Environmental Nightmare,” GREEN FUTURE, 25 March 2022, https://greenfuture.io/sustainable-living/corten-steel/#:~:text=In%201964%2C%20Eero%20Saarinen%20was,Deere%20Headquarters%20 in%20Moline%2C%20Illinois.

3. Patricia Ruiz Galende, CorTen steel: a solution to atmospheric degradation in acid and marine environments (Máster Universitario en Gestión del Paisaje. Patrimonio, Territorio y Ciudad, 2018), 1.

4. Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan & Thomas Nail (2019) WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?, Angelaki, 24:6, 111-134

History of Corten | Material Matters (Form hide the material)

United States Steel, in the 1930s, first produced COR-TEN Steel.5 The generic name of the Corten is weathering steel. The material was first created because it could get along with the natural environment, change and protect itself from rain. Meanwhile, corten steel’s presence eliminates the requirements of painting on the building and construction material and protecting the environment from the pollution of some painting materials.6 It makes you want to say what material of inner core power this is. When corten B appeared for use in bridge and railway construction in the civil engineering field in the 1960s7, the material was given great attention to itself. When the material began to be used in architectural design, a different direction began to emerge with the advent of corten A. At the same time, however, some designers were attracted by the colour of the exterior and began to hide the material itself to give it meaning in form, and take the privilege of the form upon the material.

To expand, if the emergence and use of corten B is an attempt to make the form stop obscuring the inherent power and nature of the material and to make the material, man and nature work together as equal triads to allow the material to react internally to protect itself and to shape itself. Then the architects’ use of corten a can be critically described as the designer's mind obscuring the inherent power of the material itself. Further, the emergence of corten B allows us to see a gradual move away from human exceptionalism and a blurring of the binary between human and material, human and nature and material and nature. However, how the architect approaches and uses corten A puts the designer in a position of dominance and puts us again in the Anthropocene era.

Is Corten a trigger to take us towards new materialism (especially the performativity materialism), or is it stagnation in the Anthropocene era?

5. “History of Corten”, All Steel Fabrications LTD, accessed May 2022, http://allsteelsculpture.com/history-of-corten-sculptures#:~:text=In%20 the%201930s%2C%20the%20United,America's%20marshalling%20yards%20and%20collieries.

6. “What is Corten Steel”, Corten.come, accessed May 2022, https://www.corten.com/what-is-corten-steel.html.

7. “History of Corten.”

8. Katie Lloyd Thomas, “Introduction: Architecture and Material Practive”, in Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice, ed. Katie Lloyd Thomas (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 2.

Theories and Corten Steel | Human Exceptionalism | Performative New Materialism

Human Exceptionalism and Corten Steel

The Anthropocene Epoch is part of the Quaternary Period of the Phanerozoic Eon’s Cenozoic Era, and we were stepped into this epoch.9 In these times, humans desire for geological riches leaves large craters with devastating colours and shapes worldwide. The iron ore mine pit of the corten steel’s raw material is typically one of the scars humans left on the planet.

Performative New Materialism and Corten Steel

New materialists challenge human exceptionalism by pursuing the recognition of the intrinsic activity of matter.10 The performative new materialism is one type of new materialism, which was seen as the future direction of new materialism. What makes this type of materialism different from other new materialisms is that the performativity new materialism believes there is inherent entanglement between ontology and epistemology.11 My understanding is that there is an interaction between the movement of particles within matter and the activity of humans and other matter outside. Weathering steel, as a material that protects its structure by rusting through internal chemical reactions, is well worth discussing and understanding through the framework of performative new materialism. Thus, the exploration of if the corten steel is a trigger to bring humans one step further into the new materialism will be based on the three main criteria of performative new materialism.

The three main criteria of the performative materialism concluded by Gamble, Hanan and Nail are:

“1) The activity of matter itself must be pedetic, or characterised by indeterminacy… 2) Matter must be an ongoing iterative process… 3) Matter must be fully relational and immanently self-caused.”12

The exploration will follow the trip of the corten steel on the Australian Centre of Contemporary Arts from the raw material to the building.

UNWRAP - THE TRIP OF THE CORTEN STEEL...

UNWRAP - THE TRIP OF THE CORTEN STEEL...

Trip | Ongoing iterative process | Pedesis | Relation

Mining | Extraction

Corten steel is relatively new; its journey can be traced back to its raw material, iron. Iron existed in the universe before the advent of humans and even before the Earth was formed. After countless cosmic explosions and regenerations, iron and carbon entered small stars and other planetary bodies, where they underwent numerous violent collisions and eventually became the rocks and metals of the Earth.13

The first stop on our protagonist's journey, the corten steel used in ACCA's buildings, was one of BHP's (BHP Billiton Ltd) iron ore mines in Western Australia. Iron ore has a long life and is the first significant substance that makes up corten steel. BHP is the company that developed the corten steel used for the building cladding of ACCA and owns five iron ore mines in the Shire of East Pilbara, Western Australia.14 It is hard to tell which iron ore mine is the specific starting point of our protagonist. The first step of mining is blasting and digging up the bear iron ore stone from the iron ore mine pit, which is the step that causes the craters-like scars in Western Australia.15 The rest of the mining and extraction processes are concentration, pelletising, sintering and removal of impurities in pig iron. Those processes require a lot of energy to generate heat and emit harmful gases, which are also highly damaging to the environment. Everything that happens in this process, inside and outside the iron ore, is passive and manipulated by humans, which is not in line with the new materialist idea of treating all living and non-living things as equal substances. It causes the binary between human and nature and human and matter.

13. Jonathan Schifman, "The Entire History of Steel", Popular Mechanics, published July 9, 2018, https://www.popularmechanics.com/ technology/infrastructure/a20722505/history-of-steel/.

14. BHP, “Iron ore”, BHP, accessed May, 2022, https://www.bhp.com/what-we-do/products/iron-ore.

15. “Iron”, Australian Government Geoscience Australia, accessed June, 2022, https://www.ga.gov.au/education/classroom-resources/minerals-energy/australian-mineral-facts/iron.

UNWRAP - THE TRIP OF THE CORTEN STEEL... UNWRAP - THE TRIP OF THE CORTEN STEEL...

Production | Corten

The second stop of the trip was the production process that happened in the Australian Steel’s manufacture in Braeside, Victoria, Melbourne.16 The iron and steel industry is the largest global source of CO2 emissions and the second-largest industrial consumer of energy. Obviously, corten steel's extraction and production process bring humans away from nature.

The manufacturing process of weathering steel is similar to that of other types of steel materials in that the molten iron is first converted into steel in an oxygen furnace. Then other alloying elements are added, such as copper (Cu), nickel (Ni), phosphorous (P) and chromium (Cr).17 When the corten steel is produced, a manual process was used to speed up the rusting of the COR-TEN Steel, completing a process that would have taken six years to complete in a few months.18 This is a process of artificial intervention in the inner material action of the material, which, while focusing on the chemical reactions and changes inherent in the material, also reflects the quest for material appearance.

However, this artificial involvement only accelerates the rusting of the corten steel to produce a red patina surface; it does not interfere with the exact process of reaction between the metal elements within the weathering steel and the external environment, and this process will continue to repeat itself even after the weathering steel has been used in construction. Thus, although reproducing weathering steel still gives man the prerogative of absolute domination over matter, the process of weathering of corten steel embodies the cooperation of material with man and other matter in the new materialism.

According to Barad's experiments, we would not be able to observe the movement of atoms without the involvement of humans, so presumably, corten would not exist without human involvement.19 Without the accelerated rusting process, corten would not be able to be used in architectural design. Whereas according to Kirby's theory, humans and cultures belong to nature, and nothing in the world is an exception, it might be argued that if humans and materials are seen as equals, the human activity of producing materials is a process of humans acting on materials.20 In this sense, whatever humans do, humans are in the new materialism. Yet human production of the matter is itself a form of control, and humans remain in power; the material itself cannot act on humans.

Ongoing iterative process of rusting.

Ongoing iterative process of rusting.

Relation of inherent chemical composition of corten steel.

Relation of inherent chemical composition of corten steel. Relation between inherent chemical composition, alloying elements and human.

Relation between inherent chemical composition, alloying elements and human.

16 “About Us”, Australian Steel, accessed May, 2022, https://www.australiansteel.com.au/about-us/.

17. Masteel, “Choosing Between A/B Corten Steel”, Masteel, published May 2, 2019, https://masteel.co.uk/ news/choosing-corten-steel/.

18. Central Steel, “The Patina Timeline: The Weathering Process of Corten Steel”, Central Steel Service, Inc., published July 6th, 2020, https://www.centralsteelservice.com/the-patina-timeline-the-weathering-processof-corten-steel/.

In this process of producing corten, we can hardly escape from human exceptionalism, so what if we look at the materials that have been made and used?

19. Gamble, Hanan and Nail, “What is New,” 122.

20. Gamble, Hanan and Nail, “What is New,” 124.