on site 35: the material culture of architecture

the case of Grenfell Tower, London, 2017

Stephanie White

What is it that turns a material fact into a rules-based credo: material into materialism, capital into capitalism; the transition hardens the options available to the initial, existential event, often turning it to dogma, doctrine, a fetish. This impulse is at its heart political — one can be feminine (a cultural construct in early twentyfirst century gender discourse), or one can be feminist, an entirely different political stance with different consequences and discursive options. So too with material: materials in architecture are just that: the materials used to make buildings, streets, cities, sometimes deliberate, often inadvertent and unavoidable.

Materiality, in architecture, describes material qualities: texture, colour, transparency — qualities of surface through which we interact with the materials that make up buildings: we touch the brick, check our hair in the glass, clean the moss off the concrete.

Materialism is the overweening desire to accumulate the materials that are considered of worth, whether or not they are useful. Worth, as materials go, becomes cultural, not the materials themselves, although they become marked by association. In so far as materialism was the accusation once hurled at the Joneses and all those who wanted to keep up with them, materialism in architecture occupies a particular niche: the choice of materials to raise the status of a building. This is the Grenfell Tower example. The materialism of the aluminum cladding was more than an earnest choice of insulation panel; it was meant to raise the status of a block of council flats to ameliorate its presence in a very expensive district, Regent’s Park. The materiality of the aluminum cladding was visual, flammable and inexpensive.

Grenfell Tower technical facts and political speculations: designed and built in 1967 in concrete, a marginal amount of insulation on the inside walls. Despite the valorous critical re-evaluation of Britain’s extensive postwar brutalist movement, housing towers such as Grenfell looked old and ugly. What was revealed in the weeks after the fire was the diverse and rich life contained between its old and ugly concrete floors and walls — not the tight old London working class communities that had gone through the Blitz and who until Windrush and the empire coming home were white and deeply rooted in London as a place. No, Grenfell 2017 was hugely diverse: the new London which because of the numbers of 1960s council towers still has economic diversity built into its heart. Nonetheless, Grenfell flats were cold, its architecture a failed socialist model: some new clothes were needed. This is where a discussion of the material culture of architecture becomes relevant. The 1967 architecture was straight-up modernism: concrete was exposed, potential fires were contained within each concrete unit, each unit had fresh air, long views and floorby-floor communities of similar economic circumstance. Come 50 years later, the model and the architecture has long been discredited. Its facelift solution was two-fold: increase insulation and make it look glossier by covering the outside with gleaming silvery aluminium insulated panels.

It is these panels which are the material expression of a cultural appreciation of architectural style; not architecture, but the look of architecture. That these panels were a cheapjack product is another consequence of ideological change where government is less responsible for the care of its citizens than in the postwar era, therefore there is less money allotted to housing, social welfare or community support. Government is concerned, however, with appearance. Things must look successful, not crumbling, to attract investment. Council towers all over Britain have been newly clad in insulated panels, many of which fail fire tests.

This is what material culture is: a sense of ourselves through the materiality of our choices. It isn’t about art, or architecture, or practices deemed progressive, or even conservative in the sense of conserving what one has. It is about both inadvertent and conscious practices that establish stature and identity, for better or worse.

Grenfell Tower before the addition of insulated aluminum cladding. Designed in 1967 by Nigel Whitbread for Clifford Wearden Associates,built 1972-4.

www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/ grenfell-tower-before-fire-tore-13189075

Grenfell Tower renovation, 2012-16, Studio E Architects

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/all-warnings-fell-deafears-10620149

Grenfell Tower cladding after the fire of 14 June 2017

theconversation.com/fact-check-is-the-type-of-cladding-usedon-grenfell-tower-actually-banned-in-britain-79803

Stephanie White is the editor of On Site review