Concrete and Culture: A Material History

Concrete and Culture: A Material History By Adrian Forty London: Reaktion Press, 2012. 335pp. Black and white photographs, introduction, and index. £27.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1861898975.Concrete - a construction material made from a mixture of cement, water, and stone aggregate - was architecture's most transformative technological development in the twentieth century. As a result, with its broad use in buildings, houses, roads, and bridges, concrete has become the most commonplace of building materials. In Culture and Concrete: A Material History, Bartlett School of Architecture professor and architectural historian, Adrian Forty encourages readers to look beyond the routine for the embedded meanings in a material mostly taken for granted.Concrete technology advanced the material's structural and creative characteristics at an astounding rate. It was promoted as an alternative to wood, brick, and stone; and was sanitary, fireproof, and affordable. Whether cast on site or prefabricated in factories, concrete was accessible to the masses. At first, contractors and architects approached concrete like the materials it was attempting to replace. For instance, concrete blocks that replicated stone or brick, monolithic walls with timber or stone finishes, and faux weathering. Later, as concrete technology advanced, architects expanded the material's possibilities through bold experiments in structure and form.Concrete's sudden acceptance as a building material in both Europe and North America sets the groundwork for Forty's text: "Technical development of the medium and its extraordinarily rapid take-up by the construction industry outran the capacity to think about it: people had to accommodate something that had not been there before into their mental universe (p. 79)." The author incorporates the period writings of architects and builders, the promotion of the material in trade journals, and the architectural criticism of built projects as the basis for his text. Each of the book's ten chapters is dedicated to a cultural aspect of concrete: historical developments and the individuals advancing its use, the nature of concrete, geopolitics, politics, religious structures, memorials, labor, photography, and concrete's late twentieth century revival.Forty's work excels at exploring the material's cultural contradictions. Since concrete was simultaneously viewed as a natural or unnatural material, late nineteenth and early twentieth century architects struggled with accepting concrete as a replacement for wood, brick, and stone. The manmade product became available in the course of Modernism's dismissal of traditional trades. Concrete, considered a new material, offered innovative methods of construction, and structural abilities. In church construction, for instance, it allowed twentieth century designers to finally accomplish the soaring heights, light, and space desired by medieval church builders. Conversely, though, concrete is derived from natural products, and relies upon craft tradesmen for its formwork, mixing, and installation. Concrete's ease of use made it available to the most common builder. The material became the construction medium for the greatest designers of the past century, but as one of the "new technologies of poverty," it served, and continues to serve, the Third World (p. 40).Geopolitically, concrete was the medium expressed in a universal design language - the Modern Style - that threatened to consume the local vernacular. …