It’s spreading

Concrete Architecture
Catherine Croft
Laurence King Publishing
£35

So began her obsession with modern architecture, and with concrete in particular.

After this personal insight, the tone changes and we move to an intelligent introduction on the history of the architectural use of concrete, and then to the meat of the book, which is a superbly illustrated survey of some very beautiful works of architecture built in concrete in a dozen countries over the past 10 years.

Like most books about concrete, this one is an apology. Its purpose is to persuade us that whatever the prejudices against concrete, it is nevertheless a material capable of sublime effects, of registering the maximum aesthetic responses, that it is perhaps the most truly architectural of all materials.

The book is a celebration of the renaissance of concrete that has been taking place over the past 15 years. Certainly, turning its pages leaves one in no doubt how very seductive the material can be made to look.

But how were the schemes shown selected? Croft does not tell us, so we will have to guess, and from this little exercise maybe we can learn something about the material’s current revival. After all, what we want to know is whether this revival is continuous with concrete’s history in the early and middle part of the last century, or whether we are now off on some wholly new trajectory.

The schemes in the book are divided, somewhat oddly, into ‘Home’, ‘Work’, ‘Play’ and ‘Landscape’. This immediately excludes civil engineering structures, such as airports, tunnels and bridges, which are, by and large, the places where the constructional technology of concrete has been pushed to its limits. (The only work that might fit into this category is Foster’s Canary Wharf Underground Station.)

The new concrete architecture shown here is emphatically not about longer spans, slender sections, stronger reinforcement – all the stuff that engineers get excited about. With a few exceptions, the schemes illustrated use concrete in a relatively traditional way as a material of mass, for defining spaces. What it seems to be valued for most are its qualities as a surface – and this is hardly new, having a clear relation to the work of 20th century masters like Louis Kahn.

In the section called ‘Home’, all the schemes are for private houses (such as Bearth and Deplazes’s family home in Switzerland, above right). No social housing schemes here. The 20th century notion that concrete was an emancipatory material, a means of social liberation, is strikingly absent. In this respect, concrete is clearly being used in a neo-modernist way: the style without the politics.

Now, while this may be an accurate reflection of the change in attitude towards concrete in the developed world, it simply won’t do when we turn to the second and third world. In China, Latin America and India, concrete is still very much a sign of social and economic transformation.

The fact that the selection includes only one building outside the developed world, Miguel Angel Roca’s School of Arts at Córdoba in Argentina, is indicative of the way the West has come to value concrete only for its aesthetic and not for its social qualities.

Croft acknowledges the fairly widespread dislike with which concrete has always been regarded, at least in northern Europe, and recognises that as far as its use in those countries is concerned, this is not something that can be dismissed as short-sighted, narrow-minded prejudice. Rather it has to be taken into account as part of what concrete is.

The fact that almost all the schemes shown employ large areas of exposed concrete is not necessarily a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ way to use concrete. It may well be that the obsession with showing as much concrete as possible will soon come to an end, and we will find ourselves, as we were not so long ago, covering it all up again.

Adrian Forty is professor of architectural history at the Bartlett. He is writing a book on concrete.