The Architect's Journal - 11/04/02

A drop of the Hard stuff, 11/04/02, Jeremy Melvin

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I should assure readers that the tone of this review has nothing to do with the threatened exclusion of 'journalists who write negative reviews' from the prize draw for a free trip to Concrete, Washington.

Quite rightly, there is no concomitant promise to favour those who write positive reviews. After all, where would we be if jour-nalists could be bought with a pair of economy-class tickets to the Pacific North-west, seven nights in the local Howard Johnson and meal tickets for Roy Rogers? And besides, entry to the draw requires a business card which, not having a business, I do not have.

Business, as it turns out, is the operative word. For although the exhibition attempts to chart some sort of historical arc of the use of concrete, from the Pantheon to John Outram's 'blitzcrete' and Willy Guhl's 'loop furniture', the overwhelming impression is of manufacturers' samples. Virtually none of the catalogue entries are free of an induce-ment to look at a website or phone an information line. Yet the exchange of commercially-weighted information is an essential part of the construction industry and, one hopes, architects have become adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Wheat is an appropriate metaphor because, despite the claims to show that concrete is the invisible support for modern life, this aspect remains in a murky nether-world. But several objects leap out like fecund ears against the grey-and-aggregate-studded background. Among them are cement manufacturer John Bazley White's Gothic Revival, almost-completely concrete house in Swanscombe of 1835, and Herzog & de Meuron's Rudin House of 1997, a pared down essence of house in the most elemental of materials.

Alongside are buildings already engraved in the Canon of concrete - Perret's Notre Dame du Raincy (see picture), Lubetkin's Penguin Pool and Kahn's Salk Institute. But most extraordinary of all is the section on concrete in the home. In addition to GuhI's furniture (almost Ron Arad-esque in its flowing forms) are jewellery, candlesticks and kitchenware. And in our slightly schizoid world where refined peasantware, be it culinary, domestic or sartorial, passes for quality, this does just enough to suggest that concrete really has passed from utility to luxury. At least it would not look out of place in a Shoreditch loft.

In parallel with the idea of concrete as a style prop is the story of its technical devel-opment. This requires a different mode of telling, which the exhibition manages quite well. Much of the Roman skill in concrete was lost until the 18th century, when John Smeaton devised a cement strong enough to be used in the underwater foundations of the Eddystone lighthouse. Develop-ments followed throughout the 19th century until Francois Hennebique worked out how to use reinforced frames for multi-storey structures.

It was engineers and industrialists, not architects, who made these discoveries, so concrete has a parallel story to those other materials, such as iron, steel and porcelain, where the Enlightenment marriage of philosophy and natural sciences was an essential component in the industrial developments. To this extent there is some justification in the organisers' claim that concrete has made much of our modern world possible'.

This raises a point which the exhibition could have developed further. Concrete, more than any other construction material, spans the spectrum of Modernity, from the prosaic and invisible road or tunnel building to the most extraordinary, iconic forms of Modernist architecture - Ronchamp, or Niemeyer's cathedral in Brasilia. It is the substance that has made the modern world possible and called forth the most imagina-tive innovations in architectural design.

Curiously, for an historical period which has come to see itself as fragmented, illusory and intangible, its most appropriate build-ing material is concrete, with all the word has come to mean. How Post-Modern, you might say. Now, about those air tickets...

Jeremy Melvin is a writer and teaches at South Bank University.