Anatole de Baudot

Transcription

>> Well, let's start with a statistic, there are around three tons of concrete produced every year for each person on the planet. And there is no other commodity that is produced in such quantity apart from water, it's second only to our consumption of water, consumption of concrete. This extraordinary statistic gives rise to all sorts of questions, like where does it all go? Where did it all come from? And perhaps where did your three tons of concrete go last year? And I'm not going to try and answer that, but what I am interested in because I am a historian is where, in a sense, we fit all this into our minds. If we think back a little way, concrete wasn't there, it's a relatively recent arrival in our world. And very briefly, concrete was discovered by the Romans, the art of making it was lost, it was reinvented in the early Nineteenth Century and then in the 1880s and 1890s, people discovered how to use metal reinforcement so as to make it into an effective building material. And this is a building from about 1900, this is a concrete building that is -- looks pretty familiar and it shows you all the main ingredients of concrete, that is to say, sand here, sand and gravel, there are some bits of steel lying on the ground here. There's no cement visible, but then the other ingredient of concrete is human labor. So it's something that's made out of these various components, sand and aggregates, cement and steel and human labor. Now, as I said, this is a relatively recent arrival in our world and what I'm interested is in how we accommodate this into our minds, where do we fit this material that is now so abundant, but which a century or a little more ago wasn't there at all? How do we find room for it in our heads? Now most of the discussion about concrete that has taken place has been around its technical properties and these are without question, interesting but my point of view is that as well as having a physics, concrete also has a metaphysics. That is to say, there is this question of how we make sense of this new ingredient in our world. And so that's the question that I'm interested in and I'm going to suggest to you a few thoughts about how one might approach this problem. How do we make sense of a material which is now I say present which was not there not so long ago. My perhaps kind of starting point for thinking about this is a quotation from Thomas More's Utopia, which was written in 1516 and he describes the houses of the Utopians. And he, as you can see, describes how the walls are made and then he goes on the roofs are flat and the cupboards were the kind of cement which is cheap, but so well mixed that it is impervious to fire and superior to lead in defying the damage caused by storms. Now this is interesting because he had conceived in his mind a material which did not yet exist, this is almost 400 years before concrete becomes readily available as a building material. Somebody has imagined such a substance and it's this imagining which is, to me, is, is intriguing and interesting and which I want to try and, and unpack. But let me say a couple of other things which are important to what I, I've got to say. And the first of these is that one of the features of concrete is that it's everywhere. It's a universal material. It doesn't, so to speak, have a home. It can't be located as belonging here or in the United States or in China or in Latin America or down the road, it's everywhere. It, it's not locatable in the sense as having an origin, a place of origin. It's something that's everywhere. And this is [inaudible] it's something that makes it problematic to think about, how do you think about something that isn't immediately locatable? The second thing that is, to me, is interesting and is part of what I've been trying to think about is the fact that concrete has a bad name. A lot of people don't like it very much. It's -- it, it has both an element of it that is repulsive and which people would rather not have near them. And this, again, is, is intriguing because most of what's been written about concrete has generally been trying to persuade people that what they find ugly is actually beautiful. It's been conceived in terms of, of, of an apology, if you like, for concrete. Now I'm not interested in doing that, I don't want to do something which is an apology for concrete. My interest in it is in the fact that precisely that it is repellant to so many people. And yet at the same time, it, it is so much, it's so necessary to our way of life, to our world. And it's so passionately liked indeed, by many architects and engineers who will get very excited about it. So, to me, the, the conundrum about it is that we have something which is both liked and appalled at the same time and that, to me, is, is question which is interesting and which I [inaudible] back and throw some light on. Now, in thinking about this, what I've done is to develop, to think about it in terms of, of a schema, which takes a series of oppositions and these are some of the sorts of things which I've been interested in investigating. And in each case, what I would point out and emphasize that concrete is both one thing and another thing at the same time. It often is one thing, but it also its opposite and so we can say that it's a modern material, it's an advanced material, but at the same time, it's un-modern and it's backward and so on. And what I've done in the research that I've done is really to go through a series of these sorts of polarities and try and unpack what is going on there. I'm going to talk about a few of these now, we've only got half an hour or so. So I'm, I'm not going to give you the whole story, but I'll just talk about one or two of them to give you a sense of the way I've been thinking about it. Well, let's take this first one, the modern and the un-modern. We have something which is, as I say, both, both advanced, but also in a sense, backward. And this is indeed contained within the various names that the medium carries. So in the English language, it's known as concrete and concrete implies something which is -- belongs to the world of the mind. Concrete, as opposed to abstract by talking about philosophical categories here. Concretion, the bringing together of particles to make matter. Again, an essentially kind of mental way of thinking about it. The alternative term for it, in which -- by which it's known in French and German is beton comes from a completely different source. Its root is an old French word, betun which means a mass of rubbish in the ground. And the word bitumen comes from the same root. So it clearly has a much more earthbound kind of origin if you take the French term. Now this, again, these -- this contrast kind of underlies a bit of what I want to talk about. Let's take this as an illustration, this is a permanently incomplete house in Crete and you can see here something of a building which is both modern and also un-modern. The lower part of it which is complete could be a building of more or less any time, but then above it, there is a clearly modern structure and one might say is this building dreaming of a modern past [inaudible]. What is going on here? But it illustrates rather well this capacity of concrete to be both things at once, is something that is both modern and un-modern. Normally speaking, we think of concrete in terms of its modern characteristics. This is a nice a little quote from an essay by George Orwell, and you can see that he situates concrete along with all that modern stuff against on the other side war and nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets and horses. It's not that stuff, but what I want -- I'm interested is in actually it's got a bit of that stuff in it as well. Okay. Now most of the time, a great deal of effort is put by everybody concerned with concrete into convincing us that it is indeed a progressive material. And so buildings like this, this is work of Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect, clearly drawing attention to the fact that we are using a medium here, which is progressive. It belongs to the future. This is a modern material. It's doing things which could not easily be done with any other medium. And there's, the tendency of the industry has been want -- to want to emphasize the essential modernity of the stuff that we're, we're using. But at the same time, there's an awful lot of concrete used all over the world that doesn't have this characteristic. So we look here, this is a building under construction in a shanty town in Peru and here concrete is not being used in any way that could be described as being particularly modern. It's just an ordinary building material. It's, in a sense, it's un-modern. And this, in a way, is the more general application of concrete throughout much of the world. So when we see it, tend to think of it as being progressive, we must realize that that's been loaded onto it, that this is a particular attribute which a number of architects sort of colluded, if you like, with the concrete industry in order to convince us of. But actually most of the time, in many parts of the world it's used in a way which isn't really particularly modern, one man with a cement mixer can produce things like this without any great difficulty. And there's nothing really particularly modern about them, it's just a generic way of building stuff. To me, one of the things that's interesting is the way in which sometimes architects have managed to recognize that concrete as a medium has both these characteristics, that is both advanced, but also not advanced. And a nice example of this is this building, which is the Unite d'Habitation at Marseille, Le Corbusier's great housing block at Marseille, seen here under construction in 1950. Originally, this building was going to be built in steel, but steel shortages caused them to decide to build it in concrete and it was built in concrete, but not very well built in concrete. And it's actually full of defect in it. And Le Corbusier's response to this when he saw it was not dismay, but in fact he said, oh this is pretty good, it's -- actually it's rather magnificent that it has all these defects in it. And kind of accommodated this and was prepared to accept this and see that this, you know, well on the one hand, this is clearly a piece of modern architecture. On the other hand, it had something about it which was quite atavistic and primitive and it's that, you know, combination which is, is intriguing. And to take another example of this where this is even more explicit, this is a building in Brazil, this is the faculty of architecture at the University of Sao Paolo and this is building which you see it is quite puzzling because it seems to be an enormous concrete box which sits on some very spindly little legs and it's, it's, it's a remarkable structure because you, you have all this up here and then very little supporting it. And if you look at it from the side under the colonnade here, you can see that at seen at certain angles, these columns diminish down to almost kind of needle points which are holding up this great big concrete box on top. Now this is a building in which the architect Vilanova Artigas (this was built in the '60s) was, I think, aware, was aware of and intentionally wanted to incorporate something of both the primitive and the technically advanced in this building. And this was a reflection in a way on Brazil's economic and social state, and as he saw it, the upper part of this building, in a way, is representative of Brazil's lack of advancedness. This is what Brazil could easily produce because of its abundance of unskilled labor. It's possible to produce bad concrete in endless quantities. The quantity, abundance of labor in Brazil means that this is not difficult to do. So this, in a way, is one Brazilian product, but beneath it, supporting it, is another Brazilian product, which is technical know-how and ingenuity. And the skill which engineered this particular construction with these extraordinarily slender columns, exemplifies, if you like, Brazil's other resource, which is, is technical expertise. So this is a combination of two things, of on the one hand, an advanced technical know-how, but on the other hand, manual backwardness of, of an economy which is undeveloped. So this, this, to me, is intriguing, this ability to combine the two in at once. Let's move to another thing. Let's look at the natural and the unnatural. Now most of the time, concrete is blamed or held responsible for covering over or nature, for everything that's wrong is, is, is the, the, the, the overlaying of nature by concrete. Occasionally nature gets its own backers here, and takes its revenge on concrete. But most of the time, this is the -- what is seen as being the, the, the, the normal state that nature is lost, as it were, to concrete, with concrete things over which is taken as, as meaning that, that we lose nature. Now this sense in which concrete is, is seen as anti-natural, or if you like, an unnatural material goes together with the way in which it's made, it's produced, it's a synthetic medium. It seems not to belong to nature and a lot of the antagonism towards concrete is kind of collected together in these feelings that people have that it is in some way or another, an unnatural substance. It's not quite as clear cut as this -- though as this, I mean it's more complicated, but just let me say first of all, that an awful lot of work in concrete has been put into naturalizing the medium. So this is a public lavatory outside Notre Dame in Paris, which you see, can see has been made to resemble a wooden structure with a thatched roof on it. This is a banal, in a way stupid example, but it, it illustrates what I, you know, is a common feature of concrete is -- it's treated as if it, it should be in some way, made like nature. And commonly what happens is it's either made to resemble stone, sometimes timber, sometimes other things. So, as here, steel. This is the Lloyd's Building in London. It's a concrete building, but it's made to appear as if it's a steel building. So the use of concrete is full of these attempts to make it be something which is not so unnatural, these attempts to naturalize it. Okay. Now the second kind of aspect of the unnaturalness of concrete or perceived unnaturalness of it is to do with the way in which it decays. And it decays in a way which is often not the same as other sorts of materials. And it's, as you can see here, this is the Hayward Gallery in London, its cracks, its effloresces salts come out of he surface of it. The steel inside it corrodes and so on. And these, this way of decaying is perceived as being non natural. Now this immediately asks, well what is a natural form of decay if this is not natural? And it's not easy to answer that, but I think what often happens is that people think about the way in which the human body and skin and so on, decays as being the model for how things should decay. And something which doesn't quite conform to that is then perceived as nonnatural. Anyway. This is a discussion one could take further. But I wanted to look at something else in this discussion about nature and the unnatural and this, this is a still from a film called Point Blank, which some of you may know, which was made in the 1960s with Lee Marvin as the lead character here and he's standing on the bed of the Los Angeles River, which was a, an extraordinary project which was undertaken to, to channel the Los Angeles River which had flooded parts of lower Los Angeles previously in the century. Now a lot of this film, Point Blank, takes place against backgrounds of concrete and one asks, well what is the concrete doing there. Well, the answer to this, I think, is the concrete in this film, as in many other films, provides an alternative to the desert. That in the desert in the western, the, the desert is the place where men are tested, where people are stretched to their limits. And in this film, in Point Blank, we have no desert, but we have a lot of concrete environments. And these concrete environments provide the similar points of testing. This is the ultimatum of, the finale of the film where he's, he's going to pick up the money which he's, believes he's been entitled to. He finally finds, he finds it. The parcel contains not $92,000 as he'd been led to expect, but a bundle of blank sheets of paper and he kicks it into the river and it floats away. But it's, to me, what's interesting about this is creating a new kind of nature out of this apparently unnatural medium. And people have called this sometimes urban nature, a second nature, but it's become a medium which has, has -- substitutes for traditional notions of nature in many cases. And this is a theme which one could pick up and, and develop and take further. The third of these oppositions which we might briefly look at is between the historical and the unhistorical, that normally speaking, concrete is thought of and treated by many architects and engineers as a medium that doesn't have a history. It belongs to the future, not to the past. Now this is puzzling because there's also another version that you can develop of this and you could say that what concrete does, as in this building here, this is the church at Raincy designed by Auguste Peret, built in the 1920s. What concrete does is to allow architecture to fulfill its destiny. This is, if you, you might say, a Gothic building, more perfect than any Gothic building ever could be. But what concrete allowed architects to do was to make possible or made possible for them what had been impossible to Medieval builders. So you've got this extraordinary church, which the entire external surface is a skin of stained glass. And this indeed, is what, you know, Gothic architects would have liked to do, but weren't able to do. So on the one hand, you can say, well actually concrete is, is the material that allowed architecture to fulfill its destiny. But on the other hand, a lot of builders and architects have used concrete as if it had no past. So this is the TWA Terminal at, at JFK Airport in New York, an extraordinary object this - and clearly what the architect Saarinen was doing was trying to conceive of something such as had never been before. This is the interior of it here. So there's this kind of conundrum which, which surrounds, particularly the way in which architects have thought about concrete, is this something that has no past, is, is it precisely valuable because it has no past or does it, on the other hand, have a past. And if so, what is its past? And this is particularly intriguing because architecture as a, as a, a cultural activity is something which has always been obsessed with its past. Architecture is always looking back to what it has done before, even when it says it's not doing that, it is doing that. So when we find a particular kind of collection of works made out of concrete, apparently denying their past, this is something to which immediately raises questions and it's fun thinking about this. But generally speaking, as I say, most work in concrete has tended to avoid the issue of its past. Now not only do we have a relationship to history in general, but there is this question about the relationship to concrete's own history because concrete's been around for more than 100 years. It's got a history of its own. Have architects been able to respond to that? Well, very occasionally, yes, so this is another Brazilian building. This is a sort of sports complex in, in Sao Paolo, called Sesc Pompeia and on the right-hand side, you can see there's this big tower, which is actually a water tower. And if you look closely at the joints on this building, in this, this very loose sort of ragged form, and this was a deliberate reference on the architect's part to another concrete monument, which is this, which is in Mexico City. Satellite towers by Luis Barragan, which again, similarly has this sort of raggedy joint. So this is a rather unusual case of somebody making explicitly reference in their work to a previous concrete object. Most of the time though, concrete, things that are made out of concrete deny that they have any relationship to the past. A real exception to this was in post-war Italy, where for various reasons, quite a -- there was a group of architects who were really kind of preoccupied with architecture's own relationship to its immediate past. This is the so-called Church of the Autostrada outside Florence, it's a really extraordinary building. It was built in the '60s. And this seems to be a completely chaotic interior, where everything, you know, it's crazy. You can't make any sense of this. You know, these struts and beams and so on that change shape. It seems to be quite illogical. And indeed it's meant to seem illogical. It's -- this is a 'two fingers' at rational engineering, the sort of thing that Italian and engineer Nervi had been doing. This is a way of saying 'so much for all your rationality, I don't care about it.' And it's, it's a response to that. This is another building, this is in Turin, this is the Stock Exchange in Turin which is a curious building which combines all sorts of, of architectural themes, but inside it, it has this curious web-like roof structure, which again, was a deliberate reference to a church in Paris, which had been designed at the beginning of the century by Anatole de Baudot. This is a very kind of knowing architectural reference. So these are some buildings within which people were trying to make actual reference to concrete's own history. And then just to wind up, let's talk about, a little bit about the universal and the local. As I've said, concrete's everywhere and wherever you go in the world, you'll find broadly similar sorts of concrete things. Now this immediately raises questions about what makes a place local, what is it that gives a locality to a place? And, again, you know, we make all sorts of assumptions about this, which don't necessarily hold true, is it something that is kind of embedded in the locality, or is it to do with things that are brought to it and values that are placed upon it? Are they inherent, the things, the, the qualities that make a place local or are they, as it were, part of culture and that are brought there? And the way in which concrete is employed throughout the world, I think gives us pause to stop for a moment and think about, well what is it actually that makes a locality a locality? Are we always to assume that it is to do with things that belong there, or is to do with forces and circumstances and conditions which are produced from elsewhere and produced culturally? So, at that point, I'm going to stop and, and just to end, I will say that some of what I've said and more will appear in a book which is to be published shortly under this title. And that's the end. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you. Very interesting and a very unusual view on such a ubiquitous material. We have time for a few questions from the audience. If I could ask you if you could wait until the, until the microphone comes because your question needs to be recorded on the cast. >> Thank you for the very interesting lecture. There isn't any geological background to concrete and I would challenge that the Medieval Gothic architect would have found that building better than what they could have done because they wouldn't be able to represent their saints and their carvings and their Michelangelo enfigurements, and so - I agree, to some extent, it leaves less to man and to nature. Do you agree? >> I'm intrigued by your comment, there's no theological background to concrete. [ Inaudible ] >> Geological. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought it was theological. [ Laughter ] >> Okay. [ Inaudible ] >> Okay. Okay. Okay. Yup. Okay. Well, two thoughts about this and one is that no, concrete is not a carvable material, but it is a castable material and you can cast it to do many things and indeed, people have used it as a sculptural medium. There's a lot of sculpture in the world that is made out of concrete. It's not necessarily figurative, but it may be -- have equal value to figurative sculpture. So it can be used, it -- and is used as a sculptural medium. The geological question is interesting because obviously although cement is a universal medium, the aggregates out of which concrete are made come from localities and people have tried at various times to give a local inflection to concrete, according to the particular aggregate that is used. And you can expose the aggregate by removing the cement film on the surface of concrete and if you use an aggregate which is recognizable as coming from a particular locality, you can, you can localize it in that way. And it, it, in a sense, it does have a geology. It's not completely a-geological as a substance. Any other -- there's one down, down [inaudible]. >> Yes, hello Adrian. Thanks very much for a very interesting lecture. I'm, I'm here with a little group of students from Richmond College, our A level students. And it just happens that we have been given a question about high-tech architecture to have a look at this year, and it struck me that high-tech and low-tech could be a sort of a polarity that could be applied to concrete in some way. What, what struck me is something that perhaps you were sort of getting on in, into what can make concrete local and you gave the example of the Lloyd's Building. And I think that there are other examples of the way that concrete is used in the Lloyd's Building which is not an imitation of steel. I'm think particularly of the soffits around the ground floor level where concrete is actually used as concrete, but maybe reflecting some of the other concerns of High-Tech architecture, the precision of construction, the very sort of careful attention give to joints and jointing. And I wonder that since the high-tech style, if you can call it that, is often associated with Britain. It has a sort of, in that sense, a sort of regional aspect that, that a way of building can actually give concrete a locality, rather than any sort of actual material quality of the concrete itself. Taking concrete as a, a completely plastic substance, it's more to do with the way that designers have used in concrete in a way that reflects a local tradition, which has been very quickly I suppose built up in the high-tech style in Britain. Yeah. You're absolutely right. There are, there are local traditions or ways of doing things which emerge and so, for example, in Japan, there are ways of doing concrete which are not the same as you would find in Europe or North America. And in that sense, one can identify certain things. I just pick out though, on this question about the high-tech because one of the characteristics of concrete is, or is said to be that it, its great quality is that it's monolithic, that you, you make a monolith with concrete. You've effectively produced a structure which is, is, in which all the forces are distributed everywhere through it. Now this is contrary really to high-tech, which is an architecture of components, it's all about making parts which can be assembled. So if you think of high-tech in relation to concrete, it should -- they're in conflict because the whole point about a concrete building is that it doesn't have components. So there's a questions there which is, is in intriguing. But anyway, there's more to be said. [inaudible]. Other questions. >> One last question from the gentleman here. >> I know you said that you weren't going to talk about the repulsive so-called nature of concrete, but I wondered if you had any comments to make about why you -- what most people find it such a material which they don't like, compared to say, brick or steel or glass. >> Well, I think part of the reason for its repellance is precisely because it doesn't fit within categories, that it escapes from being either natural or unnatural. It's slippery, if you like, and I think that people find that -- are uncomfortable about something which escapes classification so easily. And my, my answer to that question which, I mean is one I perhaps think about a lot is, is precisely that, that it, it eludes classification within the normal categories that we use to think about the world. >> At this point, I think that we should end by thanking Professor Forty once more. [ Applause ]