Concrete and Culture

"Adrian Forty’s book we could put alongside the style of Brutalism for a start. This style has represented recently the strongest challenge to an aesthetic norm or to people’s aesthetic sensibilities. When you raise the topic of aesthetics and architecture, very often Brutalism is the architecture that comes into discussion. It has such a strong aesthetic presence, yet seems to be one that is so antagonistic to the persons or the society that it is addressing. What Adrian Forty, a brilliant contemporary architectural historian, is trying to write here is what he calls the history of concrete as a medium of culture. He’s interested in concrete as the technical material of course, but there are other books that have dealt with that aspect. He’s interested in concrete as a signifier of a certain kind of style, but here again, there are other books that also look at Brutalism specifically. More than anything, what he’s really interested in is the way concrete has been used as a kind of medium for cultural expression, for what he also calls iconography cultures. “When you raise the topic of aesthetics and architecture, very often Brutalism is the style that comes into discussion.” Forty argues that concrete is really the modern material that has been affiliated with modern architecture since its inception, and that has unfolded with the different stages of modernism over the course of the 20th century. It’s a material that becomes representative of modernization, the building of dams, for example, or large-scale building projects in developing societies. He’s looking therefore at concrete in a multifaceted way, inquiring into its many dimensions. What is the actual texture of concrete? How is it manufactured? What are key aspects of its finishing, its form, its shaping, and of course its durability? That is, both its physical presence and the way in which it lasts, but also conversely its weathering and the way in which it decays. It has a particular kind of characteristic expression as well. And the question around concrete and its carbon footprint has unfolded really in the last few years very strongly. Forty’s book is interesting, and I think crucial because it allows us to approach the aesthetic question from a different angle, through material and the material expression of architecture. It allows us to understand that a given material, even if it is affiliated very strongly with Brutalism for example, has actually had many different appearances in different social settings. In some cases, the aesthetic appearance of a concrete building is one of refinement, precision, and high skill. In another social setting, the aesthetic appearance is one of crudeness, unskilled labour or construction, for example. What this reveals to us very strongly is the way in which the aesthetic appearance is again absolutely inseparable from a kind of social and economic context within which it is bound up. So concrete cannot mean one thing; the concept of concrete unfolds in different ways precisely because it is also an economic instrument. It’s an economic decision to build with concrete, whether it means making a decision that’s quite costly or quite cheap, depending on how the material is deployed. By thinking about concrete in this different way, writing an architectural history of concrete as opposed to an architectural history of Brutalism, I think Forty is able to give us a different way of thinking about our encounter with the aesthetic. Rather than prompting us to ask directly, “What was the architect thinking in using the concrete?”, we are prompted instead to ask what does the concrete mean in the given setting that I inhabit when I encounter that building? What did the concrete mean in a given setting when that building was constructed, and what does it mean 30 years later, 50 years later, 70 years later? It gives us a sense of the temporality of the aesthetics of architecture more strongly and differently, I think, than do Summerson or Collins. One of the things signalled there is uncertainty about whether the aesthetic aspect of architecture is something designed, or something discovered. The idea of many Brutalist architects was to present materials to a viewer in unadulterated form, to concede in a sense that these materials do indeed have an aesthetic appearance, but one that is not a designed appearance. This is very different from earlier expressions of concrete, where concrete was being put forward precisely because of its ‘designability’. It could be shaped into forms because its surface was not a natural surface, but a surface that was actually crafted, either made smooth or made rough in a very deliberate fashion. So, you have a contradiction embedded in the use of concrete in architecture, a contradiction over whether the aesthetic expression is one that is designed intentionally or one that is simply discovered and presented."