In the Cause of Architecture, VII: The Meaning of Materials—Concrete

From Architectural Record, August, 1928. Read a PDF of the original article here.

I am writing this on the Phoenix plain of Arizona. The ruddy granite mountain-heaps, grown “old,” are decomposing and sliding down layer upon layer to further compose the soil of the plain. Granite in various stages of decay, sand, silt and gravel make the floor of the world here.

Buildings could grow right up out of the “ground” were this “soil,” before it is too far “rotted,” cemented in proper proportions and beaten into flasks or boxes – a few steel strands dropped in for reinforcement.

Cement may be, here as elsewhere, the secret stamina of the physical body of our new world.

And steel has given to cement (this invaluable ancient medium) new life, new purposes and possibilities, for when the coefficient of expansion and contraction was found to be the same in concrete and steel, a new world was opened to the Architect. The Machine in giving him steel-strands gave concrete the right-of-way.

Yet three-fourths of the dwellings here are of wood and brick brought from great distances and worked up into patterns originated, east, thirty years ago. The “houses” are quite as indigenous as a cocked-hat, and almost as deciduous; one-half the cost of the whole – freight.

The Indian did better in the adobe dwelling he got from Mexico and built in the foot-hills. Even the few newer concrete buildings imitate irrelevant “styles” – although more relevant Mexico is coming north at the moment, to the rescue, in little ways. So funny, they will be architectural comedy ten years later.

It is only natural that the Architect, at first, should do as he has always done – reproduce badly in the new material the forms of old Architecture or whatever he had instead, which were probably, themselves reproductions, as false.

Let us frankly admit that these human-processes of thought move more by habit and indirection than by intellectual necessity and attach to the established order with tenacity worthy of a nobler thing.

The Architect, by profession, is a conservative of conservatives. His “profession” is first to perceive and conform and last to change this order.

Yet gradually the law of gravitation has its way, even with the profession: natural tendency in even so humble a thing as building-material will gradually but eventually force the architect’s hand and overcome even his “profession.”

Then after it has had its way, will come its sway, so that when a newer material condition enters into life, it, in turn, will have just as hard a time of it, until “the nature of the thing,” by gravity, conquers “professional resistance” once more: a resistance compounded of ignorance, animal fear and self-interest.

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The literature of concrete, as a conglomerate, now fills libraries. Its physical properties are fairly well understood.

Aesthetically it has neither song nor story.

Nor is it easy to see in this conglomerate a high aesthetic property, because, in itself it is amalgam, aggregate, compound. And cement, the binding medium, is characterless in itself. The net result is usually an artificial stone at best, or a petrified sand heap at worst.

Concrete would be better named “conglomerate,” as concrete is a noble word which this material fails to live up to. It is a mixture that has little quality in itself.

If this material is to have either form, texture or color in itself, each must artificially be given to it, by human imagination.

This it is one of the insensate brute materials that is used to imitate others.

“Concrete” – so called – must submit to the “artistic” at the hands of any parlor-architect or interior desecrator and, consequently seldom have life of its own worthy a substance so obedient and useful.

As a material it is its misfortune to project as wooden beams, travel molded as cornices. Yet it will faithfully hang as a slab, stand delicately perforated like a Persian faience screen or lie low and heavily in mass upon the ground. Again, unluckily, it will stand up and take the form (and texture too) of wooden posts and planks. It is supine, and sets as the fool, whose matrix receives it, wills.

When, and as, he has made up his mind to his “taste,” it will set into whatever shape may be, and will then go to work with steel strands for sinews, and do mighty things. When aged it becomes so stubborn that it would cost more to remove the structure often, than the ground upon which it stands might be worth.

Surely, here, to the creative mind, is temptation. Temptation to rescue so honest a material from degradation. Because here in a conglomerate named “concrete” we find a plastic material, that as yet has found no medium of expression that will allow it to take plastic form. So far as it is now used it might be tallow, cast-iron or plaster, poured into molds and at the mercy of their shape.

Therefore its form is a matter of this process of casting rather than a matter of anything at all derived from its own nature. Because it is thus, universally, at the mercy of demoralizing extraneous influences, it is difficult to say what is “concrete” form and what is not.

But certain truths regarding the material are clear enough. First, it is a mass-material; second, an impressionable one as to surface; third, it is a material which may be continuous or monolithic within certain very wide limits; fourth, it is a material that may be chemicalized colored or rendered impervious to water: it may be dyed or textured in the stuff; fifth, it is a willing material while fresh, fragile when still young, stubborn when old, lacking always in tensile strength.

What then should be the Aesthetic of Concrete?

Is it Stone? Yes and No.

Is it Plaster? Yes and No.

Is it Brick or Tile? Yes and No.

Is it Cast Iron? Yes and No.

Poor Concrete! Still looking for its own at the hands of Man.

Perhaps the term “concrete” popularly meaning conglomerate, in this connection, denotes it the mongrel, servile as such, destined to no more than the place of obedient servant in the rank of materials.

Terra cotta, the fanciful, however, though less artificial, is not much more fortunate in character and make-up. The two materials have much in common. Tera cotta having the great advantage of standing up to be modelled and becoming indestructible, colorful and glazed when fired, a comparatively expensive process.

The chief difference between stone and concrete lies in the binding medium which, in the case of stone, is of the stone itself – a chemical affinity.

In the case of concrete it is a foreign substance that binds the aggregate. There is little or none other than a mechanical affinity in concrete.

But for this difference concrete would be, in fact, a true natural stone. And taking this difference for granted it is more truly and artificial stone than it is anything else; the nature of the artifice enabling the artificer to enter at the time the mixture is in a state of flux, to give it whatever shape he may desire.

Yes, artificial stone it is that concrete usually becomes.

But the essential difference between stone and concrete is still unconsidered. And that essential difference is the plasticity of the material itself as distinguished from natural stone which has none at all.

I should say that in this plasticity of concrete lies its aesthetic value. As an artificial stone, concrete has no great, certainly no independent, aesthetic value whatever. As a plastic material – eventually becoming a stone-like in character – there lives in it a great aesthetic property, as yet inadequately expressed.

To design a concrete pattern for a casting that would feature this flow of the material might be possible and so allow its plastic nature to come through the process into artistic expression, thus distinguishing concrete from stone. I have seldom seen it done unless by accident. Of course, where the material is tamped relatively dry or beating into molds there is no such problem.

There is another plastic possibility in treatment. The material en masse may be printed, “goffered,” while fresh and wet, as the printer’s die embosses his paper – and such effects had as may be seen in stone where fossil remains of foliage or other organic forms, either cameo or intaglio, are found in it. And this treatment would be nearer to its nature, aesthetically, than is any casting whatsoever.

The pre-cast slab, rolled to small thickness but large in size, is a means common to all materials that set hard from a flux and absorb reinforcement. But there is little or nothing in that treatment to distinguish concrete from sheet steel or glass or plaster.

The slab may be smaller, be printed with design appropriate to the material and be knit together with steel laid in wide grooved joints and the whole poured and locked together into a thin slab, and express the nature of the material itself no more than it would express terra cotta or glass or metal, except as the feeling of the design and mass, as a whole, reflected it.

Most usefully then, probably, in this mechanical era, concrete is another passive or negative material depending for aesthetic life almost wholly upon the impress of human imagination. This element of pattern, however it may mechanically be made to occur, is therefore the salvation of concrete in the mechanical processes of this mechanical age, whenever it rises as material above the mere mass into which it may naturally be thrown on the ground and where it serves as such better than any other material.

Of course, always there is the interior content or aggregate of the concrete to work up in various ways, giving texture and color to the block, slab or mass. These treatments are too familiar to require much comment, and are all useful to quality the material, but of no great significance in the broad question of finding the aesthetic interpretation that will best express the nature of concrete considered as a material.

These expedients all partake of the nature of stone and bring concrete still nearer as artificial stone, the sole advantage of the concrete being that it may be formed in place in great size, by small means, by way of accretion – whereas stone must be got out, expensively cut, transported and lifted to place in bulk.

Thus concrete becomes the ideal makeshift of this, the vainglorious Makeshift Era.

There never was a more “inferior” building material than was the old concrete block unless it was ungalvanized sheet-iron. The block was cheap imitation and abominable as material when not downright vicious. Every form it undertook it soon relegated to the back-yard of aesthetic oblivion.

Several of the illustrations show what that self-same degraded block may become with a little sympathy and interpretation, if scientifically treated.

Herein the despised thing becomes at least a thoroughbred and a sound mechanical means to a rare and beautiful use as an architect’s medium, as the “block” becomes a mere mechanical unit in a quiet, plastic whole. And this mechanical use of concrete as a mechanical material has only just begun. In it, along, is a medium for an “Architecture” – humble as it is before Imagination enters.

And there remain to be developed those higher uses – non-mechanical, plastic in method, treatment and mass – to which I have referred, working naturally with color into truly plastic beauty.