'Concrete? It's communist': the rise and fall of the utopian socialist material
“This process,” wrote François Coignet in 1861 of his new product, “will transform the safety, well-being, health and morality of mankind.” He predicted it would inspire nothing less than a “revolution” – not a word to be used lightly with the events of 1848 still fresh in the French memory.
Coignet’s new product was concrete, and he wasn’t far wrong in his predictions – except maybe for the bit about morality. Coignet was a SaintSimonian socialist, which is to say that, unlike Marx, he thought social equality could be achieved without class war.
He believed that concrete would be a step towards a world in which working people would own the means of production. Wherever the raw materials for concrete – sand and limestone – were available, which is to say just about everywhere, people of no skill would be empowered to build clean, dry, comfortable dwellings and be able to live in dignity. No more peasants’ hovels.
Since Coignet’s time, concrete has often been referred to as revolutionary, but this revolution has taken on three very different guises.
The first has been the one envisaged by Coignet, through which a superior means of construction has been brought within reach of the world’s poor. The greater part of the world’s cement production is used by people with no professional or technical training: self-builders and smallscale constructors. The results may not look much, but if we are to measure the social effects of concrete, the greatest have been in the advances brought to ordinary people through informal construction.
By and large this achievement is not acknowledged by the cement and concrete industries, for whom association with the messy world of small builders in the slums and shantytowns of Africa or India is neither advantageous nor desirable – not good for their image.
Architects and engineers visiting favelas such as Rocinha, left, in Rio de Janeiro have been astonished by the economy and ingenuity of the concrete structures. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/Mauro Pimentel
Yet it is estimated that were all the earth floors of dwellings worldwide to be replaced by concrete, the incidence of parasitic diseases would drop by 80%. Nor are self-builds always lacking in skill: architects and engineers visiting favelas in Brazil have been astonished by the economy and ingenuity of the concrete structures. Everywhere, for those living in poverty, concrete has meant a step up in the world – and because of concrete’s reputation as an “advanced” or “modern” material, it puts them on a par with the wealthier inhabitants of the planet. Concrete changes not just people’s material existence. It changes their global selfimage.
The second revolution of concrete has been to transform building with a new structural technique. It has allowed constructions that could only be imagined before the 20th century: dams, bridges, tunnels of a scale never before possible. These are the sorts of achievements that the cement and concrete industry does like to celebrate – and there is no question that these structures have transformed people’s lives, too, by overcoming nature, speeding up communications and bringing us closer together. In architectural terms, concrete introduced new principles into design and made possible works such as the sailing shells of the Sydney Opera House or the cantilevered saucer of Oscar Niemeyer’s Museu de Arte Contemporanea at Niterói in Brazil – works often described as revolutionary on account of forms that would previously have been unachievable.
Concrete transformed infrastructure projects in the 20th century, allowing building on a scale never previously seen, from the Hoover dam (top) Boulder dam as well as road projects such as the Chiswick flyover (bottom left). Photographs: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty
But of all the features of concrete that might be considered revolutionary, what has perhaps been the most important has been its use to bring about rapid change. When sudden or urgent transformations were called for, whether it was five-year plans in the Soviet Union, the New Deal in the USA, the Great Leap Forward in China, or postsecond world war housebuilding in Europe, concrete was pressed into service.
Each of these political programmes anticipated infrastructural work on a wholly new scale, beyond existing industrial and labour resources. Concrete, because its raw materials were easy to find and relatively cheap and because, in theory, much of the work could be done with unskilled labour, promised to make possible the otherwise impossible. When in 1956 the Soviet Union set a seven-year target to “catch up and overtake the USA”, concrete construction was a vital component. Two years earlier, Nikita Khrushchev’s first major speech after the death of Stalin had been on the advantages of concrete.
It lasted three hours. No head of state before or since has delivered such a lengthy or detailed speech about concrete, nor made concrete the subject of such a politically explosive address: Khrushchev used it to announce his break with Stalinism. He did so by criticising the inefficiencies of the craft methods of construction favoured by Uncle Joe, and arguing instead for the benefits of prefabricated concrete construction that would draw upon Russia’s vast resources of unskilled labour.
Known as Khrushchevka, this type of five-storey apartment building is made of prefabricated concrete panels, and was developed in the 1950s when Nikita Khrushchev was in power in the USSR. Photograph: Andrei Makhonin/ Tass
Khrushchev’s speech astonished his audience – it is still a gripping read today – and made concrete central to the future of the Soviet Union. Within a year, he had pushed through a decree that all future construction would follow a standard design: “a single type of building for the whole country”, all in precast concrete. You can see the consequences throughout the former Soviet empire.
In Britain in the same decade, faced with the urgent need to build more houses, Harold Watkinson, the minister responsible for the motorway programme, remarked in a statement that was more than just a metaphor: “Somehow we had to make a lot of bricks without straw – and quickly.”
The answer, again, was concrete, and prefabricated construction systems that shifted construction into factories, where, it was supposed, productivity would be higher than on building sites. Although concrete was rarely cheaper, it promised to be faster – and by creating an entirely new look to the built environment, it would signal to the public that a new transformation was indeed afoot.
Three of the different models of prefabricated housing used in Britain to deal with housing shortages following the second world war. Photographs: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty/Keystone Features/Evening Standard
The deliberate linking of concrete to these sudden and dramatic transformations of the 20th century has associated concrete with the politics of the left, rather than of the right. Although the fascist regimes of the 1930s played the same card – social renovation through new infrastructures – and indeed had sometimes used concrete to do so, as with the autobahns in Germany, the dominant association of concrete was with socialism.
Insofar as leftwing politics were about radical change and rightwing politics about the preservation of tradition, concrete was more readily aligned with the left, and the Soviet Union particularly cemented this idea in the popular imagination. As late as the 1990s, Virginia Bottomley, the UK’s Conservative secretary of state for national heritage, when asked to approve the listing of the Alexander Fleming House complex at London’s Elephant and Castle that had once housed the Ministry of Health, allegedly responded: “Oh no, we can’t list that … it’s concrete … it’s communist.”
Concrete is no longer what it was. In the west, at least, it has lost its transformative aura. There are many reasons for this, and its contamination by state socialism is one. Another is the unforeseen consequence of what Coignet saw as its greatest asset: the democratisation of construction. Concrete has been stigmatised as “cheap”, the stuff of the world’s poor. But anyone who doubts its lasting revolutionary potential has only to look at China, which poured more concrete from 2012 to 2015 than the US did in the entire 20th century. Socialist or capitalist, in China the most rapid transformation of a country ever to have taken place in human history has been achieved in a couple of decades, in no small part by means of concrete.
Adrian Forty is emeritus professor of architectural history at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London and the author of books including Objects of Desire and Concrete and Culture
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Concrete changes not just people’s material existence. It changes their global selfimage