IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

In 1817, Joseph Vicat ‘invented’ modern concrete, using argillaceous limestone local to Grenoble, sowing the seed that would transform the form of the urban fabric and make the identity of the city (Grenoble). This transformation led to the radical re-working of architectural form, the colossal extension of infrastructures that re-shaped the land and our ways of inhabiting it, but it also fundamentally transformed the ‘constructive cultures’ of European societies (Simmonet 2005). That is, concrete disrupted traditional relations between architects, trades and their clients, it brought standardisation and norms, and it altered the very metabolism of the city. Concrete is not eternal, it ages, it weakens. Today we face the challenge of making concrete city sustainable, and often the solution is to demolish but unlike others building materials, concrete has difficulty being re-used as anything more than rubble. As teachers of the next generation of urbanists and architects, our question is how do we get our students to think beyond this ‘concrete order’. Our concern, here, is less those of the sand swallowed and the carbon emitted by its production than that of concrete’s afterlives (Higgin 2016). In collaboration with the artist Stefan Shankland we developed a workshop experimenting with techniques re-working this inheritance, finding new urban forms from the waste of the old.