Concrete

I decided to pick this topic after reading the excellent Tapia, Tabbi, Tabique, Tabby that I featured on Wednesday, and we will start with that piece today.

Tapia, Tabbi, Tabique, Tabby

Places Journal • 24 Sep 2024 • ~6350 words

In this piece, Jola Idowu explores the often-overlooked history of tabby architecture along the U.S. coast. It discusses how tabby architecture was shaped by the labor of enslaved Black people and Indigenous communities, and how the preservation of these sites has often overlooked their complex histories.. Through a personal journey across historic sites, Idowu uncovers how tabby structures serve as both a testament to resilience and a call for a deeper understanding of America's architectural heritage.

While the mixing of modern concrete often implicates distant geographies — sand from the West Coast, gravel from Appalachian quarries, with significant energy costs in the extraction and transport of materials, even before the manufacturing process — the ingredients for tabby could be sourced locally. The main cost was labor, which was forced upon the millions of people brought from across the Atlantic to work under slavery, and those born into it. Tabby architecture was made possible by the labor of Indigenous people who harvested oysters and created the middens, and the labor of the enslaved people who mined that resource, prepared the concrete, and built the structures.

Concrete: Engineering Society through Social Spaces

UF Impact of Materials on Society • 1 Jan 2000 • ~5950 words

This article explores the history and evolution of concrete, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to its revolutionary use by the Romans, and how concrete has continued to shape society and architecture over time. It examines the composition and properties of Roman concrete, the societal needs it fulfilled, and the environmental challenges posed by modern concrete production.

Concrete is such a part of our daily lives that we may not stop to think about who invented it or why builders create certain types of buildings from it and not others. Is there a connection between buildings and larger societal forces? Have you ever wondered why we use concrete the way we do? Do buildings reflect a society’s ideals for social organization? To try to answer these questions we need to examine the role concrete played in the society that first developed it—ancient Rome during the late Roman Republic era (200–100 BCE).

Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand

Scientific American • 1 Feb 2024 • ~3450 words • Archive Link

This piece explores the global issue of illegal sand mining and trafficking, which has become a massive, lucrative black market industry. It examines the environmental devastation caused by unregulated sand extraction, the criminal networks involved, and the challenges in addressing this largely overlooked problem that is depleting the world's sand resources at an unsustainable rate.

Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water.

Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It.

NOEMA • 6 Dec 2022 • ~5700 words

Concrete has shaped the modern world, enabling rapid urbanization and development, but it’s now facing scrutiny for its environmental impact. This piece explores the paradox of concrete: while it has powered progress, it also contributes significantly to climate change. Dive into the complexities of our reliance on this material and the urgent calls for change in the way we build.

Concrete has been like a nuclear bomb in man’s conquest of nature: redirecting great rivers (often away from the communities that had come to rely on them), reducing quarried mountains to mere hills, and contributing to biodiversity loss and mass flooding by effectively sealing large swathes of land in an impermeable grey crust. The other key ingredients all bring their own separate crises, from the destructive sand mining of riverbeds and beaches to the use of almost 2% of the world’s water.

So you want to use less concrete

Construction Physics • 3 Feb 2022 • ~3100 words

The environmental impact of concrete is obvious, but viable alternatives are not. This piece examines the scale of concrete production globally, where it is being used the most, and the challenges in finding alternatives that can match concrete's versatility and cost-effectiveness. The article also explores potential solutions, such as using alternative cementitious materials and carbon capture techniques.

⁠. . . you often see enthusiasm for the idea of replacing concrete buildings with mass timber ones. But assuming you could substitute all the world’s concrete for an equal volume of wood, you’d need to more than triple the total annual volume of global wood harvested, which puts a somewhat different spin on the issue . . . And many other materials would have emissions as bad or worse than concrete if they were used on the same scale.

Hard living: what does concrete do to our bodies?

The Guardian • 28 Feb 2019 • ~1950 words

Concrete is all around us, shaping our cities and lives, but what toll does it take on our bodies? The article explores the various health impacts that concrete can have, from respiratory issues caused by silica dust to musculoskeletal problems from prolonged standing on hard surfaces.

Health and safety advice worldwide takes it as read that concrete floors cause ailments as diverse as varicose veins, achilles tendonitis and osteoarthritis. An entire industry has grown up around anti-fatigue matting which, it is thought, mitigates tiredness by requiring constant microadjustments in balance.

The grey wall of China: inside the world's concrete superpower

The Guardian • 28 Feb 2019 • ~1200 words

This piece takes us inside China's concrete obsession, highlighting the staggering scale of its construction projects, like the new Beijing Daxing International Airport. As the country pours more concrete than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century, the article also delves into the human cost of these megaprojects, from village evictions to environmental concerns.

. . . ambitious infrastructure projects require a ready and vast supply of concrete. It is a demand that has been easily met by the country’s cement supply: in 2017, China produced 2.4bn tonnes of the stuff, more than the rest of the world combined.

Brutal beauty: how concrete became the ultimate lifestyle concept

The Guardian • 26 Feb 2019 • ~1550 words

This article explores how concrete, sometimes maligned as the scourge of cities, has become a ubiquitous lifestyle concept, used to sell everything from luxury apartments to club nights. It examines how architects have shaped the popular imagination of concrete, both positively and negatively, and how the material's revival in recent decades has been driven by a desire for honesty, purity, and the sensuous qualities of raw materials.

. . . visible concrete has generally retreated to the realm of interiors, from the sweeping spiral staircase and angled buttresses inside Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern Switch House, to the raw ceilings and walls in AHMM’s White Collar Factory office building. Both projects use naked concrete as a means of simulating an “as found” industrial character.

Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth

The Guardian • 25 Feb 2019 • ~4550 words

This piece explores the immense environmental impact of concrete while it delves into the staggering scale of concrete production globally, its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and the broader ecological damage it causes by destroying natural habitats and disrupting ecosystems. The article also examines the political and economic factors that have driven the relentless expansion of concrete infrastructure, and questions whether there are viable alternatives to it.

All the plastic produced over the past 60 years amounts to 8bn tonnes. The cement industry pumps out more than that every two years. But though the problem is bigger than plastic, it is generally seen as less severe. Concrete is not derived from fossil fuels. It is not being found in the stomachs of whales and seagulls. Doctors aren’t discovering traces of it in our blood. Nor do we see it tangled in oak trees or contributing to subterranean fatbergs. We know where we are with concrete. Or to be more precise, we know where it is going: nowhere. Which is exactly why we have come to rely on it.

Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia

Places Journal • 10 Nov 2018 • ~3300 words

This piece explores how Yugoslav architects in the post-war era shaped their nation through innovative concrete designs, reflecting a unique blend of socialist ideals and modernist influences. It’s a thoughtful look at a period often overlooked in architectural history, and it also contextualizes this architecture within the broader history of Brutalist and socialist architecture globally, noting how it differed from the constraints of Soviet Bloc architecture.

. . . while operating in sync with progressive international trends, the promotion of concrete construction by state actors in Yugoslavia carried particular significance; the building material came to symbolize national unification and modernization even as it enabled the transcendence (or ignoring) of regional vernacular building traditions.

The World Is Running Out of Sand

The New Yorker • 22 May 2017 • ~4750 words • Archive Link

The article explores the global shortage of sand, a key ingredient for concrete. It delves into the various industrial and commercial uses of sand, the challenges in sourcing high-quality sand, and the environmental consequences of sand mining around the world. It also raises concerns about the sustainability of current sand consumption patterns and the potential impact on industries and infrastructure that rely heavily on this finite resource.

Aggregate is the main constituent of concrete (eighty per cent) and asphalt (ninety-four per cent), and it’s also the primary base material that concrete and asphalt are placed on during the building of roads, buildings, parking lots, runways, and many other structures. A report published in 2004 by the American Geological Institute said that a typical American house requires more than a hundred tons of sand, gravel, and crushed stone for the foundation, basement, garage, and driveway, and more than two hundred tons if you include its share of the street that runs in front of it.

Growing Up in a Concrete Masterpiece

New York Times • 1 May 2017 • ~1800 words • Archive Link

Blake Gopnik takes us on a nostalgic journey through Habitat, a unique concrete housing complex that shaped his childhood in Montreal. As it celebrates its 50th anniversary, the article explores how this architectural marvel, once dismissed as "brutal," is now being rediscovered and appreciated for its bold design and cultural significance.

Habitat is a prime example of our postwar love of raw concrete architecture. For a little while, from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, concrete seemed to be the civic, public alternative to the steel and glass buildings that represented the corporate world, Mad Men-slick and meant to sell us on the polished ease of the capitalist way, reflected back and forth across the hall of mirrors of New York’s Park Avenue.

Welcome to the SXSW of Concrete

The Atlantic • 1 Mar 2017 • ~3000 words • Archive Link

This article provides an inside look at the concrete industry in the United States, exploring how it intersected with President Trump's infrastructure promises back in 2017 and the complexities of actually building large-scale concrete projects. It examines the industry's reaction to Trump's plans, the challenges of adopting new technologies, and the skilled labor shortages facing the sector.

It’s easy to promise magnificent, gleaming, trillion-dollar things made of concrete if you believe the substance is malleable to your will. But a career dedicated to taming concrete—trying to tame it—forces you to be patient. It demands locking in for long-term consequences, and understanding that materials matter more than metaphor.

The cement company that paid millions to IS: was Lafarge complicit in crimes against humanity?

The Guardian • 17 Sep 2024 • ~6400 words

In a troubling account, The Guardian explores the controversial actions of Lafarge, a major cement company, during the rise of ISIS in Syria. As Lafarge prioritized its bottom line, it made payments to the militant group for protection, raising serious questions about corporate ethics and complicity in human rights abuses. This article sheds light on a complex web of decisions that put profit over morality in a war-torn region.

But on home turf in France, Lafarge faces a criminal case that might yield a reckoning without precedent. Dozens of former Lafarge employees in Syria, along with two non-profits, Sherpa and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, have accused Lafarge of complicity in crimes against humanity.

Concrete in Life 2023

GCCA • 12 Sep 2023 • ~1000 words

We wrap things up with not an article, but with a photography contest. I am linking to the winners of the 5th annual Concrete in Life photography competition by GCCA, but on the same page you can find not only the entire shortlist, but also links to previous years.