| CONCRETE PLANET The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World's Most Common Man-Made Material Robert Courland Dennis Smith (Fwd.) Amherst: Prometheus Books, November 2011 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-61614-481-4 | ||||
| ISBN 1-61614-481-5 | 396pp. | HC/BWI | $? | |
I don't usually quote from a book's Acknowledgments, but in this case it's warranted.
"Another person to whom I owe thanks is fellow writer Dennis Smith. We were having a discussion over lunch one day when I mentioned the incredible material I had unearthed about problems related to reinforced concrete. I also expressed qualms about doing a book about the subject, since I was neither a civil engineer nor an architect. 'That's why you need to write the book,' he said. 'You don't have a career to lose.' I am glad I took his advice. – Page 12 |
So am I. The author began with two strikes against him: he was not a construction-industry professional, and he had chosen a subject that, on its face, would not appeal to a large audience. The result, however, thoroughly demolishes both objections. This is a fascinating story. Most people know that the use of concrete, made by mixing quicklime and sand in water, began in the time of the Roman Empire. But how many know that the knowledge of how to make it died out, and was only rediscovered in the nineteenth century?
The saga of concrete has even more startling revelations. Archaeological digs at the Fertile Crescent sites of Göbekli Tepe, Nevali Çori, Çayönyü, and Çatal Höyük, — the first two being temples, the last two the world's oldest known towns — revealed the use of lime in construction.1 As the author notes, lime would have seemed to those ancient peoples to have magical properties, releasing heat when mixed with water and turning into hard rock.
The saga continues through the ages. Many heroes appear along the way, as do a few villains. The heroes include the Roman architect Vitruvius, whose treatise on concrete (caementis) was preserved and guided later builders. Then there was the testy but brilliant Emperor Hadrian, the probable designer of Rome's Pantheon. The building remains intact to this day, and still astounds construction engineers who walk under its huge dome. Roman concrete was the secret of the Pantheon: its unmatched strength and durability came from an admixture of clay with the quicklime. Roman concrete was also the first suitable for underwater construction, enabling the aqueducts as well as Herod the Great's construction of Sebastos Harbor, the largest use of Roman concrete in antiquity.
England pioneered the further development of the substance, only to surrender their commercial prowess to Germany and Belgium. Courland writes:
"The story of the British cement industry is an instructive example of how industrial preeminence can be lost through complacency and an obsession with increasing profit margins at the expense of research and development." – Page 215 |
Like many mechanical geniuses, Wright displayed an interest in hardware early. His parents quarreled bitterly, however, and they divorced when he was in his teens. He later changed his middle name to Lloyd to honor his mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones. His father may have had bipolar disorder, and Wright may have inherited it. He certainly had his idiosyncracies. But he was an outstanding architect — even well into his nineties.
"Wright was the first architect since Roman times to recognize that concrete allowed for the creation of entirely new forms. Whereas the Romans used unreinforced concrete to create soaring ceiling vaults and domes, Wright employed the great tensile strength of reinforced concrete to build amazing cantilevered structures. He would rewrite the rules of structural design, and his reputation and work would be forever tied to his imaginative use of concrete. As a result, the visual landscape of our world would never look the same. – Page 246 |
Among Wright's masterpieces are the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1959), the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1923; demolished 1968) and the S. C. Johnson Company headquarters in Racine, WI (1939) as well as numerous private homes.
But before that happened, a series of men in England advanced the state of the art in concrete construction significantly, and they had the structures to prove it. The prime example was the tunnel built beneath the Thames River. Suggested in 1798, the project defeated several engineers until Marc Isambard Brunel took charge. He and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel brought the tunnel to completion in the face of numerous leaks and three complete floodings. True heroes, they were always in the thick of the action, supervising technical fixes, helping workers to safety, or descending in a diving bell to check the bottom of the river. Completed on 25 March 1843, the tunnel is a story worthy of a feature film. Not far behind it is the saga of the Eddystone Light.
The scene now shifts to the United States with the arrival in San Francisco circa 1870 of Ernest Ransome, son of British cement-maker Frederick Ransome. San Francisco was where the action was — and not only construction action.2 The Gold Rush had come and gone, but wealth continued to pour into the city by the bay from silver mines in Nevada, financing commercial and construction activity and making millionaires out of many of the men who oversaw those activities. The younger Ransome pioneered the use of reinforcing bars in concrete, enabling the construction of reinforced concrete skyscrapers and, later, the strikingly original designs of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. And so we come to the modern era, when concrete is the world's most common building material, used for everything from America's Interstate Highway System to China's Three Gorges Dam to Jørn Utzon's landmark Opera House on Bennelong Point in the harbor of Sydney, Australia.
And last we have Courland's analysis of the merits and problems of concrete reinforcement as it is done today. In comparison to the concrete the Romans used — which in the Pantheon, the Aelian Bridge3, various aqueducts and other structures has lasted almost two millennia — modern concrete constructions begin to crumble after as little as a single century. The ephemeral nature of our buildings is chiefly due to the rebar they contain, for despite concrete's apparent impermeability air and water4 can reach the steel and corrode it. Also, as the author conclusively demonstrates with data from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, concrete belies the claims its boosters made back then: it is neither earthquake-proof nor fireproof.
But the author goes on to provide some good news, for solutions to these and other problems posed by modern concrete construction methods do exist. I have more to say about this in a page linked below.
Robert Courland's history demonstrates a scholar's dedication to research and a raconteur's gift for storytelling. The tale is filled with heroes and villains, commercial successes and failures, brilliant achievements and abysmal tragedies. It sometimes becomes a trifle tedious with details of technical matters or business dealings, but far more often astounds the reader with descriptions of the wonders of antiquity (or of today), along with tales of political machinations and romance in both the classical and literal senses of that word.5 True, its topic is somewhat specialized, but Courland's writing skill overcomes that difficulty. The book has extensive endnotes, its index is very good, and within those endnotes are dozens of invaluable references to articles in obscure journals like Aggregate Research, many of which are available online (with URLs provided.) I have no hesitation in calling it a tour de force, giving it top marks, and rating it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.