Luxury concrete
Concrete is as common to the urban environment as trees are to the forest. Yet its presence is increasingly softened by shiny glass. Gone, it seems, are the days when concrete was allowed to announce itself.
In architecture school (and probably in practice) you develop a love-hate relationship with concrete. You are taught to admire its strength, durability and versatility, while simultaneously being encouraged to specify alternatives in the name of sustainability.
To me, brutalism remains one of the most daring architectural movements to emerge from modernism. My favourite example is Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation: a vast apartment block containing private, commercial and communal programmes. What was once radical is now familiar as the mixed-use development.
Its enormous concrete mass is lifted from the ground on columns, creating a strange sense of weightlessness. Colourful balconies puncture the façade, distracting the eye from the overwhelming presence of concrete. The building does not attempt to hide what it is made of.
And perhaps that is what makes concrete so uncomfortable.
Concrete can be ugly. Unlike timber, its ugliness can become more pronounced with age. It is therefore no surprise that brutalism has so often been criticised for its “grim inhumanity”. Today, glass is frequently used to soften concrete—to humanise it, make it lighter, more desirable.
But is covering concrete really the answer?
Glass does not necessarily make architecture more sustainable. Sometimes it simply makes concrete more palatable. A convenient compromise between the material we want and the material we are uncomfortable looking at.
Perhaps the question is not how we can make concrete disappear, but whether we can learn to appreciate it in its rawness.
“It would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornaments for a period of years, in order that our thoughts might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well-formed and comely in the nude.”
— Louis Sullivan
