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SOUND MIRRORS
A grey monolith emerging unexpectedly along the sightlines of an isolated coast: the past is present; the past is alive in objects. No longer fixed by their original function, the objects become monumental sculpture – surprising, stubborn. Spectacular remnant of a dead-end technology, an acoustic mirror is a passive device used to reflect and focus (concentrate) sound waves. A forerunner of radar exclusively built on the south and northeast coasts of England between about 1916 and the 1930s during World War I. The ‘listening ears’ were devices intended to provide early warning of incoming enemy aeroplanes and airships about to attack coastal towns. With the development of faster aircraft, the sound mirrors became less useful, as an aircraft would be within sight by the time it had been located, and radar finally rendered the mirrors obsolete. Sound mirrors worked using a curved surface to concentrate sound waves into a central point, which were picked up by a sound collector and later by microphones. An operator using a stethoscope would be stationed near the sound mirror and would need specialist training in identifying different sounds. Distinguishing the complexity of sound was so difficult that the operators could only listen for around 40 minutes.
Denge Sound Mirrors (Source Uknown)
During World War 2 on the coast of southern England, a network of large concrete acoustic mirrors was in the process of being built when the project was cancelled owing to the development of the Chain Home radar system. Acoustic mirrors had limited effectiveness, and the increasing speed of aircraft in the 1930s meant that they would already be too close to engage by the time they had been detected. The development of radar puts an end to further experimentation with the technique. Nevertheless, there were long-lasting benefits. The acoustic mirror program, led by Dr. William Sansome Tucker, had given Britain the methodology to use interconnected stations to pinpoint the position of an enemy in the sky. The system they developed for linking the stations and plotting aircraft movements was given to the early radar team and contributed to their success in World War II; although the British radar was less sophisticated than the German system, the British system was used more successfully. Many of these mirrors are still standing today. The most famous of these devices still stand at Denge on the Dungeness peninsula and at Hythe in Kent; the three massive concrete “listening ears” which reflectors are not parabolic, but are actually spherical mirrors that could be used for direction finding by moving the sensor rather than the mirror.
Personal Works on the Sound Mirrors, Valentina Lekuona (2019-20)
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CONCRETE
HISTORY OF CONCRETE
The rise of concrete as one of the world’s major structural materials is a significant aspect of the history of technology. Concrete is a building material composed of cement, stone, sand, and water. It is sometimes seen as an archetypically ‘modern’ material, but it isn’t. The Romans poured the dome of the Pantheon in concrete. The engineers of Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, used concrete’s gravity-defying strength to hang their dome over a ring of windows ‘as if suspended from heaven. Even earlier civilizations had already used concrete as a constructive material. It was after the collapse of the Roman Empire that its secrets were almost lost, to be rediscovered again in more recent times. Indeed, modern development spans little more than 150 years – 1999 was the 175th anniversary of the patent for the manufacture of the first Portland cement (invented in the 18th century in England), one of the most important milestones in concrete’s history.
After War, as steel was in short supply, architects were obliged to make use of reinforced and pressed concrete. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, attention was focused on form as well as function. Before this time, many concrete buildings had been designed to serve a purpose and their exterior appearance, or how they fitted into the local environment, was only a secondary consideration.“But the artist has only one ambition: to master the material in a way that makes his work independent of the value of the raw material. But our architects don’t know this ambition. For them, a square meter of granite façade is more valuable than if it were concrete. And yet granite is essentially worthless. You can find it lying outside in the field; anyone can go and get it.” States Adolf Loos in 1913 in his famous essay Ornament and Crime. Nowadays approximately 7.5 billion m3 of concrete are produced annually - which equates to 1m3 of concrete for every person on earth each year. Almost all of the buildings of the last century have some concrete components, such as foundations, and it is found in every country of the world – concrete transcends culture.
Le Corbusier (1945)
BOARD-MAKING
Carpenters make wooden moulds – ‘shutters’ or ‘forms’ – the concrete will be poured into. Next, concrete is mixed from sand, cement, gravel, and water, and poured into the shutters. It takes a day or so to set and then the shutters are removed. In other words, concrete - like printing - is a craft that works in negative. The finished concrete is imprinted with the inverse image of whatever was in the shutters. Make them out of rough boards, and its texture will be recorded forever, printed on grey concrete. For that reason, the success of finished concrete depends most – perhaps surprisingly – on carpenters. ‘Board-making’ turns concrete into something else. It makes an artificial material organic. What might be heavy and mechanical takes on the endless, unpredictable variation of nature. Le Corbusier was the first to use the impressions left by the wooden formwork as an aesthetic element.
ECO-IMPACT
Anywhere from five to seven per cent of the CO2 generated by man every year comes from the manufacture of cement. Fortunately, concrete buildings will reabsorb much of that CO2 if they stay up long enough – about 100 years. Quarrying for the rock aggregate, crushing it, then mixing it together with the other elements in the mix creates a lot of dust, that is, air pollution. And the process is a loud one, creating noise pollution. Almost a fifth of all the waste therein is either concrete or concrete byproducts. However, limestone (one of its main components) happens to be the most abundant of the planet. Also, concrete buildings are durable and they don’t have to be replaced often, thus they can stay out of landfills. Only the amount of concrete needed for any particular construction project actually gets manufactured (there is little production waste). Additionally, monolithic concrete structures, because of their immense thermal mass, cut down on the energy consumed for heating and cooling their interiors and it is fireproof.
Personal Studies on Concrete, Valentina Lekuona (2020)
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BRUTALISM
HISTORY
Brutalist architecture, or Brutalism, is an architectural style which emerged in the mid-20th century and gained popularity in the late 1950s and 1960s. It descended from the modernist architectural movement of the late 19th century and of the first half of 20th century and is characterized by simple, block-like structures that often feature bare building materials. Exposed concrete is favoured in construction; however, some examples are primarily made of brick. Though beginning in Europe, Brutalist architecture can now be found around the world. The style has been most commonly used in the design of institutional buildings, such as libraries, courts, public housing and city halls.
Brutalism's stark, geometric designs contrast with the more ornate features of some architecture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Brutalist designs have historically been polarising; specific buildings, as well as the movement as a whole, have drawn a range of criticism and support from architects and the public. Many brutalist buildings have become architectural and cultural icons, with some UK buildings obtaining listed status.
The best-known proto-Brutalist architecture is the work of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, in particular, his 1952 Unité d'habitation in France. Banham opined that Le Corbusier's concrete work was a source of inspiration suggesting "...if there is one single verbal formula that has made the concept of Brutalism admissible in most of the world's Western languages, it is that Le Corbusier himself described that concrete work as 'beton brut'".
Brutalist Aesthetic, Source Uknown
CHARACTERISTICS
Brutalist buildings are usually constructed with reoccurring modular elements forming masses representing specific functional zones, distinctly articulated and grouped together into a unified whole. Concrete is used for its raw and unpretentious honesty, thus contrasting dramatically with the highly refined and ornamented buildings constructed in the elite Beaux-Arts style. Surfaces of cast concrete are made to reveal the basic nature of its construction, showing the texture of the wooden planks used for the in-situ casting forms.
Brutalist buildings may use other materials such as brick, glass, steel, rough-hewn stone, and gabions. Conversely, not all buildings exhibiting an exposed concrete exterior can be considered Brutalist, or may belong to one of a range of architectural styles including Constructivism, International Style, Expressionism, Postmodernism, or Deconstructivism. Peter Smithson believed that the core of Brutalism was a reverence for materials, stating "Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of material," and "the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodiness of the wood; the sandiness of sand."
Brutalism as an architectural philosophy was often associated with a socialist utopian ideology, which tended to be supported by its designers, especially by Alison and Peter Smithson, near the height of the style. This style had a strong position in the architecture of European communist countries from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, USSR, Yugoslavia). In Czechoslovakia, Brutalism was presented as an attempt to create a "national" but also "modern socialist" architectural style.
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EROSIVE AGENTS
“What will remain of our lives after we’re gone?” is the question that the film director Nikolaus Geyrhalter presents in his film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence “Homo Sapiens”. Empty spaces, ruins, cities increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, though humanity has disappeared. Now abandoned and decaying, gradually reclaimed by nature after being taken from it so long ago. The visual appeal of destroyed or decayed buildings is persuasive, as are their lasting demonstrations of power and exclusivity, fragility and beauty, resembling eighteenth-century etchings of Roman ruins. In other words, our modernity is what antiquity was for renaissance and Enlightenment artists. “Is modernity our antiquity?”.
In earth science, erosion is the action of surface processes (such as water flow or wind) that removes soil, rock, or dissolved material from one location on the Earth's crust, and then transports it to another location (not to be confused with weathering which involves no movement). This natural process is caused by the dynamic activity of the erosive agents; water, ice, snow, air, plants, animals, and humans (the so-called anthropogenic erosion). Us, humans, have “recently” constituted a new (and dramatic) way of corrosion of the surface; the use of machines, construction and production… The Anthropocene (from Greek ἄνθρωπος Anthropos, 'human being', and καινός kainos, 'new') is the geological epoch proposed by the scientific community to define a new geological era affected by the activity of humanity due to the significant global impact that human activities have had on terrestrial ecosystems. There is no common agreement regarding the precise date of its beginning; some consider it together with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (at the end of the 18th century), while other researchers trace its beginning to the beginning of agriculture.
"What is the National Theatre going to look like in twenty years?" Denis Lasdun (its architect) was asked in an interview. "I want the concrete to weather” replied the architect “so that in the end lichen grows on it and it becomes part of the riverscape. I want the building to be… part of nature by the Thames. … It will weather and become as though it’s an extensión of the river Banks. That’s what it will look like." Damage the National Theatre’s concrete, and there is no easy replacement of components; it will stay damaged forever. It is not a machine-made object, it is hand-made, bespoke, organic. It took infinite craft to construct (and time as well).
Untitled, Mark Ruwedel (1934)
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ARCHITECTURE IN/AND PHOTOGRAPHY
To what extent does photography influence not only the way architecture is perceived, but also the way it is designed? How does an image bring architecture to life, and at what point does it become uncanny? How do skyscrapers and living spaces translate into the flat, two-dimensional world of photography? What it is that makes up the intimate yet complex relationship between architecture and photography, architect and photographer?
The two arts have been connected since photography was invented in the 1830s. And even before that, architecture was deeply involved with images and visual representation. It’s important to remember that the very first photographs were, without exception, images of architecture; the first photograph successfully fixed by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, “Point de vue pris d’une fenêtre du Gras���, is an image of a building. Photography is the artistic medium that maintains the most of the essence of the subject in the moment of reproduction, but it also creates expectation, and it is highly persuasive when it comes to architecture, as architecture is the bold materialization of private and public visions. The zero hour, the moment right after the building is finished, shows its ideal side; a building’s own, just as the architect intended it. A moment of rapture, of detachment from reality, before the architecture actually becomes “used” (as in Roland Barthes’ famous example of trousers), is a good illustration of the coalition between the architect and the photographer.
“Point de vue pris d’une fenêtre du Gras”, Nicéphore Niépce (1826)
The most radical thinning of architectural bodies occurs in the way architecture is portrayed. The mass, the materiality, stands in contrast to their (ultra-flat) images. Buildings are imagined, invented, drawn, and – since the advent of the medium – endlessly photographed. Buildings take on a second, parallel existence in images. In reality, the semiosis that leads from the building to the photograph is the result of a complex process of translation. Pictures speak a language of their own. They offer a discourse that is unlike the physical experience of architecture. They transform volume into surface; distil matter into forms and signs. Photography shapes architecture. An image of a certain building is, in fact, part of its architecture, since most people who learn about a building may have only seen the photograph. Sometimes it even transforms people’s approach to a built work. While photographers in the twentieth century- most notably Lucien Hervé, Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman - played an important role in creating what would become the popular image of modern architecture, contemporary photographers are now focusing on the remnants of this era to reflect more critically on the legacy of the modern movement.
“Every... Bernd & Hilla Bercher”, Idris Khan (2004)
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