Beauty from a barrel: a new exhibition at the National Building Museum showcases concrete's contribution to architecture

Concrete Producer, The,  July, 2004  by Rick Yelton

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This was one of those jobs that didn't seem too hard at first glance. And fortunately from Jack Holley's perspective, it didn't require much travel. But as everyone knows, driving west to east through Washington, D.C., traffic can take as long as a flight to Denver. But for the vice president of Lafarge's ready-mixed concrete operations, Holley knew that what seems simple can often become difficult.

Holley's task this balmy spring day was to join with an artist to help cast and prepare a key portion of what is certain to become an international celebration of concrete's beauty.

Holley was standing in the casting area of Arban & Carosi's architectural precast operation in Woodbridge, Va. Along with Nick Carosi's crew, Holley has helped create several centerpiece elements for Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete, a major exhibition organized by the National Building Museum. The exhibit will present about 30 very recent or current architectural projects where designers used concrete in exciting ways.

While Holley has had a wide-ranging career, this was the first time he was able to cast a landscape.

Tod Williams of Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates designed the architectural element. The Zen "landscape" of precast concrete panels will cover portions of the exhibit's floor, with arrays of steel reinforcing bars placed perpendicular to the panels. When installed, the visual effect will be like a field of reeds.

Along with the exhibit's architectural aspects, visitors will be able to experience concrete's fascinating scientific properties, unusual finishing techniques, and advanced hybrid versions of the material. And the landscape elements produced by Carosi's crew will be used to provide a walkway for attendees. And for producers, there's even a spot for the public to finally learn how the technology of concrete production makes it all possible.

Glorifying concrete

Architects worldwide have used concrete in their projects to express a wide range of emotions and feelings, says G. Martin Moeller Jr., the museum's senior vice president for special projects and the curator for Liquid Stone. "Some of the world's most beautiful and innovative works of contemporary architecture derive their character from one of the world's most common materials--concrete," he says.

Curating this first-of-its-kind exhibit has been a challenge for Moeller. Talented architects and engineers who value concrete's versatility, strength, and almost unlimited potential as a medium for highly imaginative forms and surfaces have used the material. "This is a special opportunity to show how concrete is more than a commodity product used for sidewalks and roads," says Moeller.

But more importantly, the exhibit makes an important statement about concrete. "We have demonstrated there's a strong and continuing interrelationship between concrete as a material and the Modern Movement in architecture," says Moeller.

Concrete has been the indispensable medium for architects and engineers who want to explore sculptural and expressive possibilities for their structures. "Reinforced concrete may indeed be the quintessential material of the Modern Movement in architecture because its strength and flexibility have allowed unprecedented experimentation with forms, surfaces, and structural frames," says the curator.

Halls of concrete performance

The exhibit is divided into four sections: structure, surface, sculptural form, and concrete's future.

Structure

The Longitudinal House(s) is an innovative approach to structure. Designed by Vincent James Associates Architects, it is a connected pair of vacation houses for twin brothers where the individual spaces are defined by an undulating ribbon of concrete, which alternately serves as floor, wall, and ceiling.

Another project, the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, Spain, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, is a skyscraper whose skin is a built version of a pixilated digital image, with an irregular grid of concrete panels forming unexpected geometrical shapes and framing views in surprising ways. Also included will be a new bridge by Lord Norman Foster which spans a broad and deep valley with remarkably slender concrete structural elements; some of its svelte piers are taller than the Eiffel Tower.

Surface

This area will feature a complex in Japan by Tadao Ando, in which the signature design gesture is a large, shallow pool lined with an impeccably ordered array of seashells embedded in concrete. Also presented will be a Visiting Artists House, by Jim Jennings Architecture, a small structure defined primarily by two very long concrete walls, slightly out of parallel. Working closely with the architect, artist David Rabinowitch etched the walls with a flowing, abstract pattern of curves in bas-relief.

Yet another project, a technical school library in Eberswalde, Germany, by the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron, takes advantage of an astonishing new technique in which photographic images are engraved directly onto concrete panels, creating a surface that is simultaneously building skin on an artist's canvas.