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SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ARCHITECTURAL USE OF CONCRETEAuthor(s): Andrew SaintSource: AA Files, No. 22 (Autumn 1991), pp. 3-16Published by: Architectural Association School of ArchitectureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29543748 .

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SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT

THE ARCHITECTURAL USE

OF CONCRETE Andrew Saint

This is the second section of a two-part article calling for the reappraisal of the history of concrete architecture.

The earlier part appeared in AA Files no. 21.

Case Study II THE CONCRETE ARCH TRADITION

In the history of modern concrete architecture a distinction tends to

be drawn, often unconsciously, between two kinds of structure. On one side stand simple structures like bridges, dams, silos, cooling towers and hangars. These, though complex in the technical sense,

perform relatively straightforward tasks and are usually set in

virtual isolation. They are engineering structures. Many are of

great beauty. The response they evoke combines curiosity about how they are built with admiration for their size, their plainness of

line and their sheer, dramatic visibility ? the age-old fascination

with the sublime. On the other side stand more intricate structures:

housing, schools, offices and so on. These are the stuff of everyday modern architecture. Often humdrum from the engineering point of

view, such buildings require the knitting-together of spaces and

spans variable in size and use. What is asked here of the successful concrete structure is that it do its knitting neatly, logically and

economically, and at the same time offer something extra in the way of expression. They are architectural structures.

It is readily apparent that many kinds of buildings fall somewhere between these two categories and thus create difficulties for a reduc tivist history of twentieth-century concrete architecture. It is to these that I wish to draw particular attention in this second case study.

Use of the concrete arch, vault or dome goes back to the earliest

days of mass concrete. The Romans of course used concrete vaults,

though always (so far as we know) with at least a coat of plaster to cover their nudity. Arches and vaults can occur in all sorts of

structures, from the rawest engineering works to buildings with

many parts and of much intricacy. Despite Brunei's experiments of the 1830s, the modern history of concrete arch construction might well be said to start in 1867, the date of the astonishing but

temporary mass-concrete bridge thrown over the District Railway Line in London just north of the Cromwell Road (Fig. I).1 When reinforced concrete emerges, a fertile tradition of bridge-building

begins which, while remaining within the domain of engineering,



2. Model of the 'Lethaby consortium' design for Liverpool Cathedral, 1902.

regularly attracts the admiration of architects. But its pioneers ?

Maillart, Freyssinet, Williams and others ? all range far beyond bridges and poach upon the architectural preserve.

The earliest modern buildings in which concrete arches and vaults

regularly reappear seem to be churches. Churches are rarely designed without an architect; no building-type could be more 'architectural' or style-conscious. These buildings are little remarked upon in the history of concrete architecture because their forms are generally conservative and their structures concealed beneath a sliver of brick, mosaic, plaster or paint. Here we en? counter the prejudice, so strong in Peter Collins's classic account of the subject, that, unless a piece of concrete shows, it cannot be of interest to architects. But there is more to architecture than

superficial visibility and form-giving. Concrete churches go back at least to the 1830s; Westley Church,

Suffolk (1836), has walls built of William Ranger's patent con? crete blocks.2 The first concrete church that Collins discusses, L. C. Boileau's at Le Vesinet (1864), has mass-concrete walls with

iron Gothic vaulting.3 Many churches were constructed in concrete between 1870 and 1914, invariably for reasons of economy. In due course they were roofed as well as walled in concrete, but so far as I am aware the earliest examples of this revival of Roman practice have never been identified. At first the vaults were of mass con?

crete; latterly they were reinforced and thinned down into some?

thing like shells. Two well-known British examples of mass-concrete

vaulting are Bentley's Westminster Cathedral and Lethaby's All

Saints', Brockhampton. Another, unbuilt, was the famous proto expressionist design sent in for the Liverpool Cathedral compe? tition of 1903 by an Arts and Crafts consortium headed by Lethaby (Fig. 2). This was transitional in that the roof-shape proposed alluded (for those 'in the know') to the concrete character of the

vaults; yet their undersides were to be covered by seemly, bejewelled craftsmanship. In the Byzantinizing, round-arched style of many of these churches there is deliberate homage to Rome.4

No century was more conscious of the expressive value of the arch than the nineteenth, for church architecture above all. But, until reinforcement became calculated, possibilities for arched

expression in concrete were more or less limited to the primitive barrel vault. Indeed, in potential for architectural expressiveness in vaults or domes at the end of the nineteenth century, concrete could do less than the thin, unreinforced shells offered by the ancient

Spanish tradition of bovedas tabicadas, or 'board vaults', consist?

ing of flexible layers of overlapping, plaster-covered tiles, con? structed without centering. This method of vaulting was greatly developed from the 1860s onwards and taken to New York by Rafael Guastavino in 1881. It was regularly employed both by historicizing American architects (the most celebrated example of its use being the 132-foot unreinforced vault-crossing in St John the

Divine Cathedral, New York) and by Catalonian radicals like Gaudi and Domenech y Montaner, who twisted it into expressive, pliable new shapes.5

The aesthetic capabilities of reinforced-concrete arching as an element within a larger whole were first demonstrated by Anatole de Baudot in his St Jean de Montmartre, Paris (1897). This brilliant

building has always defied categorization, because it falls within

3. Warehouses at Casablanca docks c.1916 (left) and Marinoni Factory at Montataire 1920-1 (right), by the Perret brothers.

4 AA FILES 22



neither a defined architectural style nor a pure concrete system. Like all early concrete buildings that aspired to civic dignity, it is faced in another material ? here, pale brick. Its influence seems to have been oblique and not immediate. Trouble in getting the church built because of Parisian building regulations may have been part of the reason.6 More to the point, reinforced-concrete construction in the years immediately after de Baudot's church developed along the lines of the proprietary systems introduced by Hennebique, Coignet, Kahn and others. Architects and even independent engineers were marginalized in this world (at least in France, the United States and Britain; the case of Germany will be discussed

below). The systems concentrated on economy of multi-storey industrial construction at the expense of internal expression. Few of them contained standard arched elements for large spans, and, as the previous case-study7 suggested, those modest arches that did occur in them were soon phased out in favour of orthogonal forms. Concrete construction in warehouses and factories had, after all,

developed as a way of eliminating the waste of space involved in

deep floors and thick walls; where this was the priority, the arch

appeared to be an encumbrance. In this respect, the development between 1900 and 1925 from floors with revealed beams at regular intervals to flat-slab concrete with mushroom-headed columns

made scant difference to the aesthetics of internal design.8 It may have been under influences of this kind that the two most

famous concrete churches of the 1900-14 period, both built of the material for cheapness, Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple of 1906-7 at Oak Park (mass-concrete walls with a reinforced slab

roof) and Josef Plecnik's Church of the Holy Spirit in Vienna

(1910-13),9 reject the expressive exploration of concrete arch and vault initiated by de Baudot in favour of classical trabeation. But the more consistent and interesting case is that of Auguste Perret. After cautious early flirtation with concrete arching and vaulting, Perret

couples growing equivocation towards such forms with an insistence that the language of concrete must be made manifest inside and outside each building, whatever its status and position. In weighing how far Perret's position on these issues is 'rational', we must be aware of the ambiguity of that word. 'Rationalism' describes not only the expression of the most appropriate and considered means for solving a problem, but also the Cartesian force in French architectural tradition.

The Perret brothers first came to grips with concrete vaulting in a church ? not their own, but Oran Cathedral in Algeria, which

they constructed well after the death of its architect, Albert Ballu, in about 1910, using his basic design but adjusting the fenestration and perhaps other features to their own ideas and methods of con?

struction.10 A little later came wartime warehouses at Casablanca

docks, for which the Perrets contrived a run of shallow concrete vaults without toplighting (Fig. 3, left). In due course this was

developed into a modestly expressive curved form of the well known industrial 'north-light roof truss', hitherto usually sawtooth in shape and framed in light iron or steel. This profile the Perrets used with some aplomb in the Marinoni Factory at Montataire

(Fig. 3, right) and in two of their 1920s Paris buildings, the film

industry scene-painting studio in the Rue Olivier-Metra, and the

Admiralty Research Laboratories.11 North-light roof trusses being ubiquitous and visible, derivatives (whether from the Perrets or from equivalent German types of concrete-framed north-lighting developed in the 1920s) have made their permanent mark on the

European industrial landscape. Meanwhile, there were grander buildings for Auguste Perret to

design and wider spaces to span. Earliest was the Theatre des

Champs-Elysees (1911-12) ?

just the type of building in which

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one might have expected vaulted or domical forms. They are not

quite excluded, but they are much reduced in favour of the recti? linear severity which became the Perret trademark. This is specially noticeable in the smaller of the two auditoriums, whose tight, crisp aesthetic seems tailor-made for the Stravinsky premieres held in the theatre. Many factors seem to come together here: reaction

against the licence of previous theatre architecture; calculation of how to span spaces economically, given the vocabulary and know how of the early reinforced-concrete systems; the acoustical

dangers of domes; and the Beaux-Arts prejudice in favour of

trabeation, going back to Laugier and the eighteenth-century 'rationalists'. Whatever the overriding reasons, a certain reduc? tive puritanism is palpable in the Theatre. What Perret has not yet

quite dared to do, however, is to bare his concrete to the world. So the puritanism is veiled by classical stonework, a frieze by Bourdelle and frescos by Maurice Denis.

Just after the First World War come two of Perret's most famous

buildings, in one of which he candidly deploys the concrete arch, in the other the concrete vault. The arched building is the Esders

Clothing Factory. One would like to know about the brief for this

exceptional building (Fig. 4). A three-storey clothing workshop at this date would normally suggest rectilinear column-and-floor

4. Esders Clothing Factory, Paris, by the Ferrets, 1919 (demolished).

5. Baths at Butte-aux-Cailles, Paris, by Louis Bonnier, 1921-3.

5



construction, which Perret here dramatically abjured. Was it the bald need for a flood of natural light on an enclosed site that made him scoop out the whole centre of the building, or was there also some Taylorist intent of all-round managerial visibility? Had Perret been looking at illustrations of Wright's Larkin Building, and

persuaded himself he could do better? We do not seem to know the answers. But once the decision on the plan of the Esders Factory had been made, the combination of height and span meant that some sort of relieving arch or vault was necessary. The whole joy of the

building ? at least, to judge from the one famous interior

photograph ? comes from the grace of the two thin, rounded arches

which Perret fashioned to meet the Esders brief, and in particular the beauty of their junction with the gallery floors. There is nevertheless something stinted about them, as though Perret wanted in this cheap industrial workshop to get away with as little arch as

possible. Comparison with a contemporary Parisian building, Louis Bonnier's baths at Butte-aux-Cailles (Fig. 5), makes the

point.12 In the baths (with their generic Roman overtones), the

potential for an arched and vaulted concrete architecture, though covered in brick outside and partly in mosaic within, is actively relished. At Esders, Perret admits the naked concrete arch but reduces it to an expressive minimum. It was certainly not hinted at on the outside of the building , which was said to be dull ? perhaps no smarter than a Hennebique warehouse or factory.13

At Le Raincy, Auguste Perret's first and most famous concrete church (1922-3), one might have expected that expressiveness would come into fuller play.14 It is certainly a moving building (Fig. 6), in part because Perret brings discipline and consistency to

every element of its concrete vocabulary, in part because of the

symbolist, stained-glass scheme devised for it by Maurice Denis and his Ateliers de l'Art Sacre. Le Raincy attempts a synthesis between the Gothic and the Classical rationalist traditions in the

light of what reinforced concrete can do. But this programme

6. Not re-Dame du Raincy, by the Perrets, 1922-3.

6

depends upon inhibiting ?

though not quite eliminating ? the arch

and the vault. Reinforced concrete allows them to become thin, shallow, almost nugatory things, devoid of their ancient Gothic

weight and expressiveness. As Perret's church architecture

develops, always on the basis of the language worked out at Le

Raincy, retreat from the vault becomes more marked. In his last

great church at Le Havre, Perret goes so far as to construct a

centralized, quasi-trabeated tower. Nor, from Le Raincy onwards, are arches allowed to obtrude seriously upon the other aspect of Perret's programme, the evolution of a consistent, external concrete architecture. Such forms would have compromised the essence of his vision ? that of a universal language of concrete

applicable, at differing levels of elaboration, across the whole realm of architecture, from the factory to the cathedral. Both his own Beaux-Arts training and the pragmatic development of the

early concrete systems prejudiced Perret in favour of a language of trabeated frame and infill to replace the block-upon-block, load

bearing traditions of external masonry architecture. So strong were the force and consistency of his example, that the possibility of there being other equally proper and universalizable ways of

expression for concrete architecture became obscure.

One example of an alternative, international lingua franca of concrete architecture is the development of the parabolic or

elliptical arched form in halls, swimming baths, and ? to a lesser extent ? churches since the beginning of this century. This is a

tradition of great fertility and versatility, often at the watershed between architecture and engineering. Many of its buildings are admired and enjoyed. Yet as a strand in twentieth-century architecture it has received scant concerted attention.

Midway in this line of development lies the best known of inter war parabolic-arched structures in Britain: Easton and Robertson's

Royal Horticultural Hall in London (1927-8).15 This is one of the best buildings in a fairly dull decade of British architecture (Fig. 7). It has a suave brick neo-Georgian front, refined with early touches of 'Swedish grace'. Behind the front and to one side are the public spaces and small-scale meeting rooms which halls of this kind have to have. Behind again is the full-height hall for which the building is famous, consisting of 'nave and aisles' with a stepped section for

clerestory lighting, carried on a series of satisfying, flat-faced concrete elliptical or parabolic arches. Here is an approach quite different from Perret's: an architecture that admits, for good functional reasons, a disconnection between the outside of the

building and its inside; and one that entertains the device and

expressiveness of the concrete arch pragmatically, without the sense that it can be permitted only within some inexorable, fully formulated language for concrete.

The pedigree of the Horticultural Hall and the many buildings like it is an international one and can be traced as far back as the

Crystal Palace. One infrequently mentioned feature of the Crystal Palace was the stepped section of its aisles. This allowed an even

spread of clerestory lighting and avoided the heat and glare associated with direct toplighting (which the seamstresses in Perret's Esders Factory must surely have endured). Before the

stepped hall section could come into its fully visible own, the forest of columns present in the Crystal Palace design had to be cleared away. In iron and steel construction, this seems first to have

happened in Tony Gamier's La Mouche Market Hall at Lyons (designed in 1907), which crosses the stepped section with the

powerful, uninterrupted arches of the Galerie des Machines

(Fig. 8).16 But by then the thing had been more effectively done in reinforced concrete ? in Germany.

A case could be made for the fundamental tradition of arched and

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7. Royal Horticultural Hall, London. Easton and Robertson, architects, Oscar Faber, engineer, 1927-8.

8. La Mouche Market Hall, Lyons, Tony Garnier, c. 1913-17.

vaulted architecture in reinforced concrete being German rather than French. No English-speaking scholar seems to have covered this ground adequately. Collins did not pursue the early German contribution to reinforced concrete architecture in the depth it deserves. His book restricts the subject to a couple of stimulating but compressed pages, and brief allusions to the important con?

tracting firms of Wayss and Freytag and of Dyckerhoff and Widmann.17 Since then (1959) much German material has been

published,18 but no one seems yet to have taken up the challenge of a new international interpretation.

Suffice it to say here that an independent architectural tradition of German reinforced concrete, based on the development of the Monier patents, was well established by 1914. Wide-span buildings were a speciality. The shallow-domed hall of the School of

Anatomy at Munich (Max Littmann, architect, 1905-7) (Fig. 9) was mentioned in passing by Collins, though characteristically he illustrated a rectilinear part of the building. The span of the concourse at Leipzig Railway Station (1909-11) was a major advance in reinforced-concrete tunnel-vaulting (Fig. 10). Such

AA FILES 22

masonry-clad and plaster-finished buildings offered little that was

immediately new in the way of form, but were edging towards the

fully fledged shell roof. The most interesting of all the German pre-war buildings were

two in Breslau, now Wroclaw: Heinrich K?ster's Market Hall of 1906-8 (specialist contractor, Karl Brandt) (Fig. 11), and the more famous Jahrhunderthalle, or Centennial Hall, built to the designs of

Max Berg (specialist contractor, Dyckerhoff and Widmann) in 1911-13 (Fig, 12).19 Here certainly were major form-givers. The Breslau Market Hall has elliptical concrete arches supporting a

stepped clerestory, and directly triggers off the set of structures to which the Horticultural Hall belongs. The Centennial Hall, still

standing, is yet more important, for it is here that reinforced concrete architecture first comes firmly 'into the round', the ribs and stepped section of the market hall being turned dramatically round a circle. The 213-foot-diameter Breslau dome was the first to beat the span of the Pantheon, and with a huge reduction in weight. It points forward, though in ribbed rather than shell construction, to the inter-war evolution of concrete domes in Germany. Collins's

7



9. Ha// o/f/ie School of Anatomy, Munich University, by Heilmann and Littmann, architects and constructors, 1905-7.

^^^^^^ ^jj^

10. Leipzig Railway Station, concourse, 1909-11.

11. Breslau (now Wroclaw) Market Hall. Heinrich K?ster, architect, Karl Brandt, contractor, 1906-8.

8

Concrete pays homage to these buildings ('novel in form, vast in

scale, with a delicacy of line and plasticity of surface'). Yet, wary as ever of the arch and vault, he argues that their influence was 'not

exclusively beneficial', but productive of cliches 'inimicable \sic~] to a sound architectural development of the new material'.20

Clearly Collins was thinking of the parabolic-arch tradition. The expressionism of the Breslau buildings certainly had a big

impact. Freyssinet, for instance, was using high concrete arches with wide spans in a glass factory at Montlucon by 1915 (without the stepped clerestory, but with an exterior strangely like that of the

Lethaby team's design for Liverpool Cathedral), and went on to

design a variety of larger elliptically arched structures, of which the most famous were the vast airship hangars at Orly (Figs. 13, 14).21 In 1928 Francis S. Onderdonk devoted a chapter of his book The Ferro-Concrete Style to the 'parabolic arch'. Much of this covers

bridges or domical structures, in which the impetus to arch spans is one of purely practical engineering. But Onderdonk illustrates

many examples of halls or churches in Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia where the Breslau Market Hall arches are used primarily for expressive effect. One such, the temporary Congress Hall designed for the Gothenburg Exhibition of 1923

(architect, Arvid Bjerke), was the immediate precursor of Easton and Robertson's Horticultural Hall.22 Here the construction was of laminated timber, not concrete ? a reminder that architectural forms suggested by a new building technology quickly have effects outside its own bounds.

Collins, with his commitment to originality, rationality of struc? ture and absolute correspondence between the outside and the inside of a building, evidently felt that the Horticultural Hall and other derivatives from the Breslau Market Hall failed the test of architectural admirability. But a broader view can perfectly well be taken: that they offered a genre of modern, more imposing, more

'architectural' hall which was not only satisfying in itself but

promised much for future development. In Britain, for example, the building type which most took to the

elliptically arched hall was not the church or the market hall but the covered public swimming bath. The design of municipal baths and wash-houses had been the subject of architectural attention since 1850. It was a building-type with a variety of requirements, chiefly technical and hygienic. But the main swimming pool offered a

measure of aesthetic opportunity. Before 1914 it tended to be a

drab, toplit rectangle, often with a plain iron roof and continuous

clerestory. After the First World War, swimming began to be

thought of more as a sport or leisure activity, less as a ritual of

cleansing. Reinforced-concrete construction had advantages for the

design of such pools. Well handled, it could be fresh and striking; it offered flat, smooth surfaces which were easy to maintain and

clean; and it could let a flood of clerestory light into the building ?

a powerful point in the inter-war period, when there was faith in the

healing effect of natural light upon the urban population.23 Reinforced-concrete swimming baths came in soon after 1918.

Early British examples are not exciting. They were toplit still, with shallow arches separated by conventional plaster panels

? in part perhaps because they had to double as municipal halls during the winter months and therefore required a modicum of civic ornament in fibrous plaster. More adventurous baths were being built abroad. Best of all are the ever thoughtful Louis Bonnier's Butte-aux Cailles Baths in Paris (1921-3), referred to above, which took a Roman or 'thermal' approach to the type, combining round arches with 'Diocletian'-style endlighting and toplighting (Fig. 5). The

simpler alternative of the high concrete arches and ramped-back clerestories of Breslau Market Hall had made its appearance in

swimming baths no later than 1927 in the Stuttgart suburb of

AA FILES 22



12. Breslau (now Wroclaw) Centennial Hall. Max Bergf architect, Dyckerhoff and Widmann, specialist contractors, 1911-12.

13. Montlucon Glass Factory, by Eugene Freyssinet, 1915.

14. Orly, airship hangars, by Eugene Freyssinet, 1921-3 (demolished).

AA FILES 22 9



75. Heslach Baths, Stuttgart. E. Z?blin, specialist contractor, 1926-7.

16. Poplar Baths, London. Poplar Borough Engineer's Department, 1932-4. Front and interior of first-class swimming bath set out for winter use as a public meeting and entertainments hall.

10

leslach (Fig. 15) ?

combined, as at Butte-aux-Cailles, with a

rteek, all brick exterior.24 But probably Heslach was not known in

Britain before the Horticultural Hall caused a little rash of ellip

ically arched British municipal pools in the early 1930s.

Poplar, where the spirit of municipal enterprise was then

?trong, was the first of these (Fig. 16). New baths in East India

Dock Road were commissioned from the Borough Engineer in

L929, delayed by the national crisis of 1931 but built in 1932-4. There followed baths of similar structure for St Marylebone ;Kenneth Cross, architect, 1935-7), for Willesden (Willesden

Borough Engineer's Department, 1935-6) and outside London at

Northampton (J. C. Prestwich, 1936-7, after a competition).25 Diere may be other examples. The heightening of the arch in these

3uildings conveys a sense of space and presence which the flatter :urve of the conventional hall or pool fails to offer. Yet, as at the

Horticultural Hall, it has little or no impact upon the exterior.

Poplar Baths has a second-rate 'modern' brick set of elevations

hung off a steel frame. Kenneth Cross, a specialist in bath

buildings, supplied St Marylebone with a neat, Regency-style pair of fronts (Fig. 17). The Willesden baths (on a tight site in Granville

Road, Kilburn: demolished 1990) had a single front in an able version of the 'Liverpool-modern' idiom, the principal assistant on

the job having apparently been Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, then fresh Dut of the Liverpool School of Architecture.26 None of these buildings was a smart project, in architectural or

engineering terms. The high concrete-arched hall, in other words, was ready after the Horticultural Hall to enter the common British architectural vocabulary and be taken up by a lowly borough engineer and his assistants. That, no doubt, was the meaning of the

journalist in the Architect and Building News who wrote so

percipiently about the Poplar Baths: 'the hall itself stands in an

honourable line of descent from Leipzig via the Horticultural Hall, Westminster, to ends as yet unknown. There is structural idea in this scheme as definite as in a vaulted cathedral, and it is by working on such an idea until its final possibilities are disclosed that real architectural style may be expected to evolve.'27

Collins on the other hand saw this kind of cribbing as a cliche. It is true that in comparison with the adventurous use of all sorts of

Rippenkonstruktionen ?

cranked, elliptical and other types of concrete arch ? that German-speaking architects were making for their halls, factories, markets and warehouses of the 1920s,28 the

repeated recourse to the ellipse in the British swimming pools was

quite naive. But when is a common architectural form a cliche, and when a sound line of architectural development? The answer must

depend partly on taste, partly on one's point in history. Too close to the time, the naked copying of architects (or engineers) seems to be

evidence of sterility; at a remove, a clutch of common forms may appear attractively to evoke a particular decade and culture. Why the 'cliche' of the parabolic arch should be worse for future architecture than, for instance, the hackneyed language into which French and Swiss churches so often fell in the aftermath of Perret, Collins could not explain. But one can sympathize with his

impatience when confronted with the bogus kind of theorizing adduced by Onderdonk in his chapter on the parabolic arch.

'Comets', contends this author, 'follow parabolas through limitless

space and the parabolic arch gives the Ferro-Concrete Style something of the infinite swirl and swing of the Universe . . . one

end here in the finite ? the other hidden in the infinite-eternal ? for

are we not like comets of hidden origin and unknown destiny?'29 The high concrete arch made a surprise but merely token

appearance in Le Corbusier's entry for the Palace of the Soviets

Competition. As a common building form for halls, it failed to

outlive the 1930s. Given its aspirational, Gothic overtones, it is

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17. St Marylebone Baths, London. Kenneth Cross, architect, c.1935.

18. Catholic church at Bischofsheim, Germany, by Dominikus B?hm, c.1926.

AA FILES 22

curious that the high arch or vault did not take firmer hold in

church-building. There are individualistic examples all over

Europe,30 but nothing in the way of a coherent tradition. Of the

churches illustrated by Onderdonk, the best and most consistent are

those by Dominikus B?hm of Cologne, a fine, expressionist architect interested, it seems, purely in the spiritual value of the concrete vault, and therefore at the opposite end of the spectrum from the structural rationalism of Perret (Fig. 18).31 In Britain,

Seely and Paget were the only practice with a more than passing interest in the form, but neither of their churches in this mode, at Lee on Solent (1933) and Stevenage (1956-60), carries the conviction of the Horticultural Hall.32 By the time of the Second

World War, the leadership in the development of a non-trabeated concrete architecture had passed from the arch or vault to the dome

? more particularly, to the exploration of shell-concrete coverings.

At the penultimate point in these articles, I should stress again that their purpose is not to rewrite the whole history of reinforced concrete architecture, but to point out some strands in it which seem to have got lost, or at least not to have received full consideration, in orthodox accounts of modern architecture's development. The disclaimer is necessary, because the following paragraphs venture further on to territory where I have found no Peter Collins to guide me ? territory, too, upon the disputed border between architecture and engineering. They are tentative notes towards a history that someone else, some day soon, should write.

During the 1950s and early 1960s a worldwide interest emerged in the architectural expression of great, shaped, concrete-roofed

spaces. Some familiar examples will make the point: Eero Saarinen's Ingalls Ice Hockey Rink at Yale and his TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport; the CNIT Building that sparked off the

development of La Defense in Paris; Hugh Stubbins's Kongress? halle in Berlin; the Commonwealth Institute in London; and, in controversial culmination of the series, the Sydney Opera House. These buildings owed much to engineers: something to Freyssinet, something to Nervi, a good deal to Fred Severud in New York, a little to Torroja in Spain and Arup in Britain, most of all perhaps to Felix Candela in Mexico. In retrospect they appear to have been a flash in the pan. Frei Otto always claimed that expressive roofs were better done with his type of tensile structure than in concrete.33 So he seems to have proved when the cable-hung, concrete-covered roof of the Berlin Kongresshalle suffered partial collapse in 1980 (Fig. 24). The shaped concrete auditorium roof is now out of fashion.

In its heyday, nevertheless, it seemed to have the potential for unlimited future development. Gordon Graham, for instance, in 1957 compared the trabeated style of reinforced concrete to a

Model-T Ford, and looked forward to the radical changes to come when architecture had absorbed the plastic advances in form of

Maillart, Nervi, Torroja, Arup and Candela.34 This no doubt was to confuse the everyday tasks of architecture with the exceptional ones of engineering. But it conveys the excitement and importance then attached by many to this strand in architectural and structural

thought. What were its origins? A quest for the answer leads us back to the systematic

development of shallow concrete-shell domes and vaults in

Germany in the period after Max Berg's Centennial Hall at Breslau. The Centennial Hall was a ribbed structure, but its specialist engineering contractors, Dyckerhoff and Widmann, very soon realized the greater potential of ribless domes and vaults ?

rippenlose Systeme, as they are called in Julius Vischer and Ludwig Hilberseimer's illuminating book of 1928, Beton als Gestalter?5

Dyckerhoff and Widmann went into collaboration in the early

11



79. Leipzig Market Hall. Zeiss-Dywidag, specialist contractors, 1928-9.

! 1 ?

il L

' L

20. Diagram showing Zeiss-Dywidag dome system, c.1930.

i .,

21. Brynmawr Rubber Factory. Architects Co-Operative Partnership with Ove Arup, 1948-52.

12

1920s with the celebrated firm of Zeiss on a small experimental dome in the company's home town of Jena, meant as a prototype for a planetarium to be built at Munich. Walter Bauersfeld of Zeiss was the brains behind the project. It was built of steel latticework, with a covering of concrete sprayed on. Another planetarium at Berlin Zoo (see inside front cover) followed, and then larger domes in Jena and D?sseldorf. A joint company, Zeiss-Dy widag, was set up to

exploit the innovation. The new firm's experts were Franz

Dischinger (who had joined Dyckerhoff and Widmann in 1911, the

year of the Centennial Hall) and Ulrich Finsterwalder (Dischinger's colleague from 1925).36 Together they embarked upon a research

programme into the behaviour of shells of varying curvature,

elongation and thickness. Since they worked for contractors, they did not aim at architecturally individualistic results. What they sought was some reliable, systematic, economical yet elegant

method of roof spanning. It is worth comparing Dischinger and Finsterwalder's approach with that of Perret. Both were systematic and disciplined. But, where the Frenchman aimed at a rational and

complete concrete vocabulary applicable across the whole range of

architecture, the Germans seem to have had in mind something akin to Typisierung

? the search for universalizable forms and solutions to particular problems of applied design, so much debated by the

Deutscher Werkbund in the 1920s.

By the end of that decade Zeiss-Dy widag had built its domes over three vast market buildings, in Frankfurt, Leipzig (Fig. 19) and

Basle, and the shallow, shell-concrete dome, square, octagonal or

oblong, was on its way to becoming standard in German archi? tecture and engineering. Cylindrical vaults for factories and

hangars, not unlike the forms which Perret tried out in his early industrial buildings, were also elegantly systematized by

Dischinger and Finsterwalder. The serried ranks of north-light roof trusses to the Volkswagen works outside Magdeburg were probably the most extensive pre-war example of the use of shell concrete.37

Though people knew about this work abroad (Candela wanted to

study under Dischinger, but the Spanish Civil War prevented him and he went to Mexico instead),38 it had not been much exploited outside Germany before the Second World War. A former

Dyckerhoff and Widmann employee, Anton Tedesko, emigrated to the United States in 1930 and there made some use of the Zeiss

Dy widag patents, beginning with Chicago's Hay den Planetarium of 1933. But wider exploration of German innovations in shell concrete had to await American wartime needs.39

Acquaintance with these methods in Britain was characteristically hit-and-miss. A certain C. F. de Steiger patented something called the 'Chisarc' roof, which was used in a few places, and there were one or two wartime shell-concrete-roofed structures (notably the

Wythenshawe Bus Garage, and a canteen building at May and Baker's factory, Dagenham, built to the designs of Edward Mills). But it was shell concrete more than anything that excited the team of British architects and engineers sent into Germany in October 1945 to see what secrets they could plunder from the German

building industry.40 Some of the earliest post-war British concrete structures of architectural interest mimicked the German shell concrete forms closely. The well-known Stockwell Bus Garage of 1951-4 does nothing that had not already been done at Frankfurt,

Leipzig or the Volkswagen works. Even so smart a building as the

Brynmawr Rubber Factory (1948-52), for which Ove Arup was the

engineer, cribs the form of its nine domes and supporting piers quite precisely from a Zeiss-Dywidag drawing published as far back as 1930 (Figs. 20, 21).4' All this is not to deny that engineers like Arup, Torroja and Nervi

had in different ways and at different scales, from the animal cage to the hangar and the football stadium, explored in their pre-war

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works some individual, free-form architectural possibilities for reinforced concrete. The difference was that the Zeiss-Dy widag team had come up with a series of semi-standard industrial forms and techniques which, like the parabolic arch, could freely enter architectural language, if designers chose to adopt them.

A post-war interest in shaped shells soon arose, leaving the

simple Zeiss-Dy widag domes and barrel vaults behind. It took a

variety of directions, but in terms of form it seems to have had two

starting-points. One was the folded shell, usually in the form of a

hyperbolic paraboloid, the shape championed by Felix Candela and

achieved, to use imprecise language, by turning ellipses and domes inside out so that their double curvature becomes 'anticlastic' as

opposed to 'synclastic'. Two French engineers, Aimond and

Laffaille, had begun tentatively building hyperbolic paraboloids in the 1930s.42 As a Mexican, Candela was no doubt influenced by the free-form bovedas tabicadas, or 'Guastavino vaulting', of

Spanish tradition, which in Gaudi's hands had on occasions veered into anticlastic shapes. He took up hyperbolic paraboloids in 1949 and soon achieved a series of dramatically expressive results over a series of building-types

? warehouses and factories, churches, and a restaurant (Fig. 22). He worked as an engineer-contractor, usually in a dominant relationship with a Mexican architect. Candela always claimed that his shells, built in a manner derived from German inter-war work, were simple to calculate, cheap to construct and therefore generalizable.43 They did not, on the

whole, cover big spans. Candela, now seemingly almost forgotten, was particularly ad?

mired in Britain. Of the various British tokens of homage to

Candela, three are worth mentioning ? the earliest, the most

elegant, and the biggest. Perhaps the first hyperbolic paraboloid building in Britain was a small timber carpet-weaving shed built in 1957 for the Wilton Royal Carpet Company to Robert Townsend's

designs ? like the Gothenburg Exhibition Hall of 1923, a reminder

that timber and concrete forms can in certain circumstances be

interchangeable.44 Elegance in 'hypars' is better represented by the handsome assembly hall to what is now the Geoffrey Chaucer

School, Southwark, by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (1959-60).45 But the biggest British attempt to emulate Candela's favoured

shapes and volumes was Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall and Partners' Commonwealth Institute (1960-2) in London (Fig. 23).46 Because of its size, the Commonwealth Institute adopts a different, almost bastard approach to construction, in place of the purity of the Candelan shell. The roofs at both the Southwark school and the Commonwealth Institute have given many maintenance problems since their construction ? one reason for the fleeting appeal of the

'hypar' covering. The other point of departure for the wide-span concrete roof in

the post-war years was the State Fair Arena at Raleigh, North

Carolina, designed in 1950 by the Polish emigre Matthew, or

Maciej, Nowicki and posthumously built in 1952-3. The huge swooping saddle-shape of this parabolically planned auditorium, built mainly for huge cattle shows, was the first large cable-hung and concrete-covered roof structure. Of Nowicki (1910-50), another half-forgotten figure, much was expected at the time of his death in a plane crash; he had been the Polish representative in connection with the United Nations Building.47 But it is likely that the Raleigh State Fair Arena's conception had as much to do with the engineer involved, Fred Severud of New York. Severud was also the engineer for Eero Saarinen's first cable-hung structure, the

Ingalls Ice Hockey Rink at Yale (1956-8), and, on a bigger scale, for the similarly structured Berlin Kongresshalle of the same dates

by Hugh Stubbins (Fig. 24).48 A third, perhaps less adventurous line of post-war development

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22. Xochimilco, Mexico, restaurant by Felix Candela, 1957-8.

23. Commonwealth Institute, London. Robert Matthew, Johnson

Marshall and Partners, architects, Harris and Sutherland, engineers, 1960-2.

13



24. Berlin Kongresshalle. Hugh Stubbins, architect, Fred Severud and others, engineers, 1956-8. As completed (above) and after partial collapse in 1980 (below).

25. Kresge Auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Eero Saarinen, architect, 1953-6.

14

in shell-concrete vaults is represented modestly by Saarinen's

Kresge Auditorium at MIT of 1953-6, more grandly by the CNIT

(Centre Nationale des Industries et Techniques) Building at La Defense outside Paris of 1957-8, designed by a team led by Robert

Camusot, an architect always alive to innovations in structural

technique. Both of these are domes of more or less orthodox

curvature, resting on three points (Figs. 25,26). At La Defense the first proposal was for a cable-hung roof, but the contractors were

frightened by it; Nervi was then consulted, and suggested the three

point dome.49 The partial collapse of the Kongresshalle in 1980 seems to have proved the French workers wise. But it was poor

performance rather than structural worries that put paid to the fashion for huge concrete-covered shells in the 1960s. 'Favoured

by expensive steel and cheap timber, hampered by small thermal insulation and precarious watertightness, their doom was sealed by corrosion-resistant light metal troughing with lightweight insu?

lation', pronounces Sir Alan Harris.50 These shell-roofed buildings of the 1950s and others like them

(Kenzo Tange's Shizuoka Convention Hall of 1955-7 also belongs in the sequence) are disparate enough, but they share several features. All belong to the borderland between architecture and

engineering. All have an ancestry which goes back to early German

experiments with concrete vaulting and has little to do with the kind of concrete architecture that interested Perret or Le Corbusier. All are public buildings destined for exhibitions, meetings or sport. All involve a level of international exchange of information that was

impossible in the inter-war world and some striving towards common vocabulary and technique. And all attempt to give the

language of public architecture dignity by means of the sheer, naive

expressiveness of the concrete shell. After Saarinen's TWA Terminal (1960-2) came the last of the great shells, the Sydney Opera House ? a competition design arbitrarily picked out by Saarinen after his fellow-assessors had rejected it because it did not conform to the rules. The tormented history of this great project too well conveys the difficulty that ambitious shell structures can

cause.51 Yet the ancestry of a building that has become a popular symbol of architectural expressiveness in a material believed to be the object of popular hatred deserves attention anew.

CONCLUSION The traditions of concrete architecture are older and broader than is

commonly assumed. During the nineteenth century concrete was

increasingly used in construction, for strength and cheapness. Usually it was aesthetically subordinate and had no marked effect on the style of the building. That subordination was sensible, given the poor visual properties of the material. The good practical sense

of covering concrete with more elegant or harder-wearing materials has also been amply proved in our own time.

The advent and development of reinforced concrete after 1900 transformed the structural possibilities of the material. As regards exteriors, the aesthetic position did not at first change. In many

buildings there remained cogent reasons for not exposing concrete. As Beresford Pite put it in 1925, 'I do not want to see as much concrete as I can, I want to see as little of it as I can; it is not as if it was precious marble.'52 In interiors, by contrast, reinforced con? crete led quickly, in building-types of wider span and dignity, above all those with a public hall as an important element of the

brief, to an exploration of new expressive possibilities. Right expression in architecture tends even today to be inter?

preted as entailing some form of visible correspondence between the inside and the outside of a building. This postulate of French rationalist teaching, strongest in Perret and strong in Le Corbusier, is easily satisfied for simple engineering structures. It is less

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26. CNIT (Centre Nationale des Industries et Techniques) Building, La

Defense, Paris. Robert Camusot, Jean de Mailly and Bernard Zehrfuss with Nervi, Prouve and other engineers, 1957-8.

reasonable for buildings with any complexity of use or volume, in which a disjunction in materials and form between exterior and interior can often be sensible and meaningful. Other interpretations of architectural expressiveness may be equally legitimate, in

particular a departure from the narrowest type of structural rationalism in order to explore the light, clean curve of the concrete

arch, vault or dome in grand interior spaces, religious or secular. The earliest generations of architects to use reinforced-concrete architecture frequently did that well.

This fertile tradition, more German than French in origin, is undervalued today. There remains a tendency to believe that all true concrete architecture is an architecture of trabeation. It was Owen

Williams, not a figure usually associated with the arch, dome or

vault, who said: T have a very definite opinion that the only structural element is the arch.'53 From its beginnings in two

buildings in Breslau, the Market Hall of 1906-8 and the Centennial Hall of 1911-12, the arched and vaulted tradition in concrete architecture developed on more or less coherent lines, first in the form of parabolic-arched halls, then of shell concrete vaults, domes and auditoriums. This was primarily an architecture of great interiors. Sensibly, its external appearance varied according to the

complexity of each individual building. This line of development did not furnish a complete architectural

language in concrete, such as Perret tried to achieve. But it did

suggest general answers to particular structural problems, and answers which ? unlike the early reinforced-concrete systems

?

had expressive potential. Because it attempted to offer both universalizable and expressive solutions to the issues of how to use concrete in architecture, this tradition is as much an architectural

legacy as an engineering one. It deserves renewed admiration and

understanding. It may yet have something to teach.

Notes

1. Survey of London, vol. 42 (1986), p. 328; Transactions of the Newcomen

Society 42 (1969-70), p. 159. 2. H. M. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840

(1978), p. 671. 3. Peter Collins, Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture (1959), pp. 33-4.

4. The use and degree of concrete construction in Victorian and Edwardian

churches vary greatly. For instance: St Barnabas, Oxford (Arthur Blomfield,

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architect, 1869-72), has lintels and concrete dressings but 'rubble' walls faced

in roughcast; St Mark's, Battersea Rise (William White, 1872-4), has mass

concrete walls faced in brick; the Swedenborgian Church, Waldegrave Road,

Bromley (1883), is walled in mass concrete with a roughcast finish;

St Andrew's, Roker (Edward Prior, 1906), has stone walls but reinforced

concrete arches faced in stone, and reinforced purlins and ridge; St Pius X

Church, St Charles Square, North Kensington (Lamb and O'North, 1908), has

brick walls but reinforced-concrete vaults and a small dome, concealed by conventional plasterwork; Clare College Mission Church, Dilston Grove,

Southwark (Simpson and Ayrton, 1911), has reinforced-concrete walls

originally exposed inside and outside, but a pitched timber roof; Georgetown Catholic Cathedral, Guyana (Leonard Stokes, 1914), is walled and vaulted in

reinforced concrete.

5. George R. Collins, 'The Transfer of Thin Masonry Vaulting from Spain to

America', Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 21 (1968),

pp. 176-201.

6. Peter Collins, op. cit. pp. 113-17.

7. See AA Files no. 21, pp. 3-12.

8. On flat-slab construction see a forthcoming paper by David Yeomans, and also

David P. Billington, Robert Maillart's Bridges (1979). 9. On the Plecnik church see Francois Burkhardt, Claude Eveno and Boris

Podrecca, Joze Plecnik Architect 1872-1957(19X9), pp. 45-7, which refers

also to an interesting concrete church of 1912 by Istv?n Benk? at Mul'a.

Plecnik used an Austrian version of the Hennebique system for his famous

Zacherl department store in Vienna (1905). 10. I have not succeeded in finding any illustrations or contemporary account of

Oran Cathedral.

11. Peter Collins, op. cit. pp. 227-8. For the Casablanca docks see Paul Jamot,

A. G. Perret et I 'Architecture du Beton Arme (1927) or Bernard Champigneulle, Perret (1959).

12. Bernard Marrey, Louis Bonnier 1856-1946 (1988), pp. 257-86.

13. A passing pejorative remark on the Esders exterior (now demolished) is made

by Collins, op. cit. p. 226. There is a lesser-known view of part of the interior

in Julius Vischer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, Beton als Gestalter (1928), p. 52.

14. For an interpretation of Le Raincy see Andrew Saint, Architects' Journal, 13

February 1991, pp. 26-45.

15. The Royal Horticultural Hall was published in Architect and Building News, 29

June 1928, pp. 925-34, and Architectural Review, January 1929, pp. 17-31

(critique by P. Morton Shand). For the engineering side see John Faber, Oscar

Faber (1989), pp. 33-4.

16. On the La Mouche Hall: Louis Piessat, Tony Gamier 1869-1948 (1988),

pp. 78-86; Tony Gamier, VOeuvre Complete (1989), pp. 146-50. The hall

was designed by 1907 and built by 1914. At one stage it was to have been in

concrete, like the rest of the La Mouche complex. 17. Peter Collins, op. cit. pp. 60-1, 90-3.

18. On early German developments in reinforced concrete the following helpful texts are available in the library of the Institution of Civil Engineers, London:

Gustav Haegermann, J. M. Deinhard, Adolf Leonhart and others, Von

Caementum zum Spannbeton, 3 vols. (1964-6), sponsored by Dyckerhoff Zementwerke A.G., notably vol. 1 (1964), part 2 by G?nter Huberti, Die

Erneuerte Bauweise; Weit Spannt Sich der Bogen 1865-1965, Die Geschichte

der Bauunternehmung Dyckerhoffund Widmann (1965); Deutscher Ausschuss

f?r Stahlbeton, Festschrift 75 Jahre Deutscher Ausschuss f?r Stahlbeton

(1982). 19. The fullest account of the Breslau Market Hall is in Handbuch f?r

Eisenbetonbau, third edition (1924), vol. 13, pp. 202-8. For this and the

Centennial Hall, which seems never to have attracted a full English-language

description, see Peter Collins, op. cit. p. 92; Vischer and Hilberseimer, op. cit.

pp. 13, 25, 47; Francis S. Onderdonk, The Ferro-Concrete Style (1928); Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (1976), pp. 252-3.

20. Peter Collins, op. cit. p. 92.

21. Jose A. Fernandez Ordonez, Eugene Freyssinet (1979), pp. 92, 96

(Montlucon) and 106-14 (Orly). For the Orly hangars see also Housing the

Airship, A A Exhibition Catalogue (1989). 22. Onderdonk, op. cit. p. 204; see also Architectural Review 54 (1923),

pp. 206-7.

23. A fuller discussion of the architecture of inter-war municipal baths in London

and the introduction of elliptically arched swimming pools is contained in

English Heritage, London Division, Historians' File TH 100, report on Poplar Baths of May 1988. See also Architects' Journal, 24 November 1926,

pp. 652-9.

24. The Stuttgart-Heslach baths (in M?rikestrasse) are illustrated in Vischer and

15



Hilberseimer, op. cit. p. 53, and Festschrift 75 Jahre. . . (see note 17), p. 60.

They are currently (summer 1991) in the process of complete refurbishment.

25. Poplar: Architect and Building News, 19 January 1934, pp. 103-7; St Maryle bone and Willesden: Architectural Design and Construction, September 1937,

pp. 427-9; Northampton: Architect and Building News, 23 September 1938,

pp. 356-60.

26. Andrew Saint, Towards A Social Architecture (1987), p. 242.

27. Architect and Building News, 19 January 1934, p. 104.

28. Julius Vischer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, Beton als Gestalter (1928). I am

grateful to Stefan Muthesius for drawing my attention to this well-illustrated

book, which gives a remarkably rich picture of building activity in reinforced

concrete during the Weimar Republic. 29. Onderdonk, op. cit. pp. 195-6.

30. Of the many elliptically arched inter-war halls, four are worth special citation:

Utrecht Post Office by J. Crouwel Jr (1917-24), early and brick-faced on the

inside; the Brno Exposition Hall (1926-8) by Kalons and Valenta, with

transepts as well as nave; the very fine and broad Rheims Market Hall by

Maigrot and Freyssinet (1928-9), with clever top-lighting, currently under

threat of demolition; and a rare American example, the Pachyderm House at

Chicago Zoo (1931). 31. The B?hm churches illustrated by Onderdonk are those at Bischofsheim and

Neu Ulm. He went on to build further fine churches after 1928.

32. The elliptical or 'expressionist* arched tradition in British twentieth-century churches goes back as much to Lethaby's Brockhampton and E. S. Prior's

St Andrew's Roker (1906), in which reinforced concrete was used but not

dominant (Architects'Journal, 30 January 1985, pp. 20-38), as to the Breslau

Market Hall-Royal Horticultural Hall line of development. One of its more

interesting products was Eric Gill's small and late church at Gorleston-on-Sea,

Norfolk, 1938-9: see Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (1989), pp. 279-81.

33. Berlin Baut 2: Die Kongresshalle (1987), p. 67. Nervi had a similar opinion. 34. Architecture and Building, January 1957, pp. 3-4.

35. Vischer and Hilberseimer, op. cit.

36. See the sources cited in note 17: Von Caementum zum Spannbeton, vol. 1, part

2, pp. 153ff.; Weit Spannt Sich der Bogen, pp. 73-4; Festchrift 75 Jahre. . .,

pp. 75-7; also Heinz Rausch, Ulrich Finsterwalder 90 Jahre: Mensch, Werke,

Impulse (1987). In English: David P. Billington, Thin Shell Concrete Struc?

tures, 1982 edition, pp. 5-12.

37. Von Caementum zum Spannbeton (see note 17), vol. 1, part 2, pp. 157ff.; also,

in English, Concrete and Constructional Engineering, September 1930,

pp. 490-500.

38. Colin Faber, Candela The Shell Builder (1963), p. 12.

39. David P. Billington, Thin Shell Concrete Structures, 1982 edition, pp. 15-21.

40. For the British interest in shells, see British Intelligence Objectives Sub

Committee, Final Report no. 575, item no. 22, The German Building Industry

(1946); H. G. Cousins, Thin Curved Shells in Large Span Roof Construction

(1945), and Shell Concrete Construction (1948); and Concrete and

Constructional Engineering, September 1946, pp. 251-2 on the Wythenshawe Bus Garage, for which Cousins was the engineer. Edward Mills's shell

concrete roof at Dagenham: Architect and Building News, 8 December 1944,

pp. 147-55.

41. Stockwell: Architect and Building News, 12 November 1953, pp. 579-82; Architectural Review, March 1954, pp. 181-6; English Heritage, London

Division, Historians' File LAM 70 (report of 1989). Brynmawr: AA Files 10

(autumn 1986), pp. 3-12, and also now the helpful M.Sc. monograph on the

factory by Victoria Perry, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, 1990. For a diagram of the Zeiss-Dywidag domes see Franz

Dischinger in First Congress of the International Association of Bridge and

Structural Engineers (Liege, 1930), Proceedings, 11-21, pp. 282-3.

42. Sir Alan Harris in Concrete Quarterly 144, January-March 1985, p. 48. For

Laffaille's experiments with steel shells and hypars for French air ministry

hangars see Second Congress of the International Association of Bridge and

Structural Engineers (Berlin, 1936), Preliminary Publication, pp. 1045-72. I

am grateful to Sir Alan Harris for this reference and for telling me about

Aimond and Laffaille.

43. Colin Faber, op. cit.; Gordon Graham in Architecture and Building, January 1957, pp. 3-7; Concrete Quarterly, April-June 1957, pp. 17-28, and July

September 1959, pp. 2-13; Architectural Association Journal 80 (December

1964), pp. 136-7.

44. Architect and Building News, 29 August 1957, pp. 290-3. Townsend went on

to construct a similar factory at Market Drayton: Architects' Journal, 25 April 1962, pp. 903-14. Another early use of small 'hypars' was O'Neil Ford and

Richard Colley's plant for Texas Instruments at Bedford: The Builder,

5 August 1960, pp. 236-7.

45. TheBuilder, 24 March 1961,p. 556, Architect and Building News, 5 My 1961, pp. 9-12.

46. Commonwealth Institute: English Heritage, London Division, Historians1 File

KC 121, report of June 1988; Architects' Journal, 14 November 1962,

pp. 119-26; Architectural Review, April 1963, pp. 261-6.

47. On Nowicki see the articles by Lewis Mumford in Architectural Record, June

1954, pp. 139-49; July 1954, pp. 128-35; August 1954, pp. 169-76 (on the State Fair Arena); and September 1954, pp. 153-9; also Tadeusz Barucki,

Maciej Nowicki (1980) (in Polish). There are passing references to the State

Fair Arena in Ludwig Glaeser, The Work of Frei Otto (1972), p. 7, and in Berlin

Baut 2: Die Kongresshalle (1987), p. 17. See also the interesting sketch of the

history of early hung roofs in Frei Otto, Das H?ngende Dach (1954), pp. 12-13.

48. Ingalls and TWA: Allan Temko, Eero Saarinen (1962), pp. 44-8. For a full

account of the Berlin Kongresshalle, its collapse and its reconstruction, see

Berlin Baut 2: Die Kongresshalle (1987). In English: Architects' Journal, 10

April 1958, pp. 535-7; Architectural Record, September 1955, pp. 182-5;

Hugh Stubbins, Architecture: The Design Experience (1976), pp. 158-63. For

Kenzo Tange's Shizuoka Convention Hall, see Concrete Quarterly, April June 1965, p. 27.

49. Gilles Ragot, Robert Camusot, translated by Charlotte Ellis (1988), pp. 121-5,

208-15.

50. Concrete Quarterly 144 (January-March 1985), p. 48.

51. Michael Baume, The Sydney Opera House Affair (1967). 52. RIBA Journal 32 (April 1925), p. 339. 53. Ibid. p. 337.

Fig. 1: London Transport. Fig. 2: Victoria & Albert Museum.

Figs. 3, 4, 5, 11, 13, 16, 17, 26: British Architectural Library / RIBA.

Figs. 6, 7, 8, 12: F. R. Yerbury Archive, courtesy of AA Slide Library.

Figs. 9 (from Von Caementum zum Spannbeton, 1964) and 10, 15 (from

Festschrift 75 Jahre Deutscher Ausschuss f?r Stahlbeton, 1982): Institute of

Civil Engineers.

Figs. II, 13: Architectural Press.

Figs. 19, 22: courtesy of AA Slide Library.

Fig. 24: from Berlin Baut 2: Die Kongresshalle.

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