You can’t avoid concrete. It’s just bloody everywhere. You can say that it’s one of the most important inventions ever made by man next to brewing coffee, or sliced bread. Either way, it’s pretty useful. Well I got some bad news for you. Practically all the concrete that you see before you are eventually going to crack, perhaps in your lifetime or your kid’s lifetime. There is a shift in the concrete plate literally beneath our feet and we don’t even know it, and this is gonna cost us a helluva lot. OH BOY.
And this is what’s Courland’s trying to tell us in this book — that we’ve been doing construction wrong over the last hundred years (and beyond), and now is a good time to fix it. I’ve only finished the book last week and recommended it straight to my dad who’s a civil engineer and is in construction to see what’s his opinion on it, but if you take away the last fifty pages of this book, the outlook is a bleak. Concrete Planet, whether intentionally or not, reveals the flaws of our economy which opt for quick profits over durability — that the rich will get richer and everybody else is fucked.
Much of the book, however, is historical. Courland does a remarkable job in recording the story of concrete, from the cavemen era, when some smart Neanderthal accidentally created limestone from fire, to the very real speculation that the Egyptian pyramids was made out of concrete, and that the entire job could’ve been done by a team of men one-tenth the original amount of men speculated, that the Romans made the best cement. This is fair enough — Roman structures are still used to this day and probably would outlast civilisation.
The modern era, when the English dabs their dirty fingers in concrete, is when the industry hit the steroid mode. The history becomes hazy as various interested parties try to claim concrete as their own — Roman cement makes a comeback, but in name only and not in substance. The rise in popularity of the Portland cement is attributed to a wayward swindler. The most successful architect who used cement to open new possibilities of the material is a jerk. Here’s looking at you Frank Lloyd Wright. While the growth of concrete was already on steroids, it went on Super Saiyan mode when everybody started to use reinforced concrete with rebar at the core.
It’s hard to imagine construction sites now without rebars sticking out of concrete pillars. Though rebars reinforce concrete for quite a while, if we look at the timeline of a hundred years, it will be the major cause of building maintenance and building decay. Buildings as we know it are superstructure which have a limited lifespan. Architects and engineers who boast about building something that can last a hundred years should be embarrassed. We don’t build buildings as we used to, and the cost of maintenance is going to be higher than the initial cost of building. How nobody is discussing this is beyond me. Then again, how many of us are having any conversation at all about climate change?
Courland is not a civil engineer by any means, but perhaps the book benefits from it as he brings a fresh perspective from an age-old industry. I do think there is too much history, as I could do without some of the anecdotes. Some of the critics also pointed out the many, many pages written about Frank Lloyd Wright. I agree. There’s too much of him. I would love to know more about the current problems. The tragedy of the Champlain tower is a case in point of the consequences of concrete degradation. Many buildings pinned in the same climate, environment, next to the sea will likely suffer the same consequences. I don’t see buildings the same way again. I see them now as ticking time bombs. You’re probably in one right now.
