Exhibition in Basel: Beton, mon amour – culture

Six years before Jean-Luc Godard became world famous with “Out of Breath”, the French-Swiss director made a 16-minute documentary about the construction of the Grande Dixence dam in the Swiss Alps. “Opération Beton” (1954) is a hymn to modern construction and its engineering. Accompanied by classical string music, the wheels turn and the conveyor belts with the rocks run under the camera eye. In Loren, fresh concrete floats by means of a special lift through the sublime alpine landscape down to the construction site. Casual young men work there, cigarettes in the corner of their mouths as cool as the young Jean-Paul Belmondo later on. The then 24-year-old Godard delivered his satisfied clients a film-turned technology euphoria, which showed that the “wonderful machinery” on what was then the largest construction site in Switzerland worked like a giant clockwork.

“The fact that practically any shape can be made from it borders on the wonderful”

The Italian civil engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979) once considered reinforced concrete to be “the best building material that man has ever invented”. Nervi raved about the delimitation of “creative imagination in the field of construction” and praised: “The fact that practically any shape can be made from it and that it can withstand any stress borders on the wonderful.” The German-Swiss artist-architect Walter Jonas (1910-1979), who planned a metabolistic, inward-facing city at the beginning of the sixties, which he called “Intrapolis”, may have thought similarly. Its 100 meter high, funnel-shaped houses were supposed to take up as little floor space as possible. The basic structure of the towers is also reminiscent of self-help group chair circles. However, “Intrapolis” was never built.

Godard’s concrete hymn and Jonas’ urban utopia kick off the concrete exhibition that can be seen in the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel. But there is not much left of the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s. The present is characterized by at least an ambivalent attitude towards building materials. Today, coffee-table illustrated books pay homage to international brutalism, which was derived from Le Corbusier’s “béton brut”, among other things. At the same time, due to its devastating ecological balance, concrete is not considered sustainable and is still used and installed on a large scale due to the lack of inexpensive alternatives.

Without concrete, Switzerland would not be the country it is today: tunnels, bridges, bunkers

The Basel show was organized in cooperation with three major Swiss university architecture archives – the gta archive at the ETH Zurich, the Archives de la construction modern at the EPF Lausanne and the Archivio del Moderno dell’Academia di Architettura at the University of Italian Switzerland (USI) in Balerna – developed. The history of concrete in Switzerland is told in nine thematic chapters. Without concrete, the Alpine republic would not be the modern, well-developed country it is today. This basic thesis runs like a red thread. Because although concrete is the most widely used building material worldwide, it has a kind of special role in Switzerland, a country where tunnels, bridges, bunkers and railways are located. At the end of the 1950s, for example, the per capita consumption of cement in Switzerland exceeded every other country in the world. But with the 1973 oil crisis, the construction boom also came to an abrupt end. Today, exposed concrete is part of the aesthetic vocabulary of the “Swiss Box” architecture – this is how the minimalist buildings are now known internationally.

In Switzerland, “by emphasizing the connection between alpine rocks and concrete” a “powerful cultural imaginary” was created early on, it says on an exhibition board. Nevertheless, the use of concrete in construction in Switzerland is “more pragmatic than polemical,” writes the architectural scientist and architect Sarah Nichols in an accompanying text. Nichols’ research formed the basis for the exhibition. “Civil engineering work made of concrete stood out for its boldness and was associated with a special ‘Swissness’. From the Maillarts bridges to the hairpin bends of the Alpine passes, these projects conveyed concrete know-how that could be sold abroad better than Swiss ones Contractors and engineers competed in the global construction business. ” The Swiss concrete expertise became a Swiss export hit as well as cheese, chocolate, financial services and watches.

Although the history of the building material is presented in great detail with many original drawings, documents, objects, models and photographs, the show has an oversized blind spot. Because there is not enough information here about the critical dimensions of concrete, especially its disastrous environmental balance. In this context, the harmfulness of concrete to the climate is the most important issue at the moment.

Not so long ago, the Swiss packed nuclear waste in concrete and dumped it in the Atlantic

Its dilemma results from the systemic relevance of concrete. Concrete plays a key role in sealing surfaces or in straightening, channeling and damming rivers. Cement works not only emit high levels of carbon dioxide. Because coal has been increasingly replaced by household and commercial waste in Germany, for example, the factories also emit significantly more air pollutants into the environment. And questions about the future are not being negotiated either, such as which alternatives could lead to a post-reinforced concrete era. Is there really no alternative to the status quo? After all, the Swiss practice, which was common until the early 1980s, is documented, for example, of pouring barrels with nuclear waste in concrete and then sinking them in the North Atlantic. A total of 5321 tons of Swiss nuclear waste are said to have found their way into the sea in this way.

The main sponsor, the internationally active building materials group Holcim, headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, is likely to like the fact that there is little room in the exhibition for the harmful effects of concrete on the climate. The cement company would so much like that concrete is green. The adjective “green” appears seven times in the Holcim press release. Four times it is claimed that concrete is “green, circular and technology-driven”. Should an exhibition with a scientific claim be used en passant for the greenwashing of a building materials company? Yuma Shinohara, one of the show’s co-curators, replied in the negative to the question of any sponsors’ influence on the content of the show. Instead, Shinohara refers to the work with the archive holdings, which mostly only extended into the eighties, and to the discursive accompanying program in which concrete criticism will also be negotiated, such as a panel discussion on the future of concrete at the end of January or the book presentation of the conference volume “Constructive Futures – Beyond Concrete “in early April. Nevertheless, the delegation of critical voices in the framework program seems at least unfortunate. Sure, “Nouvelle Vague” -Godard was cool. But so are today’s climate strike kids.

Concrete, Swiss Architecture Museum Baseluntil April 12th. The book accompanying the exhibition, “Concrete in Switzerland”, EPFL Press, costs 40 euros.