Beton is communist: The Fall and Rise of Soviet Socialist Material

From Adrian Forty of The Guardian, prepared in Albanian by Periscope

“This process,” wrote François Koinje [Cignet] in 1861 for its new product, “will transform the safety, well-being, health and morals of humanity.” He predicted that he would inspire no less than “revolution” a word that was easily due to what the Vaki did in 1848 [that year's French revolution] in France.

Koinje's new product was concrete, and he was very wrong in his predictions, possibly morality. Koinje was a socialist scorer [Sant-Simon], who, unlike Marks, believed social equality could be achieved without class warfare. He had faith that concrete would be a step towards the world in which workers would possess the production tools. Wherever the materials for concrete were fire and cement were possible, so by no means, people with little ability would be empowered to build clean, dry, comfortable dwellings and have the opportunity to live with dignity. No more villagers' shacks.

Since Koinje's meal, concrete has been considered revolutionary, but this revolution has taken three very different traits.

The first was Coinje predicted, where even the highest building facilities were within the reach of the poor people of the world. Much of the cement production around the globe is used by people without professional or technical training: self-building and small residence builders. The results may not seem so much on the horizon, but if we measure the social effects of concrete, the largest has been on the advances it brought to ordinary people through informal construction.

Yet it has been estimated that if all the floors of the world's buildings were replaced by concrete, parasites would drop by 80%. Neither do the self - buildingers always lack the skills: architects and engineers who visited the favelas [poor, overcrowded cattle in Brazil] were amazed by the genius and economy of the concrete structures there. Everywhere, for those living in poverty, concrete meant a step forward in the world and because of the concrete reputation as subject of “privatised” or “moderne”, it made them feel a little more equal to the richest people on the planet. Beton changed more than the material existence of humans. He also changed their global self-imagination.

The second concrete revolution was made to transform buildings with a new structural technique. This has enabled constructions that could only be imagined before the 18th century dikes, bridges, mountain tunnels never seen. These are the kinds of achievements that the concrete and cement industry likes to celebrate and there is no doubt that these structures have transformed people's lives, also, by overcoming nature, speeding up communications and bringing us closer to each other. In the architectural terms, concrete brought us new principles of design that enabled such works as the veil building of the Sydney Opera House [Sydney Opera Jose] or the capae of the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Oscar Niemeyer in Nitereo, Brazil ♫ works that have often been described as revolutionary in terms of forms that have been previously thought unalable.

But of all the characteristics of concrete that might be considered revolutionary, what has been most important is using it to make rapid change. When it was called for immediate or even urgent transformations, whether for a five-year plan in the Soviet Union, for the New Deal Course in the United States, Grand Dance Ahead in China, or for post-World War II buildings in Europe, concrete was taken to do work.

Each of these political programs was central to infrastructure work on a completely new scale, looking beyond existing industrial and labour resources. Beton, because the matter he was made up was easy and relatively cheap, but also because, in theory, most of the work could be done with unqualified workers, he promised to enable what was taken as impossible. When in 1956 the Soviet Union set a seven-year plan “to reach and overcome the developing United States”, concrete construction was a vital component. Two years ago, The Greatest Speech Nikita Hrushchev's [Nicita Khrushchev] after that of Stalin's death had been for the benefits that could be derived from concrete.

It took three hours. No head of state had previously given such a long or detailed speech on concrete, nor had the concrete made such an important political theme: Khrushchev used this material to announce his separation with Stalinism. He did so by criticising the failure of construction methods favoured by Uncle Joe [Uncle Joe], and arguing about the benefits of pre-advised concrete construction that would attract the large resources of Russia's unqualified workers.

Khrushchev's talk surprised all in attendance, but made concrete a central tool for the future of the Soviet Union. Within the year, he had put forward a decree saying that all future construction would follow a standard design: “a single model for all buildings in the country”, and all concrete.

In Britain in that same decade, urgent need to build more housing was shown.

The answer, even here, was concrete, and prefabricated construction systems that turned that process into factories, where productivity was said to be higher than in construction sites. Although concrete was rarely cheaper, it promised to be faster and creating a whole new view of the housing environment would signal the public for a new transformation.

The unthinkable connection of concrete to those dramatic and immediate transformations of the 20th century has linked that subject even to left politics, more than to right. Although the fascist regimes of the 1930 ' s played the same letter of social renewal through new infrastructure and really used concrete to do that, as with autobanks in Germany, the most dominant concrete association was with socialism.

As far as left politics were about radical changes as right politics about protecting traditions, concrete was seen connected to the left, and the Soviet Union in particular cemented that idea in popular imagination. Until the 1990s, Virginia Bottomley, the conservative secretary of state in the United Kingdom for national heritage, asked if she approved the list. Home complex to Alexander Fleming where the Ministry of Health once happened, it's said to have replied: "No, we can't put it... concrete... is Communist.”

Beton is no longer who he was. In the West, at least he has lost his transforming nut. There are many reasons for this, and its contamination by the Socialist State is one of them. Another is the invisible consequence of what Coinje considered her greatest asset - the democratisation of construction. Beton is stigmatized as freerity, a thing of the poor. But anyone who doubts his revolutionary potential must examine China, which spilled more concrete between 2012 and 2015 than the United States did throughout the 20th century. Socialist or capitalist, in China the most recent transformation of the century that has occurred in human history has been achieved within decades, through a large amount of concrete.

Adrian Fortune is professor of architecture history

*The original story: Concrete? Its communicators: the youth and divination of the Soviet material