Concrete
Art and architecture made from concrete, the mouldable mix of cement, water and aggregate that sets into artificial stone.
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About
Concrete is poured as a thick paste and hardens in whatever shape it is given. Reinforcing it with steel, developed in 19th-century France and promoted by builders such as François Hennebique in the 1890s, let it span and cantilever, and it became the defining structural material of the 20th century.
Architects exploited both its engineering and its surface. Auguste Perret's church of Notre-Dame du Raincy (1923) combined slender concrete columns with screens of coloured glass, and after 1945 Brutalist architects left concrete bare, often printed with the grain of the wooden formwork, as in Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1952). Claude Parent and Paul Virilio designed the bunker-like church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay in Nevers (1966). Sculptors use it too: Rachel Whiteread's House (1993) was a cast of the inside of an East London terraced house. Look for board marks, exposed aggregate and a sense of heavy mass.
