Have you ever noticed that concrete gets an increasingly bad press in the media these days? A while back I went to see Dredd - a grim and apocalyptic sci-fi movie about a future mega-city and its gun-toting lawmen (it was surprisingly funny). One of the leitmotifs of the film was its ugly concrete. Everywhere, it was dirty, covered in graffiti, crumbling, harsh and unforgiving. Perhaps the film-makers had 'dressed' it like that to make a point, and if they did, they did a good job. I noticed it, but perhaps most of the film-goers didn't. Without a doubt, anyone watching the movie would have received a subliminal message that concrete - at least the concrete of the future - is a dirty and unglamorous material.
I've often noticed in literature as well that both cement and concrete get a rough ride. If it's not James Bond being toughed up on some grey, forbidding concrete floor, it'll be a Kafkaesque anti-hero trying to negotiate a Stalinist-brutalist labyrinth of decaying concrete tower blocks. Concrete needs better PR if it is going to become a sexy, cool and desirable building material in the future.
That's why I was heartened, while travelling on the London Underground the other day, by the sight of some lovely concrete at Westminster station, in the shadow of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. It was not just unashamedly naked concrete - bare and unadorned - but it was being placed - literally - in the spotlight. Up-lit soft-lighting brought out the fantastically sophisticated - and unique - surface colours (50 shades of grey?) and texture of this smooth and supremely sexy material (right). The designers of the station, Michael Hopkins and Partners, clearly understand concrete: it is not hidden away, but instead is celebrated for its wonderful properties. No wonder they won so many awards for their impressive station and its glorification of fabulous concrete1.
Whisky in the bottle?
Thierry Bogaert, the famous modernist-minimalist cement plant architect, has an amusing sideline in perfume 'bottles' made of concrete. I have held one of these beautiful bottles, and it really packs a punch - it is substantial, hefty, solid, enduring, permanent, powerful, reassuring and sober. Perhaps it's also a little bit grim as well - 'serious' would be a more positive way of stating it instead. To be honest, I have not smelled the scent that Thierry Bogaert stores inside his concrete bottles, but I hope that it would reflect the feelings that you get from looking, touching and weighing the bottle itself. It would be a manly scent - perhaps with notes of old leather, cigars rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins, pencil shavings, the scent of an fresh oily rag, hot racing tyres and the peculiar and exotic scent that you get from a glass after it has been drained of an excellent peaty dram of single malt whisky. That would be a scent that would be an appropriate fit for a concrete bottle.
I wonder what else could usefully be given the concrete treatment? Obviously canoes, but that's been done already. Wait - what, you didn't know about the annual concrete canoe competition2? University civil engineering teams get together to design and build concrete canoes and then race them. Concrete boats3 have periodically been 'sexy,' but due to their weight and the costs of labour to build them, they haven't really caught on. In my day-dreaming moments, I sometimes think about sailing a concrete yacht to Greenland. Imagine - if an iceberg took a chunk out of the boat, all you'd need would be a bag of cement and a trowel and you could fix the hole.
A concrete car has been made4, but the use of concrete for cars is almost certain not to catch on.
What we really need is to make concrete (and by extension, cement) sexy! I searched for 'concrete lingerie' on the Internet - there's really not much out there. 'Concrete nude' brings up some interesting images, but really, these are just nudes - nude ladies mainly - lounging about or posing on concrete. That's not really what I had in mind. In the same way that a sexy lady reclining on a dumb car doesn't change the dumbness of the car, the fact that a lady is in front of the concrete just means that we can't see the loveliness of the concrete. What I think would work better is the fabulous human form made out of concrete. 'People made of concrete' doesn't find concrete people either. Try as a might - in the interests of research of course - I have yet to track down actual concrete nudes.
Maybe I'm 'barking up the wrong tree' in my efforts to make concrete more desirable. Perhaps we should turn towards today's sexiest objects - the sci-fi world of gadgets. Forget your burnished aluminium for your tablet computers, Apple, how about giving us an iPad encased in stunning, futuristic and recyclable concrete?
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_tube_station
2: http://www.asce.org/concretecanoe/