Concrete Postwar Architecture Inexpensive Building Material

The Post-War Building Studies are a set of technical reports published by the British Ministry of Works starting in 1944. This one isnt necessarily applicable to building a structure but it is relevant in terms of outside space.

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In the postwar era there was a surplus of energy and a big push for labor so concrete felt like a sensible building material at the time.

Concrete postwar architecture inexpensive building material. It became popular for authoritative buildings like government and university structures as well as social housing. Inflation pushes up the cost of building materials. Understanding Post-War Architecture The Twentieth Century Key Events 1916-20.

In the early post-war period façade panels were attached as cladding to loadbearing structures eg. For house building in the post-war period three main types of precast concrete elements were used visibly in façades. The Directorate of Post-War Building was established in 1941 under Sir James WestThe Directorate was charged with coordinating solutions for construction of housing to replace homes that had been destroyed as well as homes that had been deferred due to war.

Concrete is arguably the most widely used building product in the world. Cladding architectural precast concrete and sandwich panels. Concrete contributed to the creation of skyscrapers stronger bridges and several other new and modern forms.

Additionally shortages of materials encourage the use of new materials such as Crittall windows sand-lime bricks and prefabrication steel and concrete. Could be a strikingly beautiful building material. At the time in the late 50s early 60s the cost of concrete was pretty affordable says Buck.

Its in our buildings our roads our tunnels and runways. Like bricks the blocks are stacked together and joined with a mortar usually. The material has a long history starting in early Roman times but its use in construction exploded during the 20th century.

More info Brutalism typically identified as heavy superscaled massings in concrete brick or block had its building boom from the 1950s to the 1970s with some later examples in Eastern European Soviet cities. Concrete blocks are a prefabricated material mainly used to build walls. Unlike materials such as concrete wood doesnt need as much of a forceful process method when turning it into construction material and products.

Post-war concrete architecture was decried by many as ugly but now Brutalist buildings are back in fashion writes Jonathan Glancey. It means wood as a material has a significantly smaller carbon footprint. In fact we produce around 10 billion tonnes of concrete every year.

This website chronicles a year of global field study examining post-war concrete specifically Brutalist architecture. Given its ubiquity it is not surprising that the BTHL contains many documents for concrete designs products construction techniques and equipment. 55 of United States commercial building stock was built between the years of 1960 and 1980 leaving 36 billion square feet of building material to be.

1 Several architects including Le Corbusier Louis Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright adopted the use of concrete in their designs and proliferated its use. Were surrounded by concrete. In this thesis I investigate issues of post-war concrete buildings and how we can both add value and make adaptable what we have traditionally defined as not valuable and not adaptable.

Initially the material was enticing for sheer economic purposes where the architect desired steel frameworks reinforced concrete consistently proved cheaper. Le Corbusier constructed such buildings as the Unité dHabitation which used béton brut as its primary material and the Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut which featured a dynamic and sweeping use of concrete.