Arrr... C.C!

The colourful concrete boxes of Chennai

Have you looked around your urban setting and noticed the sameness and boxiness of buildings? Rectangular blocks with flat roofs and a disproportionate looking unsupported cantilever at the entrances. Balconies and projections that stick out like sore thumbs aided by the numbers game encouraged by the municipal corporations of our times catering wholly and solely for the ease of developers to squeeze out as much (and mostly dead) square footage for profit. On the other end of the spectrum, we have our ultra designer houses with fancy forms with sloping RCC roofs and pseudo greek pediments and a mix of greek (that I call ironic) columns with elaborate plaster mouldings. building infill walls with bricks and covering up all the flaws of construction with cement plaster.

I'm spiralling into a bottomless pit of despair, but haven't you ever wondered why?

One simple reason is that building materials like brick (baked, adobe or flyash) and dressed stones give us a very rectangular module to work with. Structurally, RCC can take up any form required, horizontal and vertical structural elements - columns, beams and slabs compliments these and make it the cheapest. All this results in simple disproportionate cuboid mass repeated and lifestyles adjusted for the so called modern houses. All you need is someone who can calculate the requirement of reinforcement for your cuboid with allied paraphernalia and a contractor who will build the said cuboid for you. Many a times, they two agencies are one and the same. They shouldn't be, but they are.

Le Corbusier, Maison Dom-Ino 1914

So why and when exactly did we start worshipping this listless cuboid? I'm guessing that it partly has something to do with one of the world's (whimsically) greatest architects of all times- Le Corbusier (Corbu, Corby or Charles-Édouard Jeanneret as he is least known as.) Specifically with his Five points of architecture. Sure, it can be interpreted very cleverly, but  most choose not to. But can you really blame him? Post war (World war I and II) Europe of the 1930s and late 1940s required a certain typology of mass housing, public amenities, industry. A fresh and rather democratic perspective on architecture, similar to the change in the social fabric and political structures in many nations. Many of which were coming out of Monarchy or Dictatorship, (while many of the newly de-colonised ones were on the steady path to dictatorship) and transitioning into democracy or communism/socialism.

Palace of Assembly, Chandigarh - Le Corbusier

The many European architects in the mid twentieth century- the movers and shakers of Architecture, the ones who spoke well, wrote well, and well... designed, moved to the new world- The Americas. And brought along with them the the principles of Modernism, De Stijl, Bauhaus and the likes and coined the term - International style. It was like a big boys club. They decided who could be part of it and who couldn't. But the standards and principles they brought with them never moved beyond the principles of typology of mass factory housing and industry which was the cornerstone of the great European change. Industrialisation, two great wars, and political revolutions which brought about democracy (or socialism as the case may be). RCC was celebrated. Forms never thought of before were being built out of this very material. And it spread across the world like wildfire. Cement is an industrially manufactured standard material, as are steel bars. And the two combined together gave us a standard, yet flexible building material which made building larger, taller and bigger buildings possible. It was celebrated even visually in the form of brutalism without too much reflection. Corbu (Corby, Le Corbusier or Charles, as he is less known as) along with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and a few other European/British Architects landed in Chandigarh because of various factors which I won't mention here (Pd. Nehru, etc.) The cousin and other architects along with many of their Indian counterparts and planners worked on the masterplan, public buildings and housing for the city. Corbusier not only worked on projects in Chandigarh, but also in the wealthy city of Ahmedabad. The need for mass, cheap housing, public institutions and absolute lack of imagination on the part of public institutions and engineers and some architects, R.C.C. started proliferating. And it was here to stay.

One of the most important ingredients of RCC - Cement has it's own history. Cement in many forms has been used from the times of the ancient Egyptian civilisation and the Romans. Development of Portland cement began in the 18th century, and was being manufactured on a large scale in the 19th century and made it cheap. Standardisation of the material made it cheaper. Using it with locally available sand and aggregate to make concrete made it even cheaper. Using this concrete with some percentage of expensive steel bars to make RCC, one got a very economical and robust structural material. Cement however, is not a very environmentally friendly material. One tonne of cement production releases nine hundred kgs of Carbon dioxide (through fossil fuel burning and the process of breaking down calcium carbonate into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide). RCC and concrete both requires a lot of water to set. It absorbs more heat than brick/mud. And it's not something that can break down easily. A lot of energy is used to break down Concrete structures and recycle them. 

Raddi

This data is available publicly, yet concrete is the biggest building material in large growing countries like China and India. Why don't we use better building materials which most of the times are made with something very local? Or something that is environmentally and financially sustainable? Is anyone working on making cement and the industry less polluting? Why isn't concrete used sparingly and sensibly? We've been building without today's version of concrete for millennia, after-all! As the great Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan famously sang: The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind (Although to be clear, he wasn't singing about cement but it's is definitely blowing in the wind with so much construction happening around us.) Cement is really really cheap. How cheap? It's cheaper than raddi. Yes, the raddi that you sell to your neighbourhood raddi wala in exchage for a few ₹more. The amount of money one gets from a kilo of old newspapers is about ₹9/- here in Pune. Cement costs ₹300/- per bag. Each bag contains 50 Kgs of cement. That makes it ₹6/- per kilo of cement. Take that, sustainability!