Supplementary Cube Test Results for a Single Cube
Contract Name: Spoil and Fill
Concrete Grade: C20
Cube No./Set No.: 1/3
Site Location: 80 Bishopsgate, London EC2
Distance to Test Location: 5.5 miles
Date Cast: 9 February 2013
Date Collected: 12 February 2013
Maximum Load: 468.934 kN (20.842 N/mm2)
Maximum Strength: 20.842 MPa
Compressive Strength at 7 days: 15 N/mm2
Characteristic Strength at 28 days: Ability to listen
Unit Weight: 5,290g
Bound with animal fat, milk or blood, Roman
concrete, like all concrete, hardened over
time. Sanguine additives brought with them
bubbles of air, like tiny vehicles for the movement of solid materials through the cement,
enabling flow and so multiplying the minutes
between when the concrete was mixed and
the moment it set for good. Because of this
lubricating quality, a splash of water could be
sacrificed without loss to workability.1 Once
the concrete set, each entrained microdwelling of air became a pore, allowing the now
solid structure to absorb new water, for this
to freeze, thaw, and exit the artificial stone
without fracturing its temporary home. In
neat correspondence to the civilisation itself,
strength won and growth quickened with
blood.
The first Pantheon was erected following the determining sea-fought battle of
that last war of the Republic, the fight that
saw Cleopatra exit, like a descendant of so
many kings, with an asp to her breast.2 Its
replacement, built under Hadrian, concrete
beneath brick, still stands. The resistance of
this ancient concrete was forged at humanly
untenable temperatures, the ash of Vesuvian
eruptions precooked just as the limestone in
Portland cement is sintered to clinker today.
Two parts volcanic mortar to one part lime;3
blood for tenacity; horsehair to lessen shrinking;4 laid by hand in line with its aggregate. It
Test 001
Test Title: Acoustic absorption
Description: At the highest decibel
level permissible play the cube
recorded sound continuously for one
hour. This test’s playlist included
‘You’ve got to get out before they
pull the whole place down’ by Leslie
Sarony, from the soundtrack to
Barbican Regained.
Date of Testing: 10/05/2013
Age in Days: 90
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: Almost imperceptible
widening of pores on surface
of cube.
Test 002
Test Title: Literary absorption
Description: Read one chapter of any
work of fiction out loud to the cube.
This test was performed with chapter
four from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.
Date of Testing: 16/05/2013
Age in Days: 96
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: None
2
Test 003
Test Title: Foundation for thought
Description: Convey to the cube
without sound or gesture your understanding of one political ideology.
Date of Testing: 17/05/2013
Age in Days: 97
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: None
1 Less water would ordinarily mean a less workable, yet
stronger-setting concrete, concrete
production a tireless battle between
the window from liquid to solid,
and strength. The pores brought by
added blood allowed moisture to be
absorbed and expand, such as upon
freezing, without causing cracks.
2 Whether the cobra bit her
breast or her arm, or anything at all,
is a point of – to this article at least –
irrelevant debate. Christoph Schäfer
has most recently rigorously taken
the romance out of Cleopatra VII’s
demise and had her die through
pedestrian administration of sedatives, antispasmodic and opiates, but
Plutarch had Charmion describe her
queen’s death as one that became
built the Pantheon, the Colosseum, it rebuilt
much of Rome and thousands of miles of
road. These days a soupier substance is needed to flow through machinery. Watered down
by industrialisation, for economy, required
to flow faster, to build more, it arrives ready
mixed, slow setting, weaker and bloodless.5
Its quickflow corpus reinforced now by steel;
cracks begin to appear much earlier on.
As the Empire faded to end, so did common use of concrete, its systematic application the stuff of large-scale bureaucracy. The
Middle Ages had concrete, but not as much,
nor as strong, nor so persistent.6 In building
material circles, it stayed out of vogue until
relatively recently and it would be centuries
before the role of body fluids in the durability
of those ancient structures was recognised.
Even then, duplicated only by accident. It
was noticed that, contaminated by the boiled
and strained fat of US cattle, some concrete
roads weathered more trucks than others.7
Its first life ending with Ancient Rome,
embryonic for centuries, concrete has flowered anew.8 Reinstated to wrap around the
human race, now Earth endemic, it kept
pace with our growth, servile to our colonisation. We grew fond of it and elevated its
role from service to decoration, polishing it
to a gleam, marking our affection for it with
the pawprints of our leaders. We worshipped
it as we enslaved it; if not entombed six feet
“the descendant of so many kings”
before she too passed away and who
am I to trust more than my dying
namesake? Sounds like a snake to
me.
3 Romans actually had two types
of concrete. One part lime and three
parts sand or one part lime to two
parts pozzolana (the volcanic ash
named after Pozzouli by Naples
where it was originally found).
4 Like the polymer polypropylene fibre that is used today, horse
hairs finely distributed created a
matrix to support the concrete.
5 “Nay more, in proportion as
the use of machinery and division
of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of
the working hours, by the increase
of the work exacted in a given time
or by increased speed of machinery.”
Marx and Engels (1848).
6 It’s not that they didn’t have
concrete then, it just wasn’t as
good as the Roman stuff. It wasn’t
until the eighteenth century, when
making a seastorm-proof lighthouse
that John Smeaton rediscovered
hydraulic setting cement.
7 The import of animal additives,
but more that of the entrained
air they brought with them was
noticed in the 1930s. Some sections
of American road were found to be
more resistant to the freeze and thaw
of that country’s weather range, the
cement that had been used to make
these it turned out was milled using
beneath the concrete slopes of the Hoover
Dam, bodies were certainly sacrificed to the
glistening grey material of its making.9 In
this country, a 1920s post-war shortage of
bricks, of homes, and of builders, necessitated
a wider acceptance of concrete.10 For a while,
other religions shunned their rival, excluding it from their churches and temples,11 but
eventually came Brutalism, like the French
for raw concrete, béton brut, unsweetened
rather than savage.
No shock that the toughest breed, Ultra
High Performance Concrete,12 is fabricated
where it is at most risk of rapid unprecedented load.13 Ultra High, in a location prone
only to the injuries of pollution, weather and
the constant clammer of workers’ feet, spins
lightweight structures that pierce the clouds,
it blankets others in fine filigree. In a country
attacked by another, instead layered thick,
buried deep, it makes for a safer bunker. Yet
any concrete’s strength is an illusion that
occurs when it is amongst other concrete,
layered up in foundations, pillars, cladded
walls. When its unity is displaced through
force, isolated it is exposed as fragile, a brittle
substance that suffers violently in an explosion. It can be a horror movie cliché, the
one-dimensional character whose overarching
masculinity, his insistent heterosexuality,
his gym-and-protein-shake muscles can not
protect him from maniacal zombies. Things
Test 004
Test Title: Capitalist decay
Description: Sell the cube.
Date of Testing: 24/05/2013
Age in Days: 104
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: None
are more complicated beneath the surface, as
its dislocated fragments become missiles, they
pass each other and acknowledge their differences. There is no homogeneity in concrete,
its materials heated, heaped and provoked
into a cohesive mix fly apart in sudden failure
just like many things melded under such
pressure.
After a car bomb detonated outside the
Old Bailey in ‘73, one remnant shard of glass
– remainder, reminder – stayed embedded
in the wall of the main stairs of this croupier
to Greater London’s justice. One shard too
many this city. A decade before Renzo Piano’s
began to splinter the sky above London
Bridge, and two before six women codenamed Sigmund scaled it in a networked and
livestreamed demonstration, a truck exploded
outside 80 Bishopsgate in London’s financial
sector. Glass shards flung themselves at its
concrete walls; from each of its windows,
paper flew like scattered pigeons across the
impact zone, secrets, contracts, unprotected
data had to be gathered and shredded by
scattered pigs; the Blitz-survivor church
next door collapsed. As a result of this blast,
half a million CCTV cameras were installed
to encircle the City, concrete was enlisted to
provide accurate pictures of vehicles and their
drivers, slowed in their progress by its bulk in
plastic-coated blocks. Like the concrete of its
dreams, the City absorbed the impact, milita-
Test 005
Test Title: Close observation
Description: Pay attention to the cube
for fifty-seven minutes. If you can.
Date of Testing: 24/05/2013
Age in Days: 104
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: None
4
Test 006
Test Title: Responsivity to light
conditions
Description: Place the cube in direct
sunlight without rotation.
Date of Testing: 27/02/2014
Age in Days: 383
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: Slight lightening of colour
down two adjacent sides of cube.
rised and hardened. An end to a recession was
officiated two days afterwards, the week after
that John Major declared it would be “business as usual” for currencies, commodities,
stocks and shares,14 same thing he would say
after the 1994 Tel Aviv bus bomb15 and, again,
when he fired Norman Lamont who had
replaced him in his previous role as Chancellor of the Exchequer, keeper of the nation’s
capital.16 At the time it was common for a
building’s insurance to neurotically demand
that it be reinstated like-for-like, down to the
last decorative details. At the time Amanda
Loomes was a civil engineer. At the time, in
the employ of Wimpey Construction, she and
her colleagues painstakingly created a facsimile building from scratch. After the bombed
remains were systematically demolished,
salvaged components piled up, transported
out and reused, with the limited maneuverable space allowed to them in the shadows
of neighbouring unexploded structures, the
engineers worked to restack the ten storeys.
Concrete poured, budgets tightened, camaraderie prevailed and their work was done. So
too Loomes’s, work of this kind at least. Some
time later, but not enough, Keltbray Ltd
demolition company suffered the déjà vu of
having to tear down the same building again.
Its duplicated ten storeys no profitable match
to the just under a million square foot of net
lettable space in three new buildings includbeef tallow as a grinding agent.
8 New concrete suffers from efflorescence, the arrival of a flowering
of salt deposits when absorbed water
evaporates.
9 Although accounts of the
fallen bodies of workers trapped in
its concrete like insects in amber
are unlikely to be true, the Hoover
Dam famously took many lives in
its making. The first sacrifice was
by drowning, that of a surveyor J. G.
Tierney, while searching for where
to place the dam. Over one hundred
more were to die in the construction, that is discounting those for
whom “death by pneumonia” no
doubt concealed carbon monoxide
poisoning from the site. The last,
Patrick, son of the surveyor fell to
ing a forty-storey tower anchored by five
contiguous podium floors of 44,000 square
foot each, with thirty-two tower floors ranging from 19,000 to 25,000 square foot, to suit
any tenant requirement.17 Loomes had a plant
she had rescued from the desk of a worker at
the exploded 80 Bishopsgate. Seventeen years
on from its age at emancipation, she returned
with it to the demolished 80 Bishopsgate, she
couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to shrivel a
little.
These days we’re looking for a concrete that can heal its own wounds. A stone
infected with bacteria that on contact with
water will wake, widen and fill completely
the space they had been rattling about in
when dry.18 Preemptive tactics for a future
laissez-faire approach to maintenance. We’ve
run optical glass fibres through concrete
to enable it to transmit light, to reveal the
bodies behind.19 What else could we infect
this porous material with before we let it set
around steel cages? What discovery would it
take to have materials engineers play music to
their unset concrete just as expectant parents
do their unborn children? 20 Concrete, adjectively, denotes the fluid movement of voice
from note to note, either up, or down, missing
none between. What would an acoustically
concrete concrete be? Would buildings lined
with sonically enhanced cement possess more
resilience in an earthquake? Would they
his death thirteen years to the day of
that of his father.
10 “While those who had had experience of concrete, never doubted
its constructional value and economy as a material for building small
houses, the Englishman’s love of the
national building material – bricks
and mortar – had to be reckoned
with.” Concrete and Construction
Engineering (1921).
11 Broadly sweeping statement
permitted, one of the first British
buildings made from mass concrete,
a block of flats near the Crystal Palace, was originally a New Church of
the Christian reformist and mystic
Emanuel Swedenborg. Even then,
however, an elitism of material was
apparent, the concrete was cunning-
ly disguised as sandstone.
12 The acronym UHPC is usually
used to mask its parodic name.
13 Fact sourced from a thoroughly
biased and hysterical article on the
University of Tehran’s research into
precision engineered concrete in
The Economist.
14 ‘Business as usual’ was the
name of a UK government policy
from the beginning of WW1, that
mandated an attitude that this war
declared in August 1914 would be
through by that Christmas. Major
used this phrase in a speech made in
London, 26 April 1993.
15 Speech to the Joint Israel Appeal and Jewish Continuity Dinner,
21 November 1994.
16 Prime Minister’s Question
sound better in the wind?
‘Places remember events’, scribbled
James Joyce in the margin of his manuscript
for Ulysses, perhaps sound’s storage in our
architectures is how they do so. J.G. Ballard imagined a social undercast, mute and
illiterate, who would work in waste removal
in such a situation. The eponymous figure
of Ballard’s short story The Sound Sweep rids
interiors of their sonic residue; places of
worship are swept free of centuries of coughing and crying, public spaces emptied of the
cacophony of fairgrounds and transport links
cleaned regularly of the sounds of trains,
planes and cars.21 Extraneous sounds removed
from buildings are taken to a sonic dump,
leaving the air behind less ‘leaden and tumid’.
Unswept, though unheard, it is certain these
remaining resonances would tear apart the
city. In this world the concrete’s foe is not
frost nor blast, its fissures and weakening
the upshot of police sirens and the echoes of
thousands of footsteps down a corridor daily.
Though like all Ballardian worlds, this one
reveals itself as ours when we glimpse it in
the rear view mirror or hear about it in the
space between radio frequencies: a Western
mindset even cursorily examined holds a
belief that building materials act as storage
for lives lived, sonically or otherwise. The
sometimes murder scene and site of burial
of most of their many victims, their own
Test 007
Test Title: Flow tracking
Description: Serve the cube one glass
of tap water laced with the pink tracer
dye used to track water through a
plumbing system or to find out if
caves are connected. Remove the
glass after a few hours.
Date of Testing: 13/03/2014
Age in Days: 398
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: Slight flaking around the
top surface
children amongst them, Fred and Rose West’s
home on Cromwell Street was flattened into
a footpath rather than reinhabited. Of course
there are more (toweringly) pertinent examples, but none that I walked past as a secondary school student on weekdays. Government
on occasion harnesses this unspoken belief,
that buildings and their components can be
blamed for other negligences or blunders.
Look!, they say, bad concrete, bleak and brutal, how depressing, it has let everyone down.
The architects and engineers scratch their
heads and wonder at which point they should
have informed the concrete it would be
responsible for anything other than strength
under load.
Data gathered from the British Standards Institution’s concrete test battery neglects therefore to recognise some things we
expect of the concrete used to construct our
habitats. Placing it under increasing pressure
until it fractures to determine compression
strength is the mandate. Small cubes are set
from a delivery of wet concrete to a building site, they are placed between the thrust
of two plates which slowly, without shock,
come together until the cube fails. The load
at which it breaks must be at least eighty-five
percent of the strength specified by the grade
of concrete for the delivery from which the
cube came to be considered ready for use as
intended. Concrete cubes are thus routine-
Test 008
Test Title: Susceptibility to pranks
Description: Play a trick on the cube.
Date of Testing: 20/03/2014
Age in Days: 405
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: None
6
Test 009
Test Title: Tell the cube every joke
about cheese you know, the punnier
the better.
Date of Testing: 21/03/2014
Age in Days: 406
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: None
ly and unimaginatively tortured near each
and every regulated construction site. Now
artist, Amanda Loomes once said concrete
was sexy. How would we know what grade of
sexy a batch of concrete was? Would Norman
Foster be more or less likely to buy sexier
rated concrete? A concrete number is one
that is real, not abstracted for the purposes of
theory. One person died in the 1993 explosion
at 80 Bishopsgate. Similarly with the qualities of objects or beings, it was a male person
who died, concretely, a man. Yet separated
from its object, the dead man, that quality,
maleness, becomes abstracted. No longer
concrete. Hence Pierre Schaeffer’s musique
concrète: concrete sounds sampled, recorded,
looped and used to compose music. Roman
concrete was known as opus caementicium, an
opus being now an artistic or literary work or
Time, 10 June 1993.
17 Paraphrased from the developer’s sales pitch “The completed
project provides just under a million
sq ft of net lettable space in three
new buildings. A forty-storey tower
is anchored by five contiguous podium floors of 44,000 sq ft each, with
32 tower floors ranging from 19,000
to 25,000 sq ft, to suit any tenant
requirement.”
18 This is the work of research at
University of Bath into a concrete
mix that contains bacteria within
microcapsules, these germinate on
contact with water to produce a calcite that plugs the crack from which
the water came.
19 Translucent concrete, LiTraCon™, was invented 2001 by
collection of works of magnitude. Yet ‘concrete thinking’ is a psychoanalytic term for
a person’s developmental state before they
become able to think metaphorically or for
when they have regressed from the ability
to do so. We seem to have mucked up our
etymology and in doing so evicted all other
reasonable uses for concrete, word and substance. Just as Bruno Munari’s Supplement to
the Italian Dictionary22 fills in the gaps of that
language’s grammar and vocabulary with the
gestures and expressions necessary to its fluid
exchange, so too do we need a supplement to
the audit of standardised concrete testing. If
nothing else, the futility of any such test to
provide results of application to human well
being might indicate we are and always have
been looking in the wrong place.
architect Áron Losonczi.
20 The disputed ‘Mozart Effect’
theory.
21 Originally published as
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare
(1963).
22 A dictionary of hand gestures
that indicate non-verbally when
a speaker or their subject is, for
example, thirsty, clever, not to blame
or a cretin.
Bibliography
1 ‘Concrete proposals’, The
Economist, (22 June 1999)
3 Andrea Pepe, ‘Materials’,
The Colosseum.Net: The Resourceful
Site on the Colosseum http://www.
the-colosseum.net/architecture/materials_en.htm
4 ‘Brief history of concrete’,
Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce
http://www.djc.com/special/concrete/10003364.htm
5 Manifesto of the Communist Party
by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
(1848) http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/download/pdf/
Manifesto.pdf
6 M.S.J. Gani, Cement and Concrete, London: Chapman and Hall
(1997), p.4
7Ibid.
9 ‘Fatalities at Hoover Dam’, U.S.
Department of the Interior: Bureau of
Reclamation, Lower Colorado Region
http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/
History/essays/fatal.html
10 ‘The Progress of Concrete
Construction in 1920 Housing’, Concrete and Construction Engineering:
The Officially Appointed Journal of the
Concrete Institute, Volume XVI. No.
i., London (January, 1921)
11 Jonathan Meades in 2014 BBC
documentary Bunkers Brutalism and
Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry.
13 ‘Bunker-Busting: Smart
Concrete’, The Economist, London
(3 May 2012)
14 John Major, transcript of
speech made in London, 26 April
1993 http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/
page1041.html
15 John Major, transcript of
speech to the Joint Israel Appeal and
Jewish Continuity Dinner, 21 November 1994 http://www.johnmajor.
co.uk/page1167.html
16 John Major, transcript of Prime
Minister’s Question Time, 10 June
1993 http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/
Test 010
Test Title: Desirability
Description: Place it in a densely
populated environment for at least
two hours and see if anyone is
sexually attracted to the cube.
Date of Testing: 03/04/2014
Age in Days: 419
Result (Unit Weight): 5,290g
Remarks: None
8
page159.html
17 ‘100 Bishopsgate: City of London’, Allies and Morrison http://www.
alliesandmorrison.com/projects/
office/2012/100-bishopsgate/
18 ‘Micro-capsules and bacteria to be used in self-healing
concrete’, University of Bath, (30
May 2013) http://www.bath.ac.uk/
news/2013/05/30/micro-capsulesand-bacteria-to-be-used-in-self-healing-concrete/
20 Don G. Campbell, The Mozart
effect: Tapping the power of music to
heal the body, strengthen the mind, and
unlock the creative spirit, New York:
Avon Books (1997)
21 J.G. Ballard, ‘The Sound
Sweep’, The Voices of Time, London:
Phoenix (2001) originally published
as The Four-Dimensional Nightmare,
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd (1963)
22 Bruno Munari, Supplemento al
dizionario italiano, Mantua: Corraini
(2000)