China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Hidden in the mix: How a regionally specific aggregate affected St. Louis Missouri's built environment
Published in João Mascarenhas-Mateus, Ana Paula Pires, Manuel Marques Caiado, Ivo Veiga, History of Construction Cultures, 2021
The MacArthur Bridge Train Trestle began construction in 1909. Designed by Boller & Hodge, this steel truss bridge contained a second deck for vehicular traffic. The guard rail adjacent to the vehicle ramps is composed of precast reinforced panels installed between cast in place posts and capped with a precast handrail. The unmistakable shiny brown aggregate is Meramec gravel. The Roman lattice pattern is in keeping with the bridge’s truss design. It is difficult to tell if surfaces were bush hammered, or whether aging and highway salt have removed the smooth surface of the concrete. Visible variation in aggregate size along the surface shows that vibration techniques resulted in separated aggregate in the mix, with areas of compactly packed aggregate bonded with little or no cement. (Figure 4)
The Concrete Facades of Paul Rudolph’s Christian Science Building, 1965–1986
Published in Clifton Fordham, Constructing Building Enclosures, 2020
The most distinctive aspect of the building, in both visual and tactile terms, was the roughly textured, bush-hammered surface treatment of its load-bearing reinforced concrete walls, exposed throughout the building on both the exterior and interior sides. This effect made the Christian Science Building unlike anything previously built in Champaign and, for those familiar with his work, immediately recognizable as a Rudolph design. As a concrete trade journal noted in 1964, “[Rudolph’s] corduroy-like, textured surfaces have become something of a trademark.”19 To achieve this effect, the concrete walls were cast on-site in corrugated formwork consisting of plywood sheets to which narrow strips of wood were nailed in a vertical pattern.20 After curing, the formwork was removed, and the sharp edges of the corrugations were bush-hammered by hand, a labor-intensive process resulting in irregularly angled facets and exposed aggregate. This texture created delicate patterns of light and shadow, reflected light at different angles and further contributed to the ambiguity of scale.
Concrete capital: John McShain’s construction of Washington, DC (1930–70)
Published in Ine Wouters, Stephanie Van de Voorde, Inge Bertels, Bernard Espion, Krista De Jonge, Denis Zastavni, Building Knowledge, Constructing Histories, 2018
Structurally, the 10-story design was an unusual proposition that employed exterior walls as load-bearing structural features. Each of the 1,584 precast concrete window units was three feet thick and weighed nearly 13 tons. They were cast in Berlin, NJ, and hauled in pairs by trucks to the job site to be later raised to the wall by a 100-ton crane. Positioned atop one another, the self-supporting walls also housed the air conditioning system. Adding to the multi-functionality of the structural element, Breuer intended the exposed concrete window panels to be bush-hammered for decorative effect. Reports on the design called Breuer’s dependency on the walls for structural support to be archaic and ancient, used contemporaneously only for small buildings. Indeed, recent projects instead employed the popular curtain-wall technique, which utilized a steel frame and thin glass panels as the building’s ‘skin.’ While the designers attempted to elegantly describe the structure’s plan as an elongated X or a double Y, construction workers simply referred to the schema as “the dog biscuit building” due to its resemblance of a popular dog product.
Baan Fai Rim Ping: a haptic approach to the phenomenon of genius loci by a riverside residence in Thailand
Published in Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 2023
Koompong Noobanjong, Chaturong Louhapensang
Overall, not only did the use of reinforced concrete as structural material bestow a uniformed appearance of the house but also result in its atmospheric comfort by acting as a thermal insulation to shield the heat from tropical sunlight from entering the building. The cool, grey concrete for walls and ceilings generated an intense homogeneity in the architecture of Baan Fai Rim Ping. In contrast to well-known Brutalist architecture of the 20thcentury–where concrete surfaces: (1) were bush-hammered as demonstrated by the Everson Museum by Ieoh Ming Pei; or (2) featured stippled effects of shotcrete or corduroy surfaces as evident from the works of Paul Rudolph such as the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University–the smooth surfaces of Baan Fai Rim Ping produced a distinctive sheen that encompassed subtle reflections of light.