Скачать или смотреть Sarah Nichols — OPERATION BETON

Sarah Nichols in conversation with Guillaume Habert and Donald Mak

CONCEPT AND REALISATION
Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture
Prof. Milica Topalovic
Hans Hortig


in collaboration with
Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard GSD
Prof. Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes


The event is part of the lecture series
SESSIONS ON TERRITORY—Urbanism as Material Accumulation


SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on the material cultures of architecture and urbanism — from territories of resource extraction to the construction site — the upcoming series unravels contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environments. Through a series of debates with invited guests, the seminar aims to critically reflect on the materiality of contemporary urbanism. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents.

The Spring Semester 2021 Sessions on Territory is curated by Prof Milica Topalovic, Asst. Prof Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Harvard GSD) and Hans Hortig.

Please find all lectures here: https://topalovic.arch.ethz.ch/projec...

29.03.2021
OPERATION BETON
Sarah Nichols in conversation with Guillaume Habert and Donald Mak
What is embedded in material or, respectively, architecture? Addressing this question reveals the entanglements that bring architecture into being—organizations and knowledge, energy and labor, and extraction and emission. By taking up this lens, building can be thought of as a long process of formation that happens through both material and immaterial means, neither beginning nor ending with the construction site but rather stretched across territories and through time, intimately linking seemingly disparate agencies together.

By studying approximately a century of cement and concrete in Switzerland, this talk will examine the relations between institutions, discourse, and technology as they intersect in the material. The establishment of organizations, ideas, and techniques from the late 19th century through the end of the interwar period will be shown to have enabled the mass deployment of concrete in the Postwar period.

Over the period of study, concrete went from being a material used occasionally to one that is ubiquitous. This talk will thus also grapple with the challenges of studying ubiquity to show how concrete—organizationally, technically and conceptually—broke with previously held notions of scarcity and became a material without limit.