Liquid Stone: Innovations and Artistry in Concrete Eddy Rhead
Photographs of Highland House by Jan Chlebik
Architect, L C Howitt, began to push the boundaries of both the materials used and the form of some of the city ’s more prominent buildings. Just one year after Peter House, the Toast Rack, designed for the Hollings College, appeared in Fallowfield. Like many of his contemporaries Howitt was beginning to use concrete in a bold and radical new way, with the soaring parabolic arches that give Hollings its unique shape, speaking a whole new architectural language, whilst advertising on a huge scale concrete ’s unique qualities. This golden age boasts numerous examples of innovative concrete technology, with Manchester based architects Leach, Rhodes and Walker at the forefront. Highland House on Victoria Bridge Street (now Premier Inn) used pre cast concrete panels, built off site and attached to a concrete frame. Supposedly the first time a tower crane had been used in the city, its appearance caused quite a stir. Even more radical, at Manchester House on Bridge Street, concrete floor plates were cast on top of each other in situ, and then jacked up into their eventual positions. Ahead of its time and prohibitively costly, it was to be decades until this process re-emerged, facilitating the global construction of very tall skyscrapers. Meanwhile architects and artists were testing its versatility and malleability to create sculptural forms within the architecture itself or as stand alone works, such as the gable end of City Tower at Piccadilly Plaza, said to acknowledge Manchester ’s history in computing and representing electronic circuitry, giving relief and texture to what otherwise would have been a plain, flat wall. Likewise the concrete gable of the Humanities Building at the University of Manchester has a pattern designed by the sculptor William Mitchell (see «the modernist» issue 2). Concrete also makes a strong architectural and artistic statement at the wall running along London Road which delineates the UMIST campus. Designed by the artist Anthony Hollaway, it uses the material’s robustness and subtly to create a functional yet intrinsically sculptural structure. More a passionate fling than a full on affair, this interlude soon waned, and as the spectre of Post Modernism reared its head, concrete returned to its former role —as a ubiquitous but functional and largely hidden material. Recently Manchester boldly attempted to rekindle that old flame when the Japanese architect Tadao Ando was given the job of remodelling Piccadilly Gardens. Renowned for his minimal, beautiful, and invariably raw concrete structures, Ando leaves the impressions of the form work (the ‘moulds’ that the concrete is poured into to create the structure) intact, a ‘signature ’ style designed to showcase the material whilst simultaneously celebrating its construction method. Such has been the controversy and criticism of the resulting pavilion it is clear that the British public is still not ready to embrace concrete, and so it shall again remain hidden away—holding our buildings up whilst quietly and bashfully being beautiful.