Architecture After the Concrete Frame
Public discourse often celebrates the spectacular one percent of concrete achievements—bridges, domes, hangars—while overlooking the remaining ninety-nine percent of anonymous reinforced concrete frame buildings.
The research Architecture After the Concrete Frame instead investigates the cultural, technical, and poetic role of the reinforced concrete frame through a series of exemplary houses.
Lessons drawn from these examples allow any existing concrete frame to be reinterpreted as a site for new architectural design. Understanding the poetic potential of the concrete frame becomes an act of ecological responsibility—precisely because it is the precondition for its reuse.
The frame is read through two primary tropes. On one side stands Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino (1914–16), which embodies the frame as idea, a cultural product, a minimal, repeatable unit of thought.
On the other stands the Grand Rocher (1934), an artificial mountain in the in Paris Zoo, where the reinforced concrete frame becomes raw material: a ductile, amorphous mass of solids and voids, a “natural” quarry of concrete frame.
From these two poles derive the Weissenhof Double House (1926–27) and Mies van der Rohe’s Promontory Apartments (1946–48); Herzog & de Meuron’s Casa a Tavole (1984) and Kazuo Shinohara’s House on a Curved Road (1976–78); and finally, Ryue Nishizawa’s Garden and House (2006) and Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bordeaux (1994).
The texts are grounded in meticulous descriptions of each building’s technical characteristics. When this condensed body of data is confronted the history and the principles underlying the idea of the building, internal tensions emerge: architectural decisions appear as acts of force—deviations from structural logic that make poetic choices visible.
Only through these narratives do the relics—and architecture itself—shift from mute imprints to carriers of meaning.