Opération Béton: Constructing Concrete in Switzerland

Abstract

By studying approximately a century of cement and concrete in Switzerland, this project examines the relations between institutions, discourse, and technology as they intersect in the material. The project is framed so that the establishment of organizations, ideas, and techniques from the late 19th century through the end of the interwar period are shown to have enabled the mass deployment of concrete in the Postwar period. The study begins with an institutional history of material testing and production, looking at the establishment in 1880 of the Institute for the Testing of Building Materials (now EMPA) and the formation of the cement cartel EG Portland in 1910 as two key institutions for structuring the cement industry. The central part is a discourse history tracing notions of solidity— the ability to endure through time, monolithic construction, and resistance to disaster—that were important for promoting concrete as well as understanding how to build with it. In this section, each rhetorical argument is approached through a key object: the Kunststein of Gustav Gull’s renovation of the ETH Hauptgebäude, the Zementhalle of the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition, and the Sonnenberg highway tunnel and civil defense shelter in Lucern. The final part looks first at a specific technical change to wet mix concrete and later at the broader, territorial ramifications of a flowing material through the example of the Dixence dams. Over the period of study, concrete went from being a material used occasionally to one that is ubiquitous, an occurrence that forms the major arc of this project. Drawing primarily from professional journals and archival material, the project shows how concrete—organizationally, technically and conceptually—broke with previously held notions of scarcity and became a material without limit.