In this online talk, Lucia Allais and Forrest Meggers present AFTER CONCRETE, an interdisciplinary research project which challenges the material conventions of reinforced concrete. Once conceived as the quintessentially modernist material, a veritable “liquid stone” that announced the arrival of an eternal present, reinforced concrete is reconceptualized as a highly dynamic technological system, subject to inevitable failure through various mechanical and energetic processes. Allais and Meggers will lecture on this rethinking, both by presenting their own research paper about the history of the carbonation equation, just published as “Concrete is 100 Years Old: The Carbonation Equation and Narratives of Anthropogenic change” in Writing Architectural History (Pittsburg: 2021); and by discussing the edited volume they are preparing (with Michael Faciejew).

The project gathers researchers from across the humanities, sciences, design and engineering who present new approaches to the lifespan, material dynamics, cultural history, and design potential of reinforced concrete.

This online talk will be moderated by Mary Louise Lobsinger.

Lucia Allais is an architectural historian of the modern period, whose work addresses the intersection of architecture, internationalism and institution in the modern period. Allais also writes about the technical and philosophical history of materials; the participation of designers in global political culture, and the history of architectural theory. Her first book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2018), uncovered new archival material about how “monuments” were redefined in mid-20th Century by international organizations who mobilized to protect and salvage famous building from destruction: making of lists and maps of monuments “not to be bombed” during World War II, decolonizing museums in the global South, and salvaging the massive temple complex of Abu Simbel from flooding. Allais has published a number of essays on related themes, most recently “Rendering: On Experience and Experiments” (in Design Technics, Minnesota: 2021), and an introduction to three translations of texts by Alois Riegl, “Mood for Modernists” (in Grey Room 80: Winter 2020). Allais has received a number of fellowships for her work; she earned her BSE from Princeton, her M.Arch from Harvard, and her PhD from MIT. Allais is an Associate Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and the Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She is an editor of Grey Room and a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative.

Forrest Meggers is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. He was previously in Singapore as Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Architecture at the National University of Singapore where he had traveled initially as a senior researcher and research module coordinator in the Singapore-ETH Centre’s Future Cities Laboratory.  He has degrees from Mechanical Engineering (BSE), Environmental Engineering (MS), and Architecture (Dr sc.). His fields of knowledge include building systems design and integration; sustainable systems; renewable energy; optimization of energy systems; exergy analysis; geothermal; seasonal energy storage; low temp hybrid solar; building materials; thermodynamics and heat transfer; and heat pumps.

Click here to purchase the book “Writing Architectural History.”