The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  A day later, Joyce copied us into a fax that she was sending Ramesh. ‘We are concerned that progress on site has been slow and are aware the construction programme has fallen behind,’ she wrote severely.

  You have verbally informed us of several delays. However, in accordance with Clause 2.3 (IFC 98) if the progress of the Works has been delayed by any event, you must inform us in writing of the cause of the delay as soon as these matters become apparent. Would you please state which items outlined in Clause 2.4 that you consider apply in this instance, and forward such information that you consider will reasonably enable us to form an opinion and determine a fair and reasonable extension of time.

  Then a revised construction programme must be issued promptly to bring the Works in line with the agreed completion date.

  I was due at a site meeting the following day, and I suspected the fax had been written partly to pre-empt my dismay at the lack of progress. In this sense it worked, because I arrived with pitifully low expectations. They were not exceeded. Ramesh put in an appearance and assured us that Varbud were doing no other work over the next month, in order to devote all their energies and resources to the project.

  ‘I don’t understand why it’s taking so long,’ I said pathetically, since Joyce obviously didn’t either.

  ‘It was very wet in February,’ she offered hopefully.

  ‘OK, let’s assume it rained all twenty-eight days in February. [It hadn’t.] We’re four months behind. How are we supposed to account for the other three?’

  She had to admit it was difficult. The rain argument didn’t do much for me anyway: what had they expected in February in Britain? And since then, we’d had unseasonably warm weather: hotter than the Mediterranean, they kept saying on the radio. It seemed rather unfair that you lost time for rain but didn’t get any credit for an off-season heatwave.

  Two weeks later, we still hadn’t seen the revised schedule. Joyce was forced to send another strict fax:

  Further to our letter dated 20 March 2002, regarding progress, a revised programme and a completion date, we have received no reply from you. Your immediate attention is required in this matter.

  We are growing increasingly concerned that the programme is drifting and now is the time to rectify the matter. Our clients need to schedule their move as well as the sale of their house.

  Tomorrow morning the client and myself will be on site for our weekly site meeting and we expect a revised programme to be presented. Included in the programme is the necessity to provide a detailed proposal as to how the concrete walls will be scheduled. The considered programming of the walls will allow you to provide a realistic programme and push everyone to remain on schedule. We remind you, as advised by David Bennett, the first wall to be poured should be a small and manageable pour. Please take this into consideration.

  We await your response.

  Ramesh turned up at the following day’s site meeting with a schedule that took us up to 28 July. Charlie and I were relieved. My private deadline was September. I didn’t particularly want to move in the summer holidays anyway, and this made September seem still feasible. We were pretty certain we’d sold our house: some friends of friends (she was a paediatrician, he was an academic: they lived round the corner in a slightly smaller house, with three teenage daughters) had approached us back at Christmas and asked for first refusal at the asking price. Since then we’d had a valuation, which they’d accepted was fair. We had agreed to sell to them at the price, and they’d promised to hang on for us.

  The slab, which Ramesh had told us back in November would be poured possibly the week before, possibly the week after Christmas, was actually poured in the week after Easter. It was a mystery why it had taken so long. Everybody seemed to blame Varbud; Mavji looked into the middle distance a lot and shook his head gravely. It wasn’t even as if, having waited so long for it, it was interesting. It was ineffably dull, as bits of construction go (which is often quite dull): a flat bit of concrete with little groves of reinforcement sticking up out of it. Still, we had Ramesh’s new schedule, which promised that things were going to move much faster now.

  9

  I was becoming a concrete bore. With all the zeal of the convert, I started buying books. I went to an exhibition at the RIBA. It became my ambition to meet David Bennett.

  I could have told you all sorts of things about concrete: that it is a composite material, consisting of sand, aggregate (usually stone chippings or gravel), cement and water; that its name is derived from the Latin concretus, meaning grown together; that the architectural critic Peter Rayner Banham described it as ‘a messy soup of suspended dusts, grits and sump aggregates, mixed and poured under conditions subject to the weather and human fallibility’. I could have told you that the Victorians were suspicious of concrete, on account of its plasticity, thinking of it as an ersatz material – acceptable for bridges or docks, but not for ‘proper’ architecture.

  I have some sympathy with this view, because concrete’s versatility has always made it a difficult material to understand. It isn’t so much one material, in fact, as a whole spectrum of them. By changing the type of aggregate, concrete can be made light enough to float on water or twice its usual density. It can be made totally impermeable, for use in giant dams, or porous enough for filter beds at sewage treatment plants. As a result, its personality is promiscuous: it is capable of being ‘as smooth as a cashmere jacket or as rough as hell’, according to the architect Piers Gough, who also claims that ‘in South America, concrete is sexy, like the culture. In Britain and Northern Europe, the material is intellectual but cold.’

  Following the initial, Roman, flurry of excitement about it, concrete went out of fashion for a long time, mainly because it needs reinforcing to be really strong, and effective methods of reinforcement weren’t invented until the nineteenth century. The modernists made a fair amount of experimental use of it, but it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that it really took off, when it appeared to be the cheapest, most versatile, fastest option for the rebuilding of Europe’s shattered cities. By 1965, there were 230 competing systems of factory-produced, site-assembled concrete components available in Britain. In a matter of a few decades, concrete had swept the world, either in the form of pre-cast panels that could be assembled like masonry, or in-situ concrete poured into more or less rough wooden moulds with the reinforcing rods left sticking out of the top, ready for whenever another storey became affordable. Concrete is now second only to water as the world’s most heavily consumed substance: one ton per year for every person on the planet.

  This welter of pre-cast and rough in-situ stuff was quite different, however, from the fair-faced poured concrete that we were contemplating, even though the concrete enthusiasts have a confusing tendency to exploit the material’s multiple personality disorder to have it all ways. They harp on about what a marvellous cheap material it is, and also what a beautiful one. But on the whole, cheap concrete isn’t beautiful and needs to be plastered over or faced with some other material in any setting where human beings must spend a lot of time. It is only where as much care is taken over the formwork joinery as if you were building a dining table (this, David Bennett said, was the standard he was looking for) that concrete becomes beautiful. The attention that has been paid, the care that has been lavished on it, is what makes it lovely.

  The general confusion about what this chameleon-like substance stands for is aggravated by the fact that brutalist architects used concrete to mimic the roughness of cheap utilitarian construction – giant silos, grain elevators – for broadly artistic ends. And something of this imagery attached itself persistently to the material, so that concrete still conveys ideas of urban, industrial modernity and hard-headed socialist brutalism. Finally, though, in the early twenty-first century, people are becoming more alert to the multifarious possibilities of concrete, and in particular, its use as a quality material in high-end buildings. Tadao Ando, as ever, has been crucial he
re, but many of the world’s most interesting architects – Herzog and de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, Denton Corker Marshall, Zaha Hadid among them – are exploring its potential. Award-winning buildings keep turning out to be made of the stuff. It is almost exhaustingly fashionable.

  Meanwhile, and almost certainly related to its renewed respectability, the marks of formwork and signs of construction that were once deemed embarrassing have become acceptable, like the grain in elm or the marks of the chisel on sculpture. (In pre-war modernist buildings, it was common to whitewash the concrete to disguise its flaws. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, built between 1945 and 1952, was shocking partly because it was one of the first buildings in which the raw concrete – and it was really quite raw – was on show.) Now, concrete is increasingly seen as an organic material, which means that the marks of its making are not seen as shameful signs of fakery, but admirable (as long, anyway, as there aren’t too many of them, and everyone knows in advance more or less what marks they are going to get).

  Our concrete would speak to us, I hoped, of the effort that went into it. In one of my concrete books, I found something that Bernardo Gomez-Pimienta of TEN Architects in Mexico City had said about the concrete house he built in a small village. No one locally knew how to build in concrete, so all the people and tools had to be brought out from Mexico City, two hours’ drive away. He persisted, nevertheless. ‘I chose to use concrete because it is a wonderful material,’ he explained, ‘– soft, monolithic and very sensuous. It is at the same time a structural material and a finish, and it is apparent how it is made, so there is a handmade aspect to it. A bit like watercolour, it shows every mistake, and allows for no corrections. Concrete is simultaneously very industrial and very handmade; it has the solidity of stone and at the same time the poetry of once having been liquid.’

  This was what I hoped for from our concrete: that it would be unlike any other, because conditioned by our site, our builders, the weather, the mistakes that were made along the way. Its mottling would tell stories and its smoothness be a sign of human effort and attention. That was the idea, anyway.

  We were due to pour our first concrete on 12 April, Harry’s seventh birthday, but the formwork wasn’t finished on time. Formwork for fair-faced concrete is always tricky (as David Bennett’s dining-table metaphor implied), not least because if the joints between the shuttering panels aren’t properly sealed, you can end up with pebbly seams erupting along your smooth surface. We were making it even harder by deciding to do away with tie-bolt holes. These are the indentations left by the bolting on of the vertical, horizontal and ground-to-wall joists pinned to the outside of the wood to stop it simply giving way when the concrete is poured. (Each one of Tadao Ando’s 180 × 90 panels has six holes in it.) Holes are a risk, however, because they offer water an opportunity to migrate and break up the surface. We would still need bolts in our formwork, but if we were clever, we could have them at the top and bottom only, where they would be hidden by floor and ceiling.

  The pour was rescheduled for the 15th, which was infuriating, because I had to be out of the country, interviewing Peter Ustinov. (I was slightly mollified by some very good concrete at Geneva airport.) I agreed to meet Joyce at the site as soon as I got back the following day. Varbud had already gone when I arrived, and so had the formwork: there was just birdsong and a wall, rearing up out of the slab.

  When Joyce and Ferhan had talked about an envelope of fair-faced concrete, I envisaged walls at either end of the house. And this thought had lodged in my head and not budged, even though Charlie had alerted me to the likelihood of a wall somewhere behind the stairs. If I gave this any thought (and I didn’t, really) I probably thought that after all, this was an external wall as well, giving on to the slug garden. But the wall we had now, the one we’d built, was in the middle of the house, separating the kitchen from the sitting room. It was an internal wall. Apparently we were having rather more concrete than I’d thought.

  There was nothing I could do about it now. Anyway, something else was disturbing me more. Now that we had one wall, the likelihood of getting a whole houseful of them on to the pitifully small slab looked extremely remote. I mooched grumpily around the area that would soon be the slug garden, wondering what on earth had possessed us to dedicate such a big, sunless space to the breeding of invertebrates.

  But perhaps I was misunderstanding. When he was younger, Freddie had been diagnosed as dyspraxic, which is a bit like dyslexic except that you bump into things. (In fact, all these fashionable child syndromes, including ADHD and Aspergers, overlap suspiciously: there’s a theory that which one you get depends on which type of professional – physiotherapist, educational psychologist, teacher – hands out the diagnosis.) Freddie and I now both think he didn’t have a learning difficulty so much as a teaching difficulty, which is to say, he had dyspraxic traits (which also include a predilection for daydreaming and an active imagination), but if he’d been taught properly they needn’t have bothered him that much academically. Whatever, we didn’t have to look far to see where the traits came from. I also have untidy handwriting and when people say that something is 250 yards away, I have only the haziest sense of how far that might be. So I had to accept that I might not be seeing the space properly, in all its wide-open possibility. It was only this that stopped me from calling Joyce and bursting into tears.

  I touched the wall tentatively: the four-panel width was as smooth as slate and surprisingly warm. There were pale ovals imprinted on the surface, where knots in the birch had been plugged, and delicate horizontal tracings where the shuttering had been peeled away. Across the middle there was a stormcloud of dark mottling, with the haziness of a Turner skyscape.

  I was impressed by its solidity and forcefulness. (‘OK,’ it seemed to be saying, ‘you wanted a house; bet you didn’t think you were getting this.’) The evening sun was shining on the wall through the shifting leaves of the ash tree, shade and light skittering across its surface. I found it surprisingly unforbidding for such a big, dark, implacable thing, which I think was to do with its sensuous smoothness, its mysterious mottlings and muted, peaceful variations.

  It might, of course, still develop the ugly streaks I’d been fearing all along. Did these generally happen straight away, or later, as the concrete dried out (or failed to)?

  According to Stewart Brand, who among other things is the author of an excellent book about the adaptability of construction, How Buildings Learn, ‘Concrete is subject to deterioration problems such as (alphabetically) blistering, chipping, coving, cracking, crazing, delamination, detachment, efflorescence, erosion, exfoliation, flaking, friability, peeling, pitting, rising damp, salt fretting, spalling, subflorescence, sugaring, surface crust, weathering…’

  There was plenty to worry about.

  Six days later, I finally got to see the concrete being poured. It should have been five days later but, according to Joyce, Varbud ‘forgot to order the crane’.

  ‘Isn’t that, er, a bit incompetent?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t get me started. They need a woman to organize them.’

  ‘What about Lux?’

  ‘Oh, that side of the business runs really smoothly.’ That was the money collection side, which wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to hear. ‘Still, they’re very caring.’

  The concrete mixer was due at 11 a.m., David Bennett having decided that this was the optimum time to drive from Stratford to Highbury. (He’d made them do a trial run, to ensure the concrete would be sloppy when it arrived.) The crane was already waiting at the bottom of the lane when I arrived. I parked the car on the forecourt of the workshop opposite, avoiding the severed Barbie-style legs strewn about and the one-armed naked women propped against the wall outside the mannequin repair shop. A van was coming down the lane, presumably collecting some good-as-new mannequins, or dropping off some tatty and injured ones for repair; I sprinted up and asked the driver to get out of the way.

  ‘But you have to!’ I pro
tested, when he declined. ‘The concrete’s like a cake! You have to get exactly the right mix of ingredients and bake it quickly.’

  He stared at me. But a concrete lorry was heading towards him, followed by a technician in his Motorway Maintenance vehicle; wisely, he thought better of continuing to argue with me, and backed into some garages to allow them through.

  As soon as the concrete lorry was in position, the chute came down from the back and the concrete gushed into a hopper: a thick gumbo of grit, nothing like the smooth cement of my wall. If you stood within 10 feet of it, bits flew up and stuck to your jumper: mucky specks of stone, coated in sticky grey gloop.

  The crane swung the hopper over to the narrow slot at the top of the mould, where the builders were waiting on scaffolding to tip it in. Mavji and another of the senior men plunged large vibrating pokers in after it to extract the air. (Already, Mavji had perfected the performance of this highly skilled and crucial job while appearing to be more interested in smoking.) The hopper went back for a refill.

  The whole thing had to be done in an hour because after that you couldn’t rely on the consistency. The concrete at the bottom might start to set before the top was finished, leading to what David Bennett described as ‘a Battenberg effect’. At the same time, only a certain depth of concrete could be poured at one time, or the vibrators couldn’t get down to get the bubbles out, resulting in a pock-marked surface with bits of stony aggregate showing through. Pinholes (of which we had quite a lot on our first wall) were generally agreed to be OK – charming, even – but big holes were not. So, for an hour, the site was a commotion of shouting in Gujarati over the noise of the Asian radio station, the creaking of the concrete lorry’s drum, the pebbly cascading of the concrete and the roar of the vibrators. And then it was over, and time for Indian tea.