Tirana’s football stadium, by Florentine architect Marco Casamonti, is signalled with a campanile & in the club’s red kit & yet invisible. A courtyard to an urban block. The tower a hotel, the upper parts offices & ground level a collar of shops, restaurants/bars & public space

Very recent Swiss & French examples & full circle to Pouillon’s now 75yr old, all stone mid-rise blocks

Stone for superstructure, internal & external finish

= greater CO2 saving & cheaper faster to build

Rough or smooth cut, hand laid stone bricks or mini-crane dropped 1.2x0.6x0.2m blocks

Monier wasn’t to know his invention would today contribute 15% to global CO2 emissions

But architects, engineers, quantity surveyors & contractors know

So, what’s to be their equivalent of unleaded petrol & HFC?

Stone ?

98.7% less CO2
(inc diesel extraction & cutting)

With what we know today will Monier’s legacy be that of Thomas Midgely Jnr ?

Midgely invented, aided the mass production & profited from leaded petrol (1.2m deaths Pa) & cfc’s (greenhouse gas & ozone depletion) despite being well aware they were toxic to human & environmental health

Born in Saint Quentin La Poterie, Roman established town for terracotta tile & pot making, Monier was head gardener to the local Duc wanting ever larger pots “reinforcing them with a cage of steel”

The leap from garden ornaments & bridges to genuine innovation in superstructure was small

from the Parisian tobacconist

Joseph Monier

his shop, a state pension after petitioning from French engineers following his bankruptcy & yrs of the state believing him to have hidden wealth from his numerous inventions & patents; which he had all sold off across his life to fund more ideas

yet how did this particular set of heavy smoking architects (& JP Sartre with Pouillon) first find inspiration in reinforced concrete, a material not yet in an architect’s lexicon?

Before then & seeing the potential for mass use of reinforced concrete in the designs of Augusts Perret & knowing LeCorbusier since a child, Max Dubois’s Swiss company, like those in France & Germany bought up as many patents for reinforced concrete applications as they could

By this time Le Corbusier’s childhood friend Max Dubois now an engineer at a cement manufacturer offered to staff & fund a studio for the research & promotion of reinforced concrete

Together they invented Dom-ino, Corbusier submitting the patent in his own name alone. Max never forgave him

While when at Perret’s studio, the art school trained Le Corbusier found reinforced concrete, its stripped back aesthetic, predominant glazing & functionalist use emblematic of the new century

Form from internal function via a visual lens but without Pouillon’s “appropriate material for the task”

His engineer/stonemason/builder father had already instilled the value/best tectonic use & assembly of materials. Reverting to these for faster lower cost post-WW2 construction was easy enough for Pouillon. Who after yrs at Perret’s studio understood both reinforced concrete’s potential & it’s waste

With direct quarry to site assembly, his stone tenders repeatedly beat reinforced concrete designs, growing his studio & construction businesses. That conflation enabling his rivals to suggest a conflict of interest, shutting down both him & stone as the low cost alternative

Corbusier won the commission for Unité d’Habitation & Pouillon rebuilding the Nazi destroyed dockside

Unité, emblematic for a new age but as Pouillon had predicted rc with its labour, steel & formwork ultimately 10x the cost per apartment of his stone hybrid structures along the dockside

Who was Fernand Pouillon & why was he jailed?

Born 1912, son of an engineer/stonemason/contractor, on graduating architecture he, like Le Corbusier worked for Auguste Perret to learn the latest innovations in reinforced concrete structures

The answer comes with post-WW2 reconstruction

Imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit Fernand Pouillon broke out & with the help of friends fled to Algeria. Where, in exile & till pardoned by president Pompidou he drew on the tradition of low cost construction in stone to help greatly expand their affordable housing programme

GROUPWORK are proud of project architect winning AJ's Retrofit + Reuse Award

Doubling NIA without demolition, extending in mass timber to the side & top, super insulating with a lyrical & critical nod to nostalgia

From a distance, established & traditional

On inspection, flawed & melting into air