Rehabilitated Concrete – the future

Apr, 26 2010

Many great architects of the 20th century, such as Le Corbusier, loved concrete as a manifestation of the modern. Futurist poets dreamed of the "new beauty of concrete".
 
There was a certain period (the 1960s) when concrete buildings were equated with all that symbolized progress. For such people, there may be something mystical about the idea of rehabilitating concrete, giving a facelift to that which – decades after its creation – has lost its newness and its freshness. Rehabilitated concrete can look and feel as solid as the day it was first formed – appealing even to the eye.
 
The new surface can look exactly how you set the mould. "Induced de-bonding mechanism"! This is a term of art used by civil engineers in reference to the process of rehabilitating concrete. It appears to mean that in repair of concrete one has to "de-bond" some parts of it to make the thing whole again.

Apart from induced de-bonding, there are a myriad of other causes of decomposition of concrete. These can be classed in three broad categories: mechanical (impacts, overload, location, explosion, vibration); chemical (deleterious substances, bio-deterioration) and physical (freeze-thaw cycles, crystallization of salts, shrinkage, erosion).

Thus, though concrete appears to embody permanence, it is in fact built on sand (or at least from sand). It ages and weathers just like the body and, therefore, has inherent impermanence. Though to give it its due – it can last much, much longer than the average person.

So the idea of rehabilitated concrete presents us with a potential multi-layered metaphor for social organizations. Can we apply it to the modern MFA (ministry of foreign affairs)? In many diplomatic bureaucracies around the world, we can certainly see a solidity of purpose and a weight of history. The last few decades have seen repeated attempts to modernize and rehabilitate this or that foreign ministry, to de-bond and to re-form. For those who see inherent beauty and form in a foreign ministry, some of the results look as impressive as they may appear radical. You can rehabilitate concrete, but at the end of the process you are left only with concrete. It exists but it has no life, it is immobile, and it is stolid. And it is still built from sand.
 
Worse still, the modern MFA sits – metaphorically – in a "concrete jungle" of other government departments and intergovernmental organizations – a sterile cityscape dominated, by pavement as far as the eye can see, by overpasses, and by modern buildings where over time, the sterile and stolid overcomes the remaining traces of the biological, botanic or zoological. One question we face is how long can we go on rehabilitating the old concrete in the minor eco-system of solidified public policy organizations in which foreign ministries operate? My answer to that question is: "not very long at all".
 
There is not a single foreign ministry in the world today – not in the United States, not in China or Japan – that has strong in-house specialist expertise in all five of the major challenges confronting the international security and prosperity of their country: complex and high risk financial markets; increasingly volatile energy markets; extreme vulnerabilities in cyber security; the social and spiritual antagonisms that drive violent extremism; and policy management for climate change uncertainties. Not only do foreign ministries lack fundamental subject expertise in many of these key areas, they are also do not have ready access to a sensible international process that can address any one of them comprehensively and systematically.
 
Either, there is no international organization or sustained diplomatic process dedicated to that task (such as energy price volatility and international financial markets) or there is no sensibly structured forum and process for doing so (as in climate change or cyber security). As the European Union this week contemplates the structure of its new External Action Service yet another time, it needs to reflect on the above. The people doing this need to ask themselves whether they are trying to rehabilitate concrete in a jungle of the same, or whether they are looking to build a new and living social organization that can lead in all of the five challenge areas so visibly beyond the reach of every one of the national foreign ministries

Source: http://www.todaysconcretetechnology.com/rehabilitated-concrete-the-future.html