STRUCTURAL DESIGN FOR ARCHITECTURE

Reinforced concrete structures

continuously through the three upper storeys
of the building. The steel mullions which
supported the curtain wall were mounted
directly on the edge of the floor slab. The
opaque parts of the exterior wall were
constructed in masonry which was rendered to
give a smooth white finish. The columns and
beams of the reinforced concrete framework
were left exposed throughout the interior.

The architectural vocabulary of the Bauhaus
building was very similar to that which was
being developed contemporaneously by Le
Corbusier. Its characteristics were due, in no
small measure, to the use of a reinforced
concrete framework which allowed great
freedom to be exercised in both the internal
planning and the treatment of the exterior.

An early demonstration in Britain of the
architectural qualities of reinforced concrete
occurred in the Boots Warehouse at Beeston
by Owen Williams (1930) (Fig. 4.8). In this case
a two-way-spanning slab was adopted,
supported on a square grid of columns with
exaggerated mushroom heads, but visually the
building was similar to the earlier examples
described above. A further example was the
Highpoint 1 apartment block by Berthold
Lubetkin of the Tecton Group and Ove Arup
(1933). Lubetkin and Arup had earlier demon-
strated their awareness of the capabilities of
reinforced concrete in the buildings which they
designed for London Zoo - most notably and
eloquently the Penguin Pool of 1933 (Fig. 4.9).
In the Highpoint block a loadbearing-wall type
of structure was adopted with one-way-
spanning floor slabs. This arrangement was
used to provide variations in the floor plans at
different levels. Where wall-free spaces were
required, the loadbearing reinforced concrete
walls in the floor above were made to act as
storey-height beams spanning between
columns. The device is seen at its most
extreme in the ground floor where the
loadbearing walls were eliminated entirely and
the vertical support was provided solely by a
grid of columns.

The visual language developed in these

highly influential early examples of twentieth-

century rationalist architecture owed much to

Fig. 4.8 Boots Warehouse, Beeston, England, 1930-32,

Owen Williams, architect/structural engineer. The structure

here is a two-way spanning flat slab with mushroom-head

columns. Its prominence and the transparency of the walls

produce a similar tectonic quality to that seen in the

Bauhaus (Fig. 4.7) and place the building in the forefront

of contemporary architectural development.[Photo: British

Architectural Library Photographs Collection]

the properties of the new structural material by

which they were supported. In all of them the

relationship between structure and architec-

ture was that of 'structure accepted' (see

Section 2.2), in which the visual and structural

programmes were allowed to co-exist without

conflict. The forms were predominantly recti-

linear; this made easy the construction of the

formwork in which the liquid concrete would

be cast and, given the spans involved, was a

sensible choice of structural form.

Rectilinearity was also an appropriate

aesthetic choice given the ideas which the

visual vocabulary was intended to express. In 105