ABSTRACT
Prefabrication is alm ost as old as building itself. Already at the end of the 19th century and throughout t he first half of the 20th century , pref abricated con crete was co mmonly used in housing cons truction, agri cultural and industrial buil dings, utilit y building and road construction: the fabrication of relativel y small elements (bricks, tiles, pipe s,…) in a workshop m eant a reduction of manual labor and production costs and an accelerated construction process, without changing the construction process and concept. Gradually m ore and m ore com panies ap plied themselves to prefabricated concrete in Belgium during the first half of the 20th century, yet the capacity and field of application of these co mpanies was relatively modest. It was not until after the Second World War that the prefabrication industry evolved into a full y-fledged branch of the construction industr y. Thanks to the scientific and technologi cal developments, the use of new tools an d machinery and the modernization of the building industr y in ge neral, the scale, focus and methods of the prefabrication industry changed. During the 1950s and 1960s, the industry applied itself to the mass production of columns, beam s and slabs for the industrial and utilitarian bui lding sector, meeting the needs of the growing welfare state with new industri al zones, suburban districts and an expanding road-system. As the body of knowledge and experience of the s ector increased, the precast industr y came to bloom , calling on quality, reliability and methodology. Production techni ques and construction pr ocess were revised , as a result of which also the design concept was slowly being reconsidered in order t o correspond with the optimal application and possibilities of prefabrication, for exam ple by redesigning the buildi ng
S. Van de Voorde Department of Architectural En gineering, Vrije Universiteit Bruss el, Brussels, Bel gium; Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
ABSTRACT: The development of architectural concrete in Belgium was instigated by the office buildings Foncolin (arch. Jacqmain, 1955-58) and BBL (arch. Bunshaft, 1959-65) in Brussels, both construc ted with precast el ements in Sc hokbeton. Inspired by their success, the Belgian prefabrication com pany CBR-Ergon set up a production line f or architectural concrete. They called on architect Brodzki for the design of the new CBR office (1967-70), which became an exemplary illustration of the versatility of conc rete, demonstrating the technical knowhow developed over recent years by CBR-Ergon. The CBR-building can be considered as the definitive breakthrough of a new trend in Belgian architecture: the so-called CBR-style, as the repetition of load-bearing, prefabricated facade elem ents in visible concrete, was applied in num erous office buildings. Yet after a short, intensive period of application, the form ula reached its own limits. It was not until the 1980s, when the inte rdisciplinary research on architecture and tech - nology was resumed, that architectural concrete could revive.
