Text commissioned by Matter at Hand for the National Festival of Making
A Concrete Heart and an Earth Core
Edison’s Poured House
For a while, the house is still liquid, its three stories, its bedrooms, cellar, hallways, its staircase, bathtub, sinks, countertops, veranda and doorways held back from their natural state (a puddle of wet cement, sand and gravel) by the metal walls of the complex mould.
Slowly, walls begin to solidify. The iron mould warms with the reaction.
Once hardened, behold: a concrete dream house. ‘Practically indestructible. Perfectly sanitary’ [1] ‘Roomy, substantial, artistic . . . with all modern conveniences.’ [2] Insect proof, fireproof, easy to clean and, above all, efficient and low cost to build. ‘It is feasible to beautify such a house far beyond anything now possible in so cheap a manner.’ [3] A single pour concrete miracle for $1200! Poured from the top, in one fell swoop. ‘Cast a house complete in six hours!’ [4]
The mould is removed, and it’s onto the next. Cast another house complete in six hours! And then another, and another, and another…
Now, furnish these houses in concrete! A range of concrete bedroom sets ‘for as little as six dollars’ [5], a concrete piano, a concrete phonograph. And in the process: ‘solve the housing question by the application of science.’ [6]And in the process: ‘social discontent will die out when the working man owns his own home.’ [7]
At least, this was Thomas Edison’s concrete vision. Edison’s experiments with concrete and attempt to solve the early 20th century American housing crisis are a lesser-known aspect of his career as America’s most celebrated inventor. His single pour concrete housing system was granted a patent in 1917. Edison imagined that his houses could be raised in a matter of hours, providing cheap, safe housing for working families. His belief in the potential of the ‘practically indestructible’ material itself was near evangelical.
A concrete heart
Although some of the popular press at the time echoed Edison’s hopes for concrete, his designs for ‘unbreakable furniture’, including concrete pianos, refrigerators and beds earned him a certain degree of public ridicule. Florence McLandburgh’ poem A Concrete Tale, published in the New York Times in 1912 mocks the inventor’s aspirational concrete lifestyle aesthetics:
A Concrete Tale
He prinked himself with care
In beautiful array,
Then to her concrete house
He hid himself away.
Within her drawing room
Quite Prominent to view,
A concrete sofa stood
A perfect fit for two.
They talked of vine-clad cots
And every blissful thing,
Forth from his pocket then
He drew a concrete ring.
She saw no sparkling stone,
And gave a sudden start,
And very soon he found
She had a concrete heart.[8]
As the 20th century went on and ‘the most important material in the building of modernity’[9]oozed its way into every aspect of our built environment, concrete would become the second most consumed substance on the planet, after water. Edison’s single pour system, though, never made it past a few houses in Gary, Indiana and Phillipsburg New Jersey, for a host of reasons. The pouring process could not, in fact, be carried out in one go, but had to happen in stages, so that it took more like two weeks to complete a house; the cost and complexity of the metal formwork’s 2,300 parts was too big an investment for any small builder; the idea that these were intended as cheap houses apparently put off buyers. Other forms of concrete construction in which the shell of a whole house was poured in situ would, eventually, take off. The Wimpey no-fines system, for example, became the most successful post-war form of nontraditional construction in the UK. Maybe Edison, in his concrete enthusiasm, was simply a little ahead of his time.
So, I’ve started us off with a flop. A concrete cautionary tale for inventors, dreamers, visionaries and hucksters.[10] But let’s not harden our hearts to invention. No concrete hearts here. We need our inventors and our dreamers, even if people write sarky poems about them in national newspapers.
We need dreamers. What we don’t need, though, is any more concrete.
Stuck
Building with concrete is terrible for the environment.
Cement production accounts for around eight percent of global carbon emissions. If the global cement industry was a country, it would be the third highest emitter of carbon dioxide after China and the USA. Concrete consumes vast quantities of other mineral resources which are in increasingly short supply and are obtained via damaging extraction techniques.
The word concrete, which is much older than its application to the material, comes from the Latin concrescere: to coalesce, condense, solidify, harden. ‘Concrete’ was pretty much only used as an adjective up until the 19th century. Concrete: the opposite of an abstract concept, a real thing, we made a concrete decision. Inherent to the material and its adjective namesake is the idea of solidity.
It’s almost too obvious a thing to say that, when used metaphorically, solid and liquid states hold very different associations.
Solid things are, or have become, sturdy, stable:
We’re on solid ground now
The plan solidified
Policy was set
Her heart hardened
She had a concrete heart
Sturdy, stable, and also cold, undivided, permanent, calcified, clear. Stuck?
Liquid metaphors, on the other hand:
go with the flow
flow state
work flow
suggest motion and potential for progress, but also instability:
He had a meltdown
Her position thawed
She dissolved into tears
In 2000, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman gave the world a powerful metaphor as an alternative to the term postmodernity: ‘Liquid Modernity.’ Bauman argued that the formerly ‘solid’ modernity of stable societal institutions and structures (and the exploitation that these structures entailed) had turned liquid. Liquid Modernity is a time of progress and instability, but also a never-ending flow in which it is very possible to metaphorically drown. Everything that used to be ‘solid’ - careers, communities, identities, relationships, truth itself, has melted, with change itself the only constant. Within Liquid Modernity, ‘the structures and institutions of the past are inviable in the face of rapid technological changes, information overload and ecological crises.’ [11] New ways of living must be sought.
You’ll sometime hear concrete referred to as liquid stone – as though its two states - liquid and solid - hold equal footing. But while concrete’s liquid state is temporary, Edison, and many of the architects of the 20th century, conceived of its final solid form as practically indestructible. The solid to liquid transformation is irreversible, a medusa-like chemical reaction: once turned to stone it can’t be turned back again. Central to concrete’s narrative is this idea of permanence as a type of progress. In the words of anthropologist Cristián Simonetti’s: ‘the illusion that humans could mould the present on the monolithic foundations of everlasting artificial rock.’ [12]
Concrete is not, actually, as indestructible as once thought. It deforms under pressure and degrades with chemical corrosion and water ingress. But once a concrete building has reached the end of its lifespan it can only ever be broken up into smaller pieces of concrete, which are destined for landfill, or ground down to become aggregate - a form of downcycling which doesn’t offset the carbon outlay in its production. While concrete is not as stable as we once thought, it is, in this sense, a bit stuck.
Solid-liquid-solid-liquid
But let’s not get carried away. Let’s not be too quick to go with the flow.
What if solid and fluid states aren’t fundamentally opposed? Simonetti and fellow anthropologist Tim Ingold argue that, actually, such a distinction is an oversimplification which is ingrained within Western thought. We forget that some materials, such as glaciers, lava, glasses, and slips, exist in between solid and fluid states. We forget that matter itself can be understood to be in flux. We forget that many things that we think of as solid were once fluid, including the ground beneath our feet. In this moment of climate crisis, they suggest, instead of conceiving of a world either built upon solid foundations or caught up in ceaseless flow, it’s more useful to think of ours as a ‘solid-fluid world’ in continuous flux. We should understand the land itself, for example, as more than ‘a solid surface to stand on’ (or build upon) but as an environment filled ‘with vitalities of all kinds […] sensate and responsive to human endeavours.’[13] The climate crisis might bring us closer to this understanding, as flooding events, earthquakes and melting glaciers remind us of the impermanence of what we might have considered to be our most solid foundations.
Take the solid foundations beneath you, right now. And beneath those foundations? Earth or soil is often seen as kind of an embodiment of place, and so we might easily think of it as a static component of our environment, which sits in place. But if we think deeper? Soil is a turbulent place, where all kinds of forces and lifecycles meet: animals, plants, water, geologies and human interventions.[14] Builders, engineers, and architects are right there in the midst of this understanding, in the mud of it, in their attempts to create habitable cities on top of the unruly earth which sits beneath every hard surface.
How might we build with, rather than against, a solid-fluid world?
An earth core?
For a while, the house is still liquid, its two stories, its bedrooms, hallways, its staircase, bathtub, sinks, arched doorways and corrugated walls held back from their natural state (an amorphous puddle of liquid earth) by the wooden walls of the complex formwork.
Slowly, walls begin to harden. Clay particles cluster and flocculate, rearranging into something approaching a solid state. Water evaporates and the house begins to dry out. Once dry, behold: an earth dream house. An energy efficient, mould free, non-combustible, entirely compostable curvy home. All poured from the top, in one fell swoop.
After a day, the wooden walls are removed – and the whole formwork slides along to the plot next door. Cast a house complete one day! And then another, and another, and another…
Matter at hand’s proposal for Poured Earth housing sees each house in a terrace built around an earth core, the form of which is derived from the material properties of earth. Earth walls excel at thermal storage, and help moderate humidity, keeping the interior atmosphere dry but not too dry. Earth construction works via compression rather than tensile strength, so each doorway and window is elegantly arched.
Practically indestructibly? No. A Poured Earth house is entirely compostable. There are no irreversible reactions here. The material is just held different states of wetness, or dryness. To make a Poured Earth building the material in simply held in shape, for as long as is needed, by protecting its walls from water – an earth house needs a roof. There are no inherent limits on a building’s lifespan: there are earth buildings around today which have stood for thousands of years. But once a Poured Earth house’s time is up and water allowed back in, it melts away, goes to ground. Earth becomes house, returns back to unruly earth.
[1] Thomas A. Edison, Process for Constructing Concrete Buildings, US Patent 1,219,272, filed August 13, 1908, and issued March 3, 1917
[2] “Magazines,” Zion’s Herald, June 1, 1910
[3] Edison quoted in Myron Henry Lewis and Albert Hotchkiss Chandler, Popular Handbook for Cement and Concrete Users: A Comprehensive and Popular Treatise on the Principles Involved and Methods Employed in the Design and Construction of Modern Concrete Work. (New York, 1911), 86
[4] From Edison Cast Concrete House, a book that Edison produced to promote his project, quoted in ‘Thomas Edison's Relentless Drive’, Mechanical Engineering; New York Vol. 111, Iss. 5, (May 1989): 62
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Edison Invented the Modern World (New York, 2007), 352
[8] “A Concrete Tale,” New York Times, February 18, 1912, quoted in Bass, Christopher, “Concrete in Steel City”, Indiana Magazine of History, 2012, 108
[9] Simonetti, C., & Ingold, T. (2018). Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (Online), 5(1), 19–31, 26
[10] Christopher Bass in his article Concrete in the Steel City notes that: ‘In a particularly stinging commentary [of Edison], the Washington Post portrayed the inventor as a huckster: “Tom is one of the most successful imitators that ever entertained a willing-to-be-humbugged public for his own profit. He is in a ten-acre lot all by himself and scratches his matches on the coattails of an admiring community.” Bass, Christopher, “Concrete in Steel City”, Indiana Magazine of History, 108, 2012
[11] Machado, Vanessa de Oliviera, Outgrowing Modernity: Narrating Complexity, Complicity and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion, North Atlantic Books, 2025, 121
[12] Clark, N., Engelmann, S., Gruppuso, P., Ingold, T., Krause, F., Lucas, G., Meulemans, G., Simonetti, C., Szerszynski, B., & Watts, L. (2022). A Solid Fluids Lexicon. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(2), 197–210. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211030976
[13] Ingold, T., & Simonetti, C. (2022). Introducing Solid Fluids. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(2), 3–29
[14] Clark, N et al., A Solid Fluids Lexicon. Theory, Culture & Society, 39 (2), 197-210