Concrete matter: building the Bruges submarine pens (1917-18) (original) (raw)

Concrete at the front : the Bruges submarine shelter (1917-1918)

2018

Starting in August 1917, a large submarine shelter was erected in the port of Bruges. Its construction completed a transition from mixed wood-and-steel structures to all-concrete bunkers in this area. The new Gruppenunterstand prefigured many of the typological and technical key features of the iconic submarine pens from World War II. An early application of reinforced concrete, the bunker in Bruges illustrates how the Great War serves as a breeding ground for experiment. Moreover, it exemplifies the underexposure of military pioneering work in the field of construction.

Improvised or engineered? Military planning and construction at the inner port of Bruges

After taking possession of the Belgian coastal region in 1914, the Germans installed the Kaiserliche Marinewerft Brügge, thus transforming the newly constructed inner port of Bruges into a spearhead for the naval war theatre. Its increasingly strategic importance throughout the war, turned the Marinewerft into a rewarding target for aerial bombing. This confrontation between the new tactical layers of submerged and aerial warfare is condensed in the planning and construction activity in the port, hinting at a changed spatiotemporal experience of conflict space in the context of industrialised warfare. Throughout this paper, the analysis of the transformation of the inner port of Bruges before, during and after the war, raises two questions. One leads to the perception of an extemporised military planning attitude, as opposed to the advanced engineering of some of the constructed buildings in the area. This insight is supported by a more detailed case on the application of reinforced concrete in shelter constructions. The other is related to the possible catalyst whether obstructing effects of military presence for the development of the port, or, in more general terms, to the tension between civil and military spatial planning.

The founding events of prestressed concrete in belgium seen through the Blaton archives

2015

The recent discovery (2013) of the archives of the Belgian contractor Blaton-Aubert who patented and developed in Belgium during the Second World War a system of prestressing concrete by post-tensioning similar to Freyssinet's has allowed assessing with a new vision the contribution of all actors involved in the early history of prestressed concrete in Belgium. The cross influences of Freyssinet, Magnel and Blaton are analysed, and a precise chronology which was lacking of the first prestressed concrete constructions that were realized in Belgium during the war is given. Searching through the Blaton archives has revealed: the extent of the partnership between the Blaton brothers and Magnel in the promotion and design of the first prestressed concrete projects; the crucial role of the engineering office of Blaton-Aubert in the detailed design of the projects and the industrial development of the "Sandwich" system; the role of the representative of Freyssinet in Belgium....

Building for War: Examples of Temporary Structures Designed for Wartime Use in Britain (1939-1945)

In Britain, the twentieth century and its two world wars ushered a period of rapid development of prefabrication as a building method, and created a wide variety of temporary wartime buildings that are often mistakenly and generally referred to now as Nissen huts. In actuality, the wartime demand for lightweight, easily erectable designs that made use of alternative building materials to steel and timber, was met by nearly sixty unique designs. While not all secured lucrative government contracts, many were put into mass production. The most successful were those that were easily adapted to a variety of uses. These temporary wartime buildings, called huts, were employed across the military and civilian spectrum as schools, hospitals, offices, workshops, radar stations, accommodation, storage sheds, aircraft hangars, kitchens, canteens, and even cinemas. Using primary and secondary sources, this paper provides new insight into Britain’s wartime building programme and highlights several lesser known huts such as the Quetta, the Seco and the Ministry of Works Standard hut. In 2015, we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. As such, it is interesting to note the unexpected longevity of temporary wartime construction. Where temporary accommodation is still a key issue in emergency operations around the world, as this paper will show, there is much that can be learnt from history that would be equally applicable today.

A New Technology for the Manufacture of Ships, Submarines and Aircraft Carriers "Through Concrete Layers and Compressed Air Tanks": Its Effects on the Political and Economic Map and Military Strategies and Tactics in the World

JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY AND EARTH SCIENCES, 2019

Can humans build giant ships so large that they are not comparable to what everyone has built before, with the least amount of financial spending, the least amount of scientific expertise, the simplest tools and means of construction, and the easiest engineering designs? Stop in any man-made field throughout history. This research is based on the idea of "using several layers of concrete equipped with compressed air tanks" in the field of the manufacture of large-scale ships, to float and direction of navigation in the seas and oceans, and bear all the violence of the waves, wind and sea currents and possible collisions with floating objects or shallow land. What is the relationship between engineering methods in the manufacture of ships "concrete layers and compressed air tanks" to political geography and change the political map of the world?. It may seem that new methods of shipbuilding based on cement and some simple tools have nothing to do with geopolitics, perhaps only in industrial geography, but because of the very dramatic impact we expect on the world political map puts it at the core of its competence. It is expected to facilitate the manufacture of giant ships based on cement, and stimulate the movement of global trade, and change the rules of the international game in naval and land conflicts, it is very easy for any country in the world to manufacture a "giant cement aircraft carrier", as well as submarines, and can even be confused The word (submarine + aircraft carrier), as well as the manufacture of "floating human colonies", and the occupation of "sunken islands, and shallow areas relatively close to the shore and to settle between the rocky edges of the continents of the world, what political impact will be!?. Why is it so surprising ?, We were studying the details of the survey instruments and how they work, and their impact on the geographical area, and the impact of geography, and therefore all of this within the core of geographical science, and it is better to use the expertise of architects specialized in construction, and conduct more rigorous experiments in laboratories Scientific, as well as actual applications in the field, to explore their strengths and weaknesses, and ways to strengthen them to carry out their tasks to the fullest. Second: Why do we demand the construction of ships of concrete? What is the importance of this in the shipping industry in the maritime field? We will not call for the replacement of all existing ships by concrete ships. We must first emphasize that this theory of shipbuilding based on "concrete layers and compressed air tanks" is not a claim to replace all existing ships in the world today, but is "the addition of a new technology in the shipbuilding industry," using a lot of tools The other means in building other ships, adds the type of features that did not exist before, and ultimately the maritime activities determine the quality of the ship optimized for the implementation of the target. No conflict between the laws and principles of buoyancy and the technology of shipbuilding of concrete layers. What does the law of buoyancy allow? If the body floats on the surface of a liquid, the weight of the submerged body is equal to the weight of the displacement fluid. If the body is made of a high-density material but has room for trapped air (1) , it may be enough to push the water to Floats, such as a ship made of iron-or of other materials, including cement-means that the hypothesis is scientifically possible if engineering design helps. This is what governs the idea and makes it feasible, and motivates us to encourage others to implement it,

Wartime Huts: The Development, Typology, and Identification of Temporary Military Buildings in Britain 1914-1945

2018

The use of temporary, prefabricated buildings in Britain during the twentieth century arose from wartime need to provide better, and perhaps more importantly, portable shelter for troops and equipment. This thesis provides the first comprehensive list of hut designs for the First and Second World Wars. The full lists and descriptions of each hut are given in the appendices. These lists, 20 types for the First World War and 52 from the Second World War, show the huge range and scope of the huts used and is the major contribution of this thesis. The concentration here is on generic types. Some huts were designed as one-offs and there is no possible way to catalogue these. This thesis has focused instead on those designs or industriallyproduced types, which were meant to be produced en-masse as generic solutions to the problem: the sort of hut that might justifiably be given a name (such as a 'Tarran', a 'Seco', etc.). This thesis provides essential information enabling historians to be able to identify these types. It uses primary and secondary sources to trace the development of these huts and the effect that wartime shortages had on their design. Beginning with the earliest examples of temporary military building, it then focuses on the huts of the First and Second World Wars followed by a study of huts grouped in chapters by material. This research shows that the wartime period pushed industry to make giant leaps forward with construction methods and materials in just a few short years, where otherwise it may have taken decades. This thesis aims to provide the first overview of this process and to enable future researchers to identify and understand the development of these important wartime structures, many of which survive to this day.

From Bunker - To Immaterial // Italian Academy of Advanced Studies at Columbia University, NY

The Atlantic Wall along the coast of Europe and Norway is in ruins. One of the most radical Hitler’s infrastructure projects, known as Fuhrer Directive No 40, capable to transform natural coastal lines into the Fortress Europe, today lies in oblivion and solitude. Concrete structures are migrating along the borderlines, becoming part of rocks, dissolving back into minerals, metamorphosing into skeletons and the giant shells of reptiles. No longer regarded as functioning architectural bodies, no longer serving as a record of violent human activity, today fifteen hundred of these Nazi bunkers have become a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of coded information. This paper advances the idea of transplanting the discourse of the Atlanic Wall Bunkers on the territory of photography, film and contemporary cultures at large, based on an on going cross-disciplinary research project – 1XPerUnknown. Launched in 2012, by the Italian urban artist Margherita Moscardini this multidisciplinary experiment forces us to re-think and re-calibrate the phenomenon within the broader trajectory of curatorial practices, material cultures, law, geography, conservation, chemistry and mineralogy. Balancing on the border of different media—engineering, politics, military-industrial production, statistics, science, forensic architecture the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall themselves embody numerous layers of meanings. However, it is this particular ambivalence of construction/deconstruction, a shift from of the most traumatic archeological remains - to radical art takes the discourse on the bunker as a military unit and a material fact to the whole new extreme.

Fortifications and Waterworks: Engineers on the Road [2013]

2013

This book chapter discusses the diffusion of engineering knowledge from the Low Countries to other parts of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In this period the Low Countries were one of Europe’s most advanced “schools of war” and a leading centre of experience from where engineering knowledge, especially regarding fortifications and waterworks, was dispersed to other parts of Europe, essentially in two manners. First, from around the 1520s onward, the latest developments in engineering and military architecture in the Low Countries had an immediate international resonance as they were studied by foreign visitors and documented in countless drawings, books, models and prints that circulated internationally. Expertise in military architecture was not only exported from the Low Countries by the 200 or so foreign engineers who worked there in this period, but also by artists such as Albrecht Dürer and by military officers such as Alexander Farnese and Lazarus von Schwendi. Second, from the 1570s onward, numerous Netherlandish engineers went to work in other countries, all over Europe. Examples discussed here include Willem de Raet in Wolfenbüttel and Italy in the 1570s, Hendrick Ruse in Denmark in the 1660s, Bernard de Gomme in England from the 1660s on, Cornelis Jansz Meijer in Rome from the 1670s on, and Carlos Grunenberg in Sicily from the 1670s on.