Track 4 / Presentation 3

Vacuum Concrete in Mexico and their Precedents in Public Housing Construction

Dr. Mónica Silva-Contreras

Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México

Monica.silva@ibero.mx

The aim of the presentation is to analyze the technical context in which is inserted the use of vacuum concrete for the construction of public low cost housing projects such as the Urban Complex Peñón San Juan de Aragón in Mexico City between 1962 and 1964.
In primary sources and some specialized publications was registered the construction of 970 houses in four months using the procedures and equipment for building with that specific material, which were registered by Karl P. Billner in the United States from 1936 onwards. That information generated a numbers of questions about the system itself and especially about the transference of that technology to Latin America and particularly to Mexico.

Vacuum Concrete was used since end of thirties in considerable examples of social housing complexes, with apartment buildings or single-family houses. Since the foundation of his company, Vacuum Concrete Corp. and the registration of his patents, Billner bet on the usefulness of the material and equipment that he was designing and improving for the construction of low-cost housing. The speed of construction was the main advantage he advertised in brochures, announcements in specialized magazines, and demonstrations in different institutions.

The United States’ housing shortage was already serious in those times of economic crisis, so Billner’s work was among interesting proposals for prefabrication as the main way to solve the problem. Editorials, articles, projects, advertising, and conferences in architectural and engineer journals may show the technical responses to build cheap and rapidly the important number of houses required.

Even when Billner bet for prefabrication of parts to build houses, his first opportunities came from George A. Fuller Co. Surely as subcontractor, he built the slabs of the buildings in big projects such as Red Hook in Brooklyn, between 1938 and 1939, of 27 building of two and six-stories according to the project of the architect Alfred Easton Poor. A similar experience quoted by Billner was the Vladeck Houses complex, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with 1,523 apartments in 20 six-story buildings, designed by the architectural firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, and built between 1939 and 1940. Both were among the first affordable housing developments managed by the New York City Housing Authority.

At the same time, Billner was working in other projects and demonstrating with other financing schemes the possibilities to build one or two-story houses with walls and roofs of vacuum concrete. It allow us to understand a specific context for this material, which main advantage was the concrete setting speed and, as consequence, the reduced time for reusing the molds. The optimal form of construction envisioned by Billner was the production of parts on site, like panels or entire walls, since the equipment was portable. That option contrasted with most of others in that time that required serial production through industrialized systems.

A similar housing crisis was growing in Latin America and other developing countries, where solutions focused on on-site production, given the lack of plants for mass production of components as well as the abundant and cheap local labor force. In this sense, there are interesting records about the proposals for the construction of houses using vacuum concrete in diverse contexts since the 1940s, as well as constructions with an experimental nature, but with ambitious objectives, in Latin American countries. The records about the construction of the houses in Mexico provide specific details about the temporary plant for producing the entire walls to build them just beside the urban complex, the equipment for handling and placement on site.

The importance of the presentation will be in the details of the methods for producing this type of concrete during thirties, forties and fifties, in different contexts and for different components, such as double or single walls, floor slaps, flat or vaulted ceilings, as precedents for the constructions in Mexico. When that happened, the date of Billner's death was close, so not only would they be built with the maximum development achieved in the equipment for the production of precast concrete pieces under vacuum by the engineer, since they would be the last ones made in life of their inventor.

The conclusions will allow the discussion about the reasons for the failure of the system, at least in Latin-American cities, such as México and previously in Bogotá, where after few experiences using components for public housing projects and a couple of factories, their representatives closed even knowing the advantages of the vacuum concrete.

Mónica Silva Contreras has a PhD in Architecture from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. She is a full-time professor in History of Architecture, Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. Activity as researcher is focused on the studies of modern materials and building technologies, like metallic structures and reinforced concrete, establishing relationships between technical knowledge of architects and engineers with aesthetics and culture, as on the social and cultural context.