Journal of concrete architecture — quarterly

Issue 07 — Summer 2026 Founded Marseille, 1998 Raw. Poured. Permanent.

Concrete/Utopias

Five buildings that promised a better world and poured it in place. This issue walks the megastructures of 1958–1972: their optimism, their weather stains, and the strange tenderness of exposed aggregate. Concrete never lied to anyone. That was always the point.

En couverture — Boston City Hall, coffrage bois, 1:200 Spot colour PMS 1788 · 42.3601°N 71.0589°W

One hundred twelve pages
Five dossiers, one argument

ISSN 2331-0707 · £14 / €16 / $18

EditorMarguerite Lopold

Set inArchivo / Grotesk / Plex

Grid2px, exposed

Ink#E33 on #D9D7D2

P. 004 — Editorial

In defence
of weight

Every age gets the ruins it deserves. Ours, if we are honest, will be glass: light, apologetic, already peeling. The buildings in this issue made no such apology. They were poured by governments that still believed a city could be an argument, and by architects who thought the argument should be visible from a mile away.

We chose five. Not the five most photographed, and certainly not the five most loved — Boston City Hall has spent fifty years on demolition wish-lists, and Trellick Tower was once shorthand for everything wrong with social housing. We chose them because each one staked a utopian claim in the least utopian material on earth, and each claim can still be read, plainly, in the shuttering marks.

Concrete records everything: the grain of the plywood, the hesitation of the pour, the strike of the formwork. It is architecture with the drafts left in. This issue is written the same way.

— Marguerite Lopold, Editor · Marseille, June 2026

01—05

The five dossiers

Dossier 01 — Montréal, Canada — 45.5017°N 73.5433°W

Fig. 1.1 — Elevation, 354 modulesPoured 1964–67

ArchitectMoshe Safdie

Completed1967

Programme158 dwellings

StatusHeritage, 2009

Habitat 67 — The hillside that was shipped in boxes

Safdie was twenty-three when he sketched it and twenty-nine when the cranes finished stacking it: 354 identical concrete boxes, each cast on site in a purpose-built factory, lifted and threaded into 158 homes for Expo 67. The promise was audacious — every apartment gets a garden, because every apartment's roof is someone else's terrace. Suburbia, folded vertically, without losing the sky.

The economics failed spectacularly; the module factory that was meant to make housing cheap made it heroic instead. But walk the estate today and the argument still stands. The gaps do as much work as the boxes. It is the rare megastructure that got lighter as it got older — and the only one on our list its residents fought to protect rather than escape.

ModularExpo 67Prefab

Read P. 012 →

Dossier 02 — London, United Kingdom — 51.5200°N 0.0937°W

ArchitectChamberlin, Powell & Bon

Completed1976–82

Programme2,014 flats + arts centre

StatusGrade II listed

Barbican Estate — A citadel with the drawbridge left down

The Blitz erased Cripplegate so completely that in 1951 its resident population was forty-eight people. On that blank page the City of London commissioned something medieval in ambition: three of Europe's tallest residential towers, seven-storey terrace blocks on a strict 30-metre grid, lakes, conservatories, a concert hall — all lifted on a podium above the traffic, all in concrete hand-tooled with pick-hammers so the aggregate glitters.

The Barbican is what happens when brutalism is given money, time, and gardeners. Its highwalks were meant to seed a whole elevated city that never came; they dead-end into air. Yet the estate itself works with almost embarrassing serenity. It proved that the material was never the problem — the budget was. Nobody who calls concrete cold has stood in its conservatory at noon.

PodiumHighwalkListed

Read P. 034 →

Fig. 2.1 — Cromwell, Shakespeare, Lauderdale123 m, 42 storeys

“Concrete is the only material that tells you exactly how it was made — and dares you to mind.”

— From “In defence of weight,” P. 004

Dossier 03 — Milano, Italia — 45.4602°N 9.1907°E

Fig. 3.1 — Section through the overhang106 m, struts exposed

ArchitectBBPR

Completed1958

ProgrammeOffices + apartments

StatusRestored 2022

Torre Velasca — The medieval skyscraper

Milan, 1958: while the rest of the world copied Mies, the partners of BBPR built a 26-storey tower that swells outward at the eighteenth floor like a Lombard watchtower, its overhanging crown braced by raking concrete struts. Offices below, apartments above — the widened top exists because homes needed more floor area than desks, and BBPR saw no reason to hide the fact.

The English critics were merciless; Reyner Banham called it a retreat from the modern movement itself. Milan shrugged and kept it. Sixty years on, the Velasca reads as the most honest building of its decade — structure as silhouette, programme as profile — and its 2022 restoration returned the pink-grey aggregate to exactly the colour of a Milanese dusk. History, it turns out, was a load-bearing material all along.

BBPRNeolibertyMixed-use

Read P. 052 →

Dossier 04 — Boston, USA — 42.3601°N 71.0589°W

ArchitectKallmann McKinnell & Knowles

Completed1968

ProgrammeCivic government

StatusLandmark, 2021

Boston City Hall — Democracy, upside down

Won in an open competition by three Columbia academics who had never built anything, Boston City Hall is an inverted ziggurat: the building grows heavier as it rises, the mayor's office and council chamber thrust outward in raw concrete hoods while the public concourse below stays open like a covered plaza. The diagram is civics itself — power made visible, cantilevered over the citizens it answers to.

Americans have voted it the ugliest building in the country and architects have voted it one of the greatest, frequently in the same year. Four mayors tried to sell it. In 2021 the city landmarked it instead, and the renovation lit the coffered ceilings it had kept switched off for decades. The lesson of City Hall is that utopias are not abandoned because they fail. They are abandoned because they ask too much — and this one is still asking.

CivicCompetitionInverted ziggurat

Read P. 072 →

Fig. 4.1 — The council chamber hoodCantilever, 1968

Dossier 05 — London, United Kingdom — 51.5266°N 0.2056°W

Fig. 5.1 — Slab, bridges, service tower98 m, 31 storeys

ArchitectErnő Goldfinger

Completed1972

Programme217 flats

StatusGrade II* listed

Trellick Tower — The villain that outlived its critics

Goldfinger pulled every lift, rubbish chute and boiler flue out of the living slab and stacked them in a separate campanile, linked back by bridges every third floor. The move gave 217 council flats something private towers rarely manage: silence, cross-ventilation, and floor-to-ceiling light on both faces. Then the 1970s happened to it — no concierge, broken entry doors, and a tabloid nickname: the Tower of Terror.

Nothing about the architecture changed between infamy and rehabilitation; only the maintenance did. A residents' association, a concierge desk and working lifts turned the same concrete into one of West London's most stubbornly loved addresses, Grade II* listed since 1998. Trellick is this issue's closing argument: every failure ever pinned on brutalism was a failure of stewardship wearing the building's face.

GoldfingerCouncil housingGrade II*

Read P. 092 →

SP. A—E

Surface specimens

SP.A — Board-formed
Timber grain, 18 cm boards, Barbican podium

SP.B — Bush-hammered
Pneumatic tooling, aggregate exposed, Trellick core

SP.C — Pick-tooled
Hand-struck ridges, 50 million strikes, Barbican towers

SP.D — Precast panel
Factory-cast module face, Habitat 67

SP.E — Exposed aggregate
Washed river gravel, Boston City Hall plaza

Index

Issue 07 — Contents

BÉTON

Masthead

EditorM. Lopold
Deputy editorT. Okafor
Art directionAtelier Coffrage
DrawingsIn-house, ink
Fact deskR. Antonelli

Type & grid

DisplayArchivo Black
TextSpace Grotesk
DataIBM Plex Mono
Gridlines2 px, exposed
Radius0 px, always

Printing

Web offset on 90 gsm uncoated stock, one spot colour (PMS 1788, "signal red"). Cover on 300 gsm board, unlaminated by principle — it should scuff, stain, and record its handling like the buildings it describes.

Correspondence

BÉTON, 14 Rue du Coffrage, 13002 Marseille. Letters to the editor are printed unedited or not at all. Issue 08, "Paper Architects," ships October 2026. Subscriptions: four issues, poured annually.