Sarah Nichols was the scientific director of a first of its kind collaboration between the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM) in Basel and the three major architecture archives in Switzerland: the gta Archiv at ETH Zurich, the Archives de la construction moderne (Acm) at EPF Lausanne and the Archivio del Moderno (AdM) at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Balerna.
In order to understand why concrete has become so ubiquitous, the project demonstrated nine different ways that concrete has been conceptualized. Each statement, from ‘concrete is rock’ to ‘concrete is fluid’, shows the powerful imaginary surrounding what concrete should be. The different statements provide points of entry to understand concrete as the complex and sometimes contradictory material that it is, sketching a discursive field rather than following a single argument. This original research is derived from consultation of thousands of archival pieces in over ten archives across the country including original drawings, models, and photographs, using them to form visual arguments. The findings of this project were exhibited as the show ‘Beton’ at S AM Basel from November 20, 2021, through April 24, 2022 and published in Concrete in Switzerland: Histories from the Recent Past (EPFL Press 2021).