What Was The First Building With Reinforced Concrete Formwork?

It is impossible to consider the world we live in today without the reinforced concrete formwork, a structural system that allows for the powerful compressive strength of concrete to be used whilst providing extra tensile strength to avoid it breaking apart when faced with strong winds.

Whilst there are some incredible exceptions, such as the Roman Pantheon, which was made without reinforcement, the development of reinforced concrete is the development of high-rise buildings that have gotten closer to touching the edges of the sky.

The first building to use reinforced concrete of any kind is the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk, but the unusual nature of the building’s construction and its characteristic lean make it difficult to ascertain the extent to which reinforcement helped its structural rigidity.

However, the building that truly started the reinforced concrete revolution was the House of Francois Coignet, built in 1853 and intended, rather ironically, to showcase a very different construction method.

A chemical industrialist eager to promote his newly developed cement business, Mr Coignet created a house made from reinforced concrete blocks, timber flooring encased in concrete and a roof made of concrete reinforced with iron joists.

The original plan was not to make a reinforced building but to prove that concrete could match the aesthetics of stone and brickwork and keep the walls from turning over on themselves.

Other architects would take inspiration from the building and combine its accidental innovations with a greater understanding of the physical properties of concrete in order to create some of the early concrete superstructures that form the basis of the modern world.

Whilst some aspects of Mr Coignet’s concrete business did not initially prove successful, he would become responsible for several gigantic industrial projects, including an 87-mile concrete aqueduct, a sea wall and prefabricated parts of a church, including a concrete spire.

The house that started it all still stands, but barely. Despite becoming a listed historical monument in 1998, it has been ravaged by age, neglect, disrepair and squatters, leaving it with €2m worth of damage.