However, these joints are also indented, a characteristic of the adap- tation made in the Soviet Union to reinforce these buildings' structure against possible earthquakes, such as the one that struck Tashkent in 1966, and which allowed the USSR to test the system's adequacy (which they called I-464). The panel in Quilpué also has another characteristic: one of its sides is lowered to save concrete and adjust the thickness of the wall according to the economic and climatic conditions of Cuba, a country that received this system as a donation from Nikita Khrushchev during the early revo- lutionary years.² However, this abandoned panel is not in Cuba, France, or Russia, but belonged to the extinct KPD factory, donated by the USSR in support of the Popular Unity government headed by Salvador Allende (1971-1973). After being discarded as debris from socialist modernity, and half consumed by vegetation, this piece of concrete appears as a kind of archaeological discovery. Material evidence of a global history that summarizes a geopolitical timeline of gradual transformations that for almost thirty years, established political, economic, and social links that connected the architectural and construction technology of France, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Chile. This is, however, not an isolated case. From the 1950s, the Danish Jesperson & Søn system was widely used in Denmark (by Høje Gladsaxe, Rødrove, Vildtbanegaard, etc.), before being exported to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. In 1964, the A-Betong company took it to Sweden and transformed it into the A-system Byggelement AB, which was used to produce projects such as the Helsinborg complex (1965).³ Through A-Betong, adaptations to the A-system reappeared in Shoaiba (Abu Dhabi) and Saudi Arabia through the Alrashid A-Betong Company (1976). Also in Sweden, the Ohlsson & Skarne S66 system (1960s) was transferred to West Germany, the Canary Islands, Kuwait, and Venezuela. Another case is that of P2, a GDR system that, after absorbing some elements of the Soviet II-35 system, became the East German WBS-70 system. Subsequently, this was transformed into the W-70 series and shipped to Poland, where it arrived under the WK-70 system name. Although it was not exported again to other countries, within Poland
it became the SBO and SBM series.⁴ O Tracoba, a system patented in 1961 by British engineers Jack Rodin and James Lowe for the French company Omnium Technique (OTH), operated in Europe, Africa, and North America. Several projects were built in France, such as the Cité Massy-Opera (Massy-Antony, 1963); La Castellane (Marseille, 1966); and the Cité Croix Blanche (Vigneux sur Seine, 1967). It also went to Italy, where it produced the Mirafiori Sus complex (Turin, 1966); to Scotland, the Hutchesontown project (Glasgow, 1968); to Spain, projects in Alcalá de Henares (1969); and Ciudad Badía (Barcelona, 1969); and to the United States (already transformed into Tracoba V), the Yorkers project (New York, c1970). During the 1970s, the Danish company Højgaard & Schultz, in collaboration with the Italian company Recchi Ingegneria, transformed Tracoba to build a large residential complex in Tripoli (Libya),⁵ incorpo- rating perforated panels, balconies, arches, and ornamental motifs, in an attempt to assimilate with the local cultures.⁶ During the post-war period, different prefabricated concrete panel systems found new destinations, reaching Asia (Mongolia, Vietnam, Nepal, China, Japan, Taiwan, and North Korea); Africa (Morocco, Egypt, Zaire, Gabon, and Zanzibar); the Middle East (Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and Bahrain); and the Americas (United States, Canada, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela and Chile), just to name a few. It is a history of movement and exchange in forming a global network in which not even the smallest panel can be studied in isolation. Thus, we can see how reinforced concrete panel systems have crossed borders and connected continents. Sometimes, these oper- ations consisted of selling the patent of a system (e.g., Camus to the Soviet Union). At other times, a complete factory was sold or donated to another nation (e.g., the I-464 system sent to Cuba and Chile); or was the result of technical missions sent to countries that were precursors of these technologies to learn from their experiences (e.g., the Swedish D4 group that toured Denmark and France in the 1950s or the U.S. del- egation that visited the USSR in the 1970s);⁷ or arose from the technical experience shared by experts with developing countries (e.g., architects and engineers from the GDR visiting North Korea or Zanzibar). At the same time, these trips were usually the result of purely economic projects (e.g., Tracoba seeking to expand into the U.S. market), a combination of economic policies with political influence (such as the USSR in Eastern Europe and Asia), post-colonial impulses (such as the Italian company Recchi that brought the Tracoba system to Libya) or attempts to solve the problem of social housing in the third world under the guise of technical assistance (such as the Ford Foundation, which sponsored research in Canada to implement the UCOPAN system in Egypt, India, Nepal and Bangladesh).⁸ We could follow these routes taking into account the connection points that, given certain similar economic or political conditions, boosted transnational movement and the transformation of various architectural species thanks to a series of mechanisms that allowed systems to cross borders and customs on commercial or dip- lomatic missions, usually under the guise of cooperation or to provide aid in the face of natural disasters. 4 Many other systems were used in Poland, all derived from Camus or Barets: Fadom (1959- 1963), PBU (1959-1963), Ratajska (1962), Dabrowa (1962), Domino (1963), Winogradzka (1964), OW-1700 (1964), WWP (1966), WUF-T (1967), etc. 5 Khaled M. Amtered El-Abidi, Farid Ghazali, & Mohamed Nor Azhari Azman, “Managing transformation: A focus on prefabricated building in the Libyan construction industry” (CIB International Conference on Construction in a Changing World, Heritance Kandalama, Sri Lanka, 2014). 6 See: Industrialized construction in Tripoli , a film by the National Film Production Company, Recchi Fund. Trípoli-Turín, c1980. Højaard & Schultz & Recchi in Tripoli, Libia, 1976-78. 7 See: James R. Wright (ed.), “Industrialized Buildings in the Soviet Union: A Report of the U.S. Delegation to the U.S.S.R. National Bureau of Standards Special Publication 334”, U.S. Department of Commerce (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1971). 8 The UCOPAN system was developed in Montreal, Canada, by Zenon A. Zielisnki & Czeslawa Zielisnka. See: Zenon A. Zielisnki & Czeslawa Zielisnka, “Proposed Ribbed Panel System for Precast Concrete Housing”, PCI Journal (June 1982): 92-115.
1 Pedro Ignacio Alonso & Hugo Palmarola, “A Panel’s Tale: The Soviet KPD System and the Politics of Assemblage”, en AA Files 59 (Londen, 2009), 30-41. 2 Pedro Ignacio Alonso & Hugo Palmarola, “Tropical Assemblage: The Soviet Large Panel in Cuba”, in STS in Latin America: Beyond Imported Magic, ed. E. Medina, I. Costa Marques, & C. Holmes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 157-177. 3 See: National Institute for Building Research, "The Sveska element building system for multi-family houses 1", Byggforskningen n.° 7 (1968); A. Palmgren & S. Vehilainen, 60er Modernismen (2017); & T. Bendixxon, "Industrialized building: finding a winning system", DESIGN n.° 200.
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