Concrete proposals: the reception of Thomas A. Edison’s monolithic concrete house and discussions on mass-produced housing for the working classes in pre-war Belgium, 1911-1913

In 1908, the American inventor Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931) patented a pioneering process for the mass-production of concrete houses, cast using just a single mould. The history of Edison’s Concrete House has been well-documented. With his early experiments, Edison opened the door to the ideal of mass-produced quality housing for the working classes, based on rationalised principles of economic viability and industrial efficiency. This movement towards rationalisation and mass-production would gain momentum after the Second World War, but important experiments were already undertaken in Belgium in the 1920s, as architects and the construction sector were facing unprecedented challenges to reconstruct the war-torn country. Among these trials, the introduction of monolithic cast concrete houses has been noted, not least within emerging garden cities, where it was hoped the technique would reduce the cost of public housing. Earlier European experiments with monolithic concrete houses had been realised in 1911 in Santpoort, the Netherlands, and the following year in Saint-Denis, France, where Edison’s system was perfected. And even though these experiments are generally considered failures (the schemes in Santpoort and Saint-Denis never achieved the large following or success the initiators had hoped for), at the time, they were known and eagerly discussed in Belgium, too.