The Weightings

#85. The smell of concrete after rain” 

This is my favourite entry from Michael Sorkin’s immensely satisfying list  ‘250 things an architect should know’. It’s my favourite because I too love to romanticize concrete. Let me tell you why. 

The Barbican Conservatory. Fallingwater. Christ the Redeemer. The Guggenheim. Imagine how these smell after the rain. Our world comes alive in concrete. 

But like all of God’s creatures, concrete is fallible. It refuses to stretch. It adores being compressed but it can’t handle being pulled apart. Little cracks appear and soon after it collapses. 

Of course, concrete is an ancient material. But the ancient Greeks, with their ungodly amount of quarries, had little use for it. They were drowning in marble. It was the Romans who developed concrete on the massive scale that allowed them to make the Pantheon, their aqueducts and bridges.  

You see a house made of concrete. But this is not a normal house. It’s missing its top half. It’s waiting for a lid, the only thing we can see are the protruding steel bars facing upwards and standing at attention, expectant.  You see one house like this and then another, and then more. 

#190. Strengths of materials (if only intuitively).

These steel bars are called anamones (αναμονές). Construction-wise, they maintain the structural continuity of the house so that extra floors can be added later using a concrete slab called a plaka. The bars are made of steel (rebar), which keeps the concrete from cracking - eventually, when a new floor is added, they’ll be encased inside the newly poured concrete. 

 So why are these houses left like this? Why leave the top floor unfinished, open to the elements and waiting?

There is a persistent urban legend that homes are built like this to cheat the tax codes—that residents don’t have to pay property taxes on "unfinished" buildings, so they leave them exposed on purpose. And while it’s true that an unplastered shell with no electricity gets a heavy tax discount in Greece, most rebar is less about dodging the state and more about pausing until the next child, or the next paycheck, arrives. The main reason is familial: these homes are built to expand as the family grows. 

Until the PASOK government under Andreas Papandreou formally abolished the mandatory legal dowry system in 1983, providing shelter for a daughter was an urgent social imperative. Traditionally, parents were expected to provide not just linens or jewelry, but a home. The groom provided the income; the bride’s family provided the shelter. Building upward on existing foundations was the most economically viable way for working-class families to fulfill this heavy obligation.

#72. How the crow flies.

But what if you were blessed with a stinky family of only boys? Well then, no matter. Perhaps the ground floor would be reserved for the eldest son, and the floors above for the younger sons. Alternatively, you could pour the plaka, the concrete slab and expose some rebar on both sides and in a line down the middle, to signal that each son gets half the plot to build upward. 

There are other reasons of course. A grandma needs to be moved in. A cousin, an uncle. It’s not prescriptive. In all cases, the concrete is left unfinished because someone loves a person who may one day need it. An expression of generosity, but also an expression of expectation. 

#92. Sentence structure

Back to the waitings. Ana-mones.

Mones, Moni in Greek is to ‘stay’, to ‘abide’, to ‘dwell’. Meno stin Athina. I live [stay] in Athens.

Out of moni, we get the words Monastery (a place of abiding) and Monk, and from its latin cousin manseio, we get Mansion, Maison and Manor. From there, we get remnant [re- (back) + manēre (to stay). Literally: To stay behind] and permanent [per- (through) + manēre (to stay). Literally: To stay through to the very end].

It’s a rich root to feed on - what does it mean to abide, to stay, to dwell?  

1. Ana means to go up, to repeat. Ana+moni: We abide, we stay upwards. to wait. 


2. Ypo means under. Ypo-moni: We bear under the abiding. We endure. We are patient.


3. Epi means upon. Epi-moni: We stay upon. We persist. We insist. 


4. Para means next to. Para-moni.  We stay beside. We stand on the threshold of what's next. The eve.


5. Pros means toward. Pros-moni. We go toward the place where we’ll stay. We yearn. The anticipation of a wish fulfilled.

Where we live, how we wait, what we endure. In five prefixes, we understand how a language quietly maps the boundaries of home, expectation, and desire. 

#83. Accidents must happen.

Henri Bergson, famed French philosopher and nemesis of Albert Einstein, believed time couldn't be understood by math or science alone. He distinguished between rigid clock-time and durée

In L'Évolution créatrice, Bergson introduced the élan vital, which he defines as an inherent, spiritual life force driving all organisms to grow and evolve. As Bergson put it: “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, and to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself.” I like to think of it as entropy’s friendly opposite.

For Bergson, true living meant placing oneself inside duration, experiencing freedom as constant movement. I would have loved to play Boggle with him. 

No one is happy about this, least of all me, but it’s time to talk about Heidegger. This is because he made a vital distinction between Erwarten and Warten. Erwarten is inauthentic time: expectation. It treats the future as an object to be secured, a calculated event. Warten, by contrast, is waiting in a pure state of being: allowing the future to unfold as it will.

Heidegger tells us to “Wait, but never expect”

If Heidegger had been a Greek villager, he would tell us that these anamones don't wait; they await. They cannot simply Warten because they have been lovingly poured with an embedded Erwarten.

#147.  The idea of too far.

At my most uncharitable, I think of anamones as part of a long tradition of sad men building things for women to live in: Rapunzel’s tower, Daisy’s East Egg mansion, Danaë’s bronze chamber. An architectural trap laid with the best intentions is still a trap. 

#148.  The idea of too close.

I’m still learning how to navigate the physical closeness that makes a family function here. My mother-in-law recently offered to travel across the country to stay with me during a minor surgery. My sister-in-law casually stroked my cheek because I stumbled through a joke in poorly spoken Greek. This embodied nearness makes me feel overwhelmed and deeply grateful in the exact same breath.

I think my anamones are facing downwards, or sideways. Or they're frayed. I don’t want anyone to wait on me to build something. I refuse to abide. 

What I haven’t said about the rebar is that it’s terminal. Pure concrete, left to its own devices, can last virtually forever - see the Pantheon or the Colosseum. The steel embedded inside that gives it tensile strength is susceptible to atmospheric betrayal. It corrodes. It expands, it reacts to seawater, to snow, to C02. It rusts, forcing the surrounding matrix outward until it breaks the concrete apart from within.

Concrete left waiting too long destroys itself. We cannot escape the tragedy of the material.