National Park Military Training Program

Why Concrete?

 Concrete is the most used material on earth next to water. It's sustainable and in our lives everyday.

It’s the sidewalks on which our kids learn to ride their bikes. It’s critical structures and infrastructure: bridges, dams, roads, tunnels, common buildings and skyscrapers, water treatment facilities, retaining walls, pipes, drainage systems, fireproofing. It’s practical as well as creative: green rooftops, zoo landscapes, kitchen countertops, serving bowls, sculpture, student concrete competition bowling balls, decorative light fixtures, pervious tree-loving hardscape, fashionable decorative floors, even canoes . . . that float.

Concrete is an enduring record of cultural history found around the world.

At Pointe du Hoc, the WWII D-day landing site in Normandy, France, scouring bomb craters and a commanding 100’ cliff overlooking the English Channel join forbidding defensive concrete structures to define a powerful landscape. Our journey of coming together as the Concrete Preservation Institute began at this site where we guided teams of university students in evaluating the condition of the fortifications, which remain as haunting reminders of one of the modern world’s most devastating wars. We returned home from that work as changed and humbled individuals.

Alcatraz Island, a National Historic Landmark and the most visited National Park Service site in the United States, is a landscape dominated by reinforced concrete structures that help tell the Island’s story from mid-1800’s military fort to infamous federal penitentiary. The notorious Prison Building was the largest reinforced concrete building in the world when it was built by the military in 1909. Our focus with CPI is on education that results in preservation of these and other landmark concrete structures and building meaningful futures for our participants.

Concrete is strong, durable, and resilient. Why, then, does it eventually need to be actively sustained through maintenance, protection, and preservation? While the Pantheon in Rome has been in continuous use for over 2000 years with very little sustaining activity, many of our modern concrete bridges are failing after less than a century of service. Coupling ample available manpower with technological limitations preventing the use of reinforcing or other innovations, the Romans focused on material based designs that relied on sheer mass to achieve height and distance - the Pantheon required 20’ thick lower walls to support the extraordinary 142’ diameter concrete dome, which remains to this day as the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Acting on its own rather like man-made rock, unreinforced mass concrete endures with very little care.

In modern times, we challenge concrete’s strong material record with technology, economics, innovation, and creativity. We use material additives, reinforcement, combinations of different structural systems, and new application methods to attain great heights, thin cross-sections, soaring distances, gravity-defying forms, remarkable finishes, and fast construction schedules, all of which require design and workmanship exactitude. Although modern concrete structures will likely outlast those constructed of other materials, if we routinely inspect and actively sustain them they will better resist the effects of their own advances in the face of time, use, and the environment. Preservation . . . the ultimate act of sustainability.

Why concrete? Why the Concrete Preservation Institute? Because concrete is important to society and to history. There are a lot of concrete structures in need of preservation and many yet to be built. Those of us involved with CPI are passionate about education, preservation, advancing the concrete industry, and most importantly preparing worthy young veterans and college students for meaningful careers in this and other industries.

Please join us as a CPI Field School participant, sponsor, guest instructor, or simply look for us during your next visit to Alcatraz or other concrete landmark sites.

CPI Foundation