DDRIG: Cementing Spaces: The Material That Made Room for New Cultures in the Twentieth-Century

“DDRIG：巩固空间：为20世纪美国新文化腾出空间的材料”Timothy J. LeCain， PI；柯克·d·埃尔萨斯说，复合颜料——粘合在一起并使混凝土凝固的物质——对于建设现代交通、能源和住宅结构是不可或缺的。全球水泥生产占人类造成的二氧化碳排放量的8%左右。主要出于这个原因，世界各地的化学家和工程师都在寻找可能减少水泥使用量的替代材料和新的建筑技术。“水泥空间”是对水泥和社会的历史研究，补充并告知了那些正在重新思考混凝土的材料科学家的工作。该研究认为水泥在过去既是环境因素也是文化因素。它介绍了传统水泥以微妙和深刻的方式影响文化发展的证据。简而言之，水泥创造了新的空间，人们用它创造了新的文化。研究过去用水泥创造的文化，为行业研究人员和政府官员提供了一个框架，以考虑和预测他们探索和实施水泥替代品将对社会产生的许多后果。“固井空间”关注的是水泥的相对抗渗性。在19世纪的运河时代，为了控制水，水泥具有制造环境障碍的潜力，在20世纪的各种无处不在的建筑中，水泥被证明是一种吸引人的、有影响力的品质。对家庭地下室、公共人行道和监狱牢房的案例研究将采用存档文件，深入探索固化环境如何塑造新的家庭、流动和监禁文化。该项目假设，水泥通过将人与水、泥土或彼此隔离，在将地下室变成现代地下室方面发挥了作用，为城市生活引入了新的市政法规和新的鞋类风格，并支持了监狱当局将单独监禁作为惩罚措施。“固化空间”的发现将有助于揭示非人类事物如何参与社会发展的学术研究，这里将新颖地关注一种材料技术，尽管它无处不在，但并不被普遍理解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

“DDRIG: Cementing Spaces: The Material That Made Room for New Cultures in the Twentieth-Century United States”Timothy J. LeCain, PI; Kirke D. Elsass, co-PICement—the substance that binds together and solidifies concrete—is indispensable to building modern transportation, energy, and residential structures. Global production of cement contributes around eight percent of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. Primarily for this reason, chemists and engineers around the world seek replacement materials and new building techniques that might reduce cement use. “Cementing Spaces,” a historical study of cement and society, complements and informs the work of those material scientists who are rethinking concrete. The study accounts for cement as both an environmental element and a cultural element in the past. It introduces evidence that conventional cement affected the development of cultures in both subtle and profound ways. In short, cement created new spaces with which people created new cultures. Studying the cultures created with cement in the past provides a framework for industry researchers and public officials to consider and anticipate the many consequences to society that will ensue from their exploration and implementation of alternatives to cement.“Cementing Spaces” focuses on the relative impermeability of cement. Cement’s potential to create environmental barriers, cultivated for control of water during the nineteenth-century canal era, proved to be an appealing and influential quality in a variety of ubiquitous twentieth-century structures. Case studies of home basements, public sidewalks, and prison cells will employ archived documents to deeply explore the ways cemented environments shaped new cultures of family, mobility, and incarceration. The project hypothesizes that cement, by separating people from water, dirt, or one another, had a role in turning cellars into modern basements, inviting new municipal codes and new footwear styles of urban life, and supporting carceral authorities’ use of solitary confinement as a punitive measure. The findings of “Cementing Spaces” will contribute to scholarship that reveals how nonhuman things participate in the development of societies, here with a novel focus on a material technology that despite its ubiquity is not popularly understood.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.