Concrete Industries

Peter MacCallum's

November 11 - December 16

For me, documentary photography is above all a means of representing specific places. Concrete Industries, which began in 1998, is a work in progress that aims to document typical work-sites related to the most common modern construction technology, reinforced concrete.

This exhibition features one long and one short series of images from Concrete Industries. The main sequence of photos, taken over the last 15 months, surveys Portland cement manufacturing sites in Ontario. The short sequence from 1998 documents restoration work on the concrete structure of Toronto's major downtown expressway.

Cement Plants

Cement is not, as commonly believed, the same thing as concrete. "portland" cement is the powdered bonding agent used in making concrete. Concrete itself is a conglomerate material consisting of aggregates, usually sand and crushed stone, held in suspension by the chemical combination of cement and water.

Unlike local concrete batching plants, cement plants are heavy industrial sites strategically located to deliver a standardized product over a large geographical area. Cement is regularly shipped in dry tanker trucks or rail cars, but marine transport is preferred for this cheap, heavy commodity. Four of the province's seven cement plants are located on Lake Ontario.

The cement making process starts with the extraction of large quantities of limestone and clay from a quarry which is usually located close to the processing plant. The materials are pulverized and blended to prepare them for chemical reduction by heating to 1450 degrees Celsius. This takes place inside a rotary kiln, a furnace in the shape of an inclined, horizontal tube that rotates slowly on its axis.

In the hottest zone of the rotary kiln the materials fuse into red-hot, vitreous lumps called cement "clinker". The clinker passes from the kiln through a mechanical cooler, and finally into a cylindrical finishing mill filled with steel balls, where it is crushed and ground into the extremely fine powder called portland cement.

Cement Plants Represented in Concrete Industries

The Blue Circle Cement complex in Bowmanville, 70 kilometers east of Toronto, is known to local families with pre-school children as "the castle". St. Marys Cement built the plant in 1968 and converted to a more efficient dry process operation in 1988. Currently producing more than 5500 tonnes of cement per day, it is one of the largest plants in North America. In 1998, the Bowmanville plant was sold to the British based multinational Blue Circle.

The original St. Marys Cement plant in St. Marys, Ontario began operation in 1912. The art deco office building added in 1921 also served as the residence of the co-founder and plant manager, John G, Lind. The modern rotary kiln plant built at St. Marys in 1978 is now owned by Blue Circle. Some of the older plant structures are still used in the cement making process, while others lie abandoned and desolate.

The industrial ruins visible on entering Lakefield belong to a plant that began operation in 1902 as the Lakefield Portland Cement Company. The plant was guaranteed cheap hydro-electric power from its own generating station on the Trent Canal, and the owners anticipated cheap water transportation by canal to Lake Ontario. A grand Trunk line which crossed the river just below the present site of Trent University led directly north to this plant on the river's east bank. In 1909, the Lakefield Portland Cement Company in Montreal was involved in a merger which created the Canada Cement Company. The Lakefield plant was re-named Canada Cement Plant No. 7, and continued in operation until 19??.

The Belleville Portland Cement Company, which began operation in 1905 at Point Anne on the Bay of Quinte, was also drawn into the merger that created Canada Cement. It was closed when Canada Cement consolidated its Belleville operations at the former Lehigh plant at the other end of Point Anne. Re-named Canada Cement Plant No. 5 this other plant was the centre of a thriving Point Anne community until the operation was moved to Bath, Ontario in 1973.

While a short section of Toronto's 40 year-old Gardiner Expressway is now being demolished, the future of the elevated roadway is still in doubt and the Sisyphean task of restoring its crumbling structure must continue. In 1988, G. Tari Construction was involved in the complicated work of rehabilitating a few of the concrete "bents" that carry the elevated roadway across the downtown core. The process involves chipping away cracked concrete to reveal the corroded outer layer of reinforced steel, sandblasting the steel and attaching wire mesh, then re-forming the surface of the beam or post using a special concrete mixture.

Text by Peter MacCallum.