The wonders of modern concrete

‘Look! Concrete!’ Bruno Lafont crashes his fist on the table. ‘You could put 30 tonnes on top of this table and it wouldn’t break. Tougher than steel!’

The table doesn’t look like concrete at all. The top is only a centimetre thick. The surface is painted a Tuscan tone, giving it the feel and look of polished stone. Lafont turns to his desk and bookshelves: ‘They’re also concrete. Aren’t they wonderful?’ These are a more utilitarian beige, but equally handsome. Scattered around the room are more clues to his passions: lumps of gypsum, vital for making cement; more rocks; and an enormous elephant painting, a present from the Prime Minister of Zambia.

Lafont is chief executive of Lafarge, the world’s biggest cement maker. On the corner of a Paris side-street, his suitably concrete 1970s-style headquarters sits oddly in the 16th district, with its chi-chi cafés and markets. It’s early in the day but Lafont is in high spirits: he’s just flown back overnight from opening a new cement works in Morocco; before that he spent a week in India for the opening of the world’s longest conveyor belt, taking limestone into Bangladesh to make cement.

No wonder he’s happy: construction is booming everywhere and concrete is suddenly sexy. Scientists are turning this drab, grey material into bendy, light, hi-tech structures. Even investors get the message: Lafarge’s share price soared 49 per cent over the last year, even before last week’s announcement of record profits for 2006.

Back to Lafont’s table, the clue to concrete’s future. It’s made of Lafarge’s revolutionary new hi-tech material called Ductal. Not only is Ductal lighter and tougher than conventional concrete but it moves too — making it perfect for earthquake zones. Five times tougher than normal concrete, it’s also many times stronger than steel.