I started The Wall Company because a contractor who used to work for me came back one day and told me he could not find new jobs anymore, that the work had dried up for him and for a pile of people he knew, and that landed at the exact moment I was convincing myself to leave my hometown because the place had turned into all politics, the kind of people who live and breathe it in the ugliest way, and I had about given up on it the way you give up on a suit that no longer fits. Hearing him talk about how hard it had become to find work made me stop and think about what I actually wanted, which was something big enough to make me want to stay here, and so I started hunting for the thing I could pour myself into and the more I thought about it the more I kept landing on concrete.

There is a version of me that always dreamed big and dreaming big in my head always ends in factories, because you cannot make anything at scale until a factory is humming somewhere, and before you can have the factory you have to name the factory, which sounds like a joke until you need a name and a purpose for every wall you cast, and that is how I ended up in precast concrete construction. We started with boundary walls, compound walls, the plain unglamorous kind that fence a plot in, cast in the yard and hauled out and set up fast, and our boundary panels run fifty millimetres of reinforced concrete with a few designer faces you can pick from, which is thin enough to make people uneasy until they remember that thin is exactly the point when the steel is doing the heavy lifting. From there we moved to the walls that have to do more than keep out a plot, the hollow-core outdoor panels at a hundred and two hundred millimetres that put less load on the structure and cost less and hold their own against wind and shear and happen to do what hollows do, which is trap a pocket of air and with it some quiet and some cool, and the lighter hundred millimetre partition for indoors that divides a room without any steel in it at all. There is something printer-like about laying those panels down row after row and every time I watch them go in I am back in my 3D printing days, which I think is why I keep at it.

None of this is new and that is the part I love, because concrete has spent a century and more learning how to be a wall and I am just the latest person holding the trowel. Plain concrete is strong when you squeeze it and weak when you try to pull it apart, so it cracks the moment it has to take tension, and the whole trick of reinforced concrete is marrying it to steel, which loves being stretched, and the French had that worked out by the eighteen sixties when a gardener named Joseph Monier was wrapping his flower pots and tubs in iron, and then a man named François Hennebique took that gardener’s trick and turned it into the beams and columns and slabs that made reinforced concrete a real building material around the turn of the century. The hollow has a line in it too, because around nineteen hundred an American named Harmon Palmer figured out how to press concrete into a hollow block with a machine, and the emptiness is the whole point since it lightens the block and traps air that insulates against sound and heat and leaves you a channel to run pipes and wires through, or to pour grout and steel down the middle when the wall has to carry a genuine load. So my fifty millimetre boundary wall is Monier’s old marriage of compression and steel, my hundred and two hundred millimetre outdoor panels are Palmer’s trick of leaving the middle empty so the wind and the noise have to work harder, and the quick indoor partition is the same idea with the steel left out because inside you mostly need it to divide a room and hold up nothing.

The bad years are where I have to be honest with myself, because I nearly lost all of it a few years back and most of that was my own doing, one poor decision stacked on another, the biggest of them being that I stepped out of the business and handed it to a friend because I wanted to believe I could create a founder out of him and that he would care for it the way I did, and instead he got distracted with a dozen other things while the company bled, and I learned the hard way that a founder has to run his own company because you cannot hand your thing to someone and expect them to love it the way you love it. I knew that before I did it and I went ahead anyway because I so badly wanted to believe you could build founders the way you build walls, and you cannot.

My eye is always on China when I think about where this can go, because China is the country I look up to when it comes to engineering and infrastructure and they have figured out how to throw up factories and housing at a speed that still feels impossible from where I sit, and I keep hoping we can catch up even though we seem to be travelling in a different direction entirely, what with the short horizons of our politics and our governments and our businesses, most of which just want to pull money out of the working class while I think the opposite happened in China where the building itself became the point. My whole aim is to be able to put up sheds and factories as fast as possible, and to do that you first need the factories themselves, the casting beds and the yards that make the walls that make everything else, which is why I keep pouring everything back into the concrete.

Working out here under the sun has been its own kind of funny for a guy with real sun problems like my Gilbert’s syndrome, but building things in the physical world and watching a wall go up that will stand there for decades is more satisfying than anything I ever shipped from the digital world, and it is the thing that keeps me in this town on the days I want to leave it again. Every couple of months the wish to stop it all comes back, because the pain of working with people who do not think the way I think and do not see the way I see wears on you in a way nothing else does, and some of those months I am sure I am done, and then I look at what we have cast and I remember the whole reason I started, which was to build things here and hold on, and I want to keep going and win at affordable housing and at the factories that make it.

We are hiring anyway, if you want to come help me name a factory. I am @troysk704.