concrete design competition

2017

Expérimentations avec le béton 

Thinking // Making

 

              Concrete is perceived as a cold material, heavy, sturdy and generally grey. Strength, density, as well chemical and thermal resistance are variables. Indeed, many types of concrete are available, distingued by the main ingredients and their proportions.

               Concrete’s composition is a combinaison of inert material, aggregates like sand or gravel, bonded together, usually with dry Portland cement or bitumen, and water. You can change the composition of this mixture to obtain a more or less fluid slurry that is easily poured and molded into different shapes and forms.

               Cement’s concret is the most used construction material in the world, and is also widely used in design. Indeed, it’s an ideal material for trying to be innovative: concrete leaves great potential of creativity because it’s possible to design many different expressions or textures on it.

 

             The word “concrete“ is also link with a feeling of “durability” in the sense that it’s a resistant material. But it’s an energy-intensive use material, source of many environmental degradations.

               One might wonder if is it possible to design or build with more natural and less energy-intensive use material. Are there other concrete, composed by an available resource that we have in abundance? A recyclable concrete, more clean, healthy and sustainable? A concrete who could have other properties, contradictory or complementary to Portland’s concrete that we know?

               Indeed, even if in common language the word “concrete”, unspecified, refers to concrete cement, a more natural concrete exists: the “earth concrete”composed with clay. Even though it hardly survived the industrial revolution, its use is motivated by economical reasons (free ressource, available immediately), ecological reasons (no chemical processes of energy-consuming or polluting transformation), and political reasons (no industry, no complex transformations, no trade).

 

               Firstly, we tried to develop our own clay concrete. During this experimentation time, several tests were carried out with different types of clay and different types of natural aggregates, in order to see the possibilities and variations of materials that were available to us. We realised that it took a lot of time and work to find the right proportions to get a good concrete, that's why we also surrounded ourselves with professionals, such Argilus, the leading French manufacturer of coatings. and clay products. I wanted to thank them for their support, which allowed us to test their products throughout our experiment.

                After this testing phase with clay concrete and our reflexion about cement concrete, about how is it generally perceived, we found a lot of opposition between cement’s concrete and clay’s concrete. Opposition like artificial/natural, grey/colorful, cold/hot, smooth/granular, shadow/light, opacity/transparency, heavy/light … Play with these « a priori » about concrete and with the duality between cement concrete and clay concrete seams really interesting for us. It allows to think about a new type of concrete, and analyse its strenghs and weaknesses.

 

               Our ambition is to exploit the potentiality of this two concrete in our design. As an architects, creating objects that have a value of use in addition to their ethical and aesthetic value is a real concern. That’s why our design follows the inherent characteristic of cement and clay concrete. Thanks to the good thermal inertia of clay concrete, our idea is to redesign an ancestral technique of heating with candle by create a contemporary design for a furniture, between a space heater and decorative lamp.          

              Furthermore, this experimentation asks the user about their own sensibility regarding concrete materiality. Our goal is to interact with users and their senses, to create an illusion and a contradiction between their sight and touch. Each people can compose its own concrete object, by choosing the form, the size and the texture of the lamp.

               By designing an object, we discover the potentialities of this new concrete on a small scale, with respect to the environment and worries of our time. However, we think that our field of experimentation can easily be applied to other scales, in urbain design and in architecture.