Concrete Ideas

Organic forms with concrete?

Concrete Ideas is an experimental project developed thanks to the opportunity offered by my university IED (Rome). It relies on the use of cement and elastic fabrics such as recycled tights or lycra. The technological research starts with the deformation of the textile until it gets the properties of a tensor structure and reaches a determinate form. Then concrete powder and water are mixed together and brushed generously onto the fabrics. In conclusion, after some hours it’s completely dried, the fabrics are removed letting the morphological experiments come true. Therefore it allows us to create forms that otherwise could not be made.  Finally, the results of the first phase of this project were exposed at the Maker Faire 2014, while producing more experiments. Photos below show the final results.

GALLERY

Thanks to materials as plexiglass, wood and inflated balloons, we arrived to these results.

In conclusion, what are they?

During these experiments, we never focused on doing real product objects. We wanted to freely discover the possible morphology of this technique. Thanks to balloons we created hollow objects that surprise the mind when it thinks about “how are they made?”. Furthermore, the wood and the plexiglass give this sense of no escape from the concrete, something that seems like forever.