Concrete Gets Glamorous in the 21st Century

Bold invention overtakes steady progress as new concrete products create startling opportunities for architectural expression
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From Architectural Record
Sara Hart

Le béton armé

The French building-products manufacturer LaFarge (www.lafarge.com), exclusive underwriter of the Liquid Stone exhibition, sponsored a three-day event in October, which began in Washington at the exhibition and ended with an intense symposium at Princeton University, in New Jersey, hosted by the School of Architecture. Billed as Architecture & Technology: Concrete Futures, the symposium attracted practitioners and journalists from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the United States. Presenters included an impressive group of architects, engineers, historians, and academics.

French architect Rudy Ricciotti won a competition to design the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille. Its intricate latticework is made from Ductal, an ultra-high-performance concrete. Scheduled to open in 2009, it will be sited on the waterfront near the historic Fort Saint-Jean (above).
Renderings: Courtesy Rudy Ricciotti

French architect Rudy Ricciotti (whose work is discussed later), principal of RCT Architects and professor at the Institute of Art in Marseille-Luminy, France, delivered the keynote address. He set the stage for discussions that ranged from how to get emerging technologies out of the laboratory and onto the building site to the beauty of European formwork and the unconventional methods of construction in China. From the stream of images that crossed the screen throughout the day with examples of all sorts of methods and theories, it became apparent that of all the materials currently available, concrete stirs the imagination more than any other. Thus, the drive to innovate. It also evoked a more emotional response from the otherwise stolid gathering: One participant enthusiastically remarked that concrete at once meets the need for tactility and for historic meaning.

Innovation and the oxymoron

The fact that concrete is opaque is one of the indisputable physical attributes of the material. Of all of its intriguing, variable features, opacity has always been a given. Therefore, the concept of translucent concrete seems more than an oxymoron; it would seem to be an impossibility. And yet translucent concrete has been invented twice in the past few years. Time magazine recently named LiTraCon (www.litracon.com), a translucent concrete block, one of the "coolest inventions of 2004." [Also see RECORD, December 2004, page 281.] (Apparently, the response to Time's designation was so overwhelming that the company's Web site collapsed from a stampede of curiosity seekers. At press time, the site was still down.)


Ricciotti's Seonyu footbridge in Seoul is a major innovation in the use of ultra-high-strength concrete-in this case, Ductal. It spans almost 400 feet, is 14 feet wide, and yet the 4-foot-deep arch supports a deck that is only a little more than 1 inch thick.

Photography: © Philippe Ruault

The material now trademarked as LiTraCon was invented in 2001 by a young Hungarian architect, Áron Losonczi, who combined concrete with an optical fiber from Schott (www.us.schott.com) to create building blocks that transmit light. The recipe calls for thousands of fibers, which run side by side, transmitting light between the two main surfaces in each block. Light rays enter the fiber at one end and are guided along the core by internal reflection, following all the bends in the fiber, which they exit at the other end.

According to the manufacturer, a wall created out of LiTraCon blocks can be quite thick, as the fibers work almost without any loss of light up to 60 feet, providing the same effect with both sunlight and electric light. Shadows on the lighter side will appear with sharp outlines on the darker one. Even colors of light are unaffected by transmission. The blocks will be on the market later this year.

 

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Originally published in Architectural Record.
Originally published in January 2005

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