The Financial Times, How To Spend It magazine, November, 2005
Design enthusiast and curator Sarah Gaventa had already written a book about creating the perfect home office when she pitched Concrete Design to a Mitchell Beazley editor. Clearly, this was a tougher proposition. She remembers the response - “a sharp intake of breath”. Her editor made the required leap of faith, but even as Gaventa started writing, others in the office proved harder to convince:
“It turned out to be the only book the accountants knew anything about, because they were convinced it was going to be such a colossal failure.”
This was in 2001. Four years later, something very like a concrete revolution is influencing every strand of contemporary design. The material is being re-evaluated, rehabilitated, reborn and described as exciting, hi-tech and luxurious without so much as a smirk. It can also be extremely expensive. Furthermore, Gaventa’s book is scheduled for a paperback reprint in February. Let the accountants account for that.
To older generations, accustomed to concrete as something coarse and monolithic - the medium of motorways, multistorey carparks and bad town planning - hi-tech concrete sounds like a nonsense. After all, isn’t it just sand, cement, gravel and water?
Not necessarily. How about light-transmitting concrete? The invention of Hungarian architect Áron Losonczi, LiTraCon is gaining a word-of-mouth following in design circles. You’d be hard-pressed to find a contemporary architect who isn’t aware of it or hasn’t seen the (eerily beautiful) photographs. But few have seen it “in the stone”, because this is a material right on the cutting edge of interior or exterior design.
LiTraCon is concrete infused with optical glass fibres. The structural integrity of the material is unaffected, and it enjoys all the usual properties of concrete - it’s strong, light, long-lasting and an effective barrier to unwanted noise - plus one extra: a shadowy translucency, like subtle, shifting wallpaper. Losonczi won a red dot: best of the best design award for the material this year, and is nominated for a 2006 DesignPreis. If you want to go and see it right now, your options include the four metre high Europe Gate, on the banks of the Danube in the Hungarian town of Kómarom, where it catches the morning light each sunrise and celebrates Hungary’s entrance into the EU. Alternatively, Losonczi has just installed a white LiTraCon internal wall in a special experimental show home, situated in the German village of Sittelson, between Bremen and Hamburg. And if you’d like some LiTraCon in your own house without committing to a radical rebuild, the new LiTraCube lamp (611 euros) - a concrete lampshade and guaranteed talking point - goes on sale this month.
Gaventa, admittedly not difficult to enthuse on the subject of concrete, is particularly excited about LiTraCon:
“Imagine it used extensively in a domestic environment. On the one hand you’d get that concrete sound barrier, on the other you’d see shadows of people walking past. Those glass blocks suddenly look so boring in comparison.”
This isn’t the first time concrete’s been chic. It was the subject of a Modernist love affair back in the 1930s, a passion ignited by Berthold Lubetkin’s much celebrated penguin pool at London Zoo. And of course it was the material du jour in the 1960s and ‘70s: whether distressed in the City of London’s Barbican Centre, built Babel-high by Goldfinger in the form of North Kensington’s notorious Trellick Tower, or delicately patterned by grainy wooden casts, as in the case of the Hayward Gallery. But what’s particularly interesting about the current concrete trend is that it’s happening from the inside, out. It’s been small-scale, domestic, boutique products that have been a driving force in the rehabilitation of what used to be solely a structural material, the supporting actor or understudy in the theatre of architecture.
And these products don’t come more boutique than Bloomsbury-based German designer Kelvin Birk’s jewellery, contemporary pieces in concrete, using... wait for it... diamonds as aggregate. From utility to luxury, there couldn’t be a more literal example. But from a jeweller’s perspective, it’s all media - tactile and interesting in its own way. Birk explains:
“I get used to working with expensive materials. And then, you know, a bag of cement costs three quid or something, and I only need a tiny amount. The value of the concrete might be one and a half pennies. And often when I put the stones in, it can be a bit like when you find the crystals in the mountains and the caves.”
He also likes to wrap concrete in silver, playing - like a number of contemporary designers - with the juxtaposition of textures. Interestingly, Birk counts a large number of architects’ wives and girlfriends amongst his customers. Otherwise, the most frequently asked question is - wouldn’t that concrete bracelet be a little heavy?
“If I made the whole thing out of silver it would be much much heavier. The specific gravity of silver is much higher than concrete. But you never usually get concrete in small amounts. It’s usually a car park or something.”
Last September, the concrete revolution reached Bond Street. Vestigo, a special exhibition at the Lalique store, brought Lalique together with French furnishings and design house Ascète. Lalique’s contributed crystal eagle and cockerel heads; lion, ram and turtle studies. Ascète provided industrial-looking concrete block furniture, ponderous in its aspect but not its reality. Ascète’s concrete is super-light, applied to a foam core like a hard shell, waxed and polished to perfection, but still concrete to the touch. The objects - furniture for garden and interior use - mix references to neo-classical French sculpture with Brutalist architecture, and the crystal seems more crystal-like, the concrete more concrete-like. According to Ascète designer Pierre Gonalons, the fascination is again in the unexpected juxtapositions:
“One is rich, the other one is poor. One is precious, the other one is not. One is very sophisticated and highly finished, and the other is crude. One is very ancient, the other is very recent. The key word is shock. This is like working with a brutal material, and creating a new trend.”
The Vestigo objects are available by special order from Lalique’s New Bond Street store. As far as Gonalons’s concerned, their purpose is more than interior design, and there is a whole generation of architecture-savvy clients ready for concrete to come in from the cold.
“This isn’t just furniture. It has an architectural purpose. It’s like a part of your room, a part of your walls. The low coffee tables resemble beams, but on the floor. It’s a vocabulary of construction, and very modern.”
That the decision to reprint Gaventa’s book was made the same year as the Vestigo exhibition, the same year that concrete planters by Kathy Dalwood have made her a finalist in the Design & Decoration Awards and that LiTraCon is winning prizes across Europe, is more zeitgeist than coincidence.
Architect Ken Rorrison, of Buschow Henley Architects (responsible, themselves, for an innovative concrete divider for a loft apartment, featured in Gaventa’s book) catches a glimpse of social change in the concrete revolution. There’s even philosophy in concrete:
“Maybe it’s less to do with the visual than the re-evaluation of what those old concrete, post-war buildings were actually trying to do. It was a time of perhaps more social consciousness, and the buildings were actually doing interesting things in terms of how social spaces, urban spaces worked.”
Whatever the reason, there’s certainly a wider trend for post-war design and Gaventa, who has a flat in the Barbican, believes it might be more generational than philosophical. The City’s latest crop of wealthy and design-curious are too young to remember planning disasters like Newham, East London’s Ronan Point, where a small gas explosion caused by fautly cooker connection managed to bring down a corner of the 23-storey building. They simply don’t understand why the material ended up the scapegoat. Now the Barbican, Trellick Towers, the Hayward are iconic and loved. And this taste-shift has resulted in “a generation of designers now looking at those post-war buildings with fresh eyes, noticing the use of texture, what you can do with surface and colour and aggregates.
“It’s not just in this country, either. Some of the concrete work down in California is really really interesting and innovative.”
California’s concrete guru is Fu Tung Cheng, author of the very recently published Concrete at Home (Taunton Press). Cheng Design mixes architecture with interior design, specialising in kitchen and bathroom fittings, innovative with concrete and commissioned by some of California’s elite, including former AOL chief, Barry Schuler. Interestingly, although concrete in America doesn’t share its recent history with the UK’s era of social engineering, it has, particularly in California, suffered from association with another recent design trend. Cheng explains:
“I respect Minimalism, but I do feel that it is much like aligning yourself with one season out of the four. Winter, basically. It has a certain beauty, but it isn’t necessarily something you want to live with all year round. I think some people still associate coldness and modernism and concrete. But by infusing concrete with other materials, for instance by infusing it with wood, tiles, slate and cross-fertilising it really warms up.”
Cheng’s company specialises in countertops, satisfying a desire amongst affluent clients for something more original, more interesting than granite. “Granite isn’t a luxury product any more,” insists Cheng. ‘It’s a mass marketed product. You can get it at Home Depot. It’s the Wal-Mart of design, and they sell granite. And the design component of building with boxes and slabs - it just isn’t enough. The industry has dictated a certain look in the design of kitchens, which is the most economically viable for mass production - it’s a slab and a box.”
What’s interesting about the concrete kitchen and bathroom (and, for that matter, about Kelvin Birk’s jewellery) is that it’s a proper celebration of craftsmanship and design. The material itself is cheap - but by spending proper money for a kitchen or bathroom that’s tough and easy to clean, looks beautiful and is finished to a texture as silky-smooth as glass, shows an understanding of design and architecture, rather than merely an attraction to labels, trends or a material’s perceived rarity. It’s the ultimate in stealth wealth.
Guy Bamford, director of Cast Advanced Concretes, manufacturers of the innovative Mass concrete surfaces, agrees that part of the attraction is in taking an active role in design, making decisions:
“Just talking about using concrete puts you in a different world. This is the world of architects, and to be a part of that as a consumer is really exciting.”
Like Birk, Bamford counts an unrepresentative number of architects and designers amongst his clients - Mass surfaces have been specified in projects at the National Gallery and the Barbarons Beach Hotel in the Seychelles, as well as a few very grand private homes such as Nevill Holt in Leicestershire, a mostly 17th century, Grade I house recently restored by David Ross, co-founder of the Carphone Warehouse. Bamfor feels that part of the attraction is the integrity of the material. It doesn’t pretend to be intrinsically rare or precious. It just works. “It’s concrete,” he says. “Clever concrete, but it’s still concrete.”
Mark Bradley, whose company Paul Davies Design specialises in interior concrete surfaces, agrees. He reports a growing trend for countertops which share their material with the flooring: an architectural vision of interior design made available to anybody (who can afford it). His clients also like their concrete neat:
“Some of our competitors use what I would call conglomerate concrete... fake concrete. But that’s one of my selling points. We use 100% concrete and nothing else. The same as what an M1 motorway bridge is made out of.”
According to Gaventa, the ultimate status symbol is to have our concrete kitchen or bathroom cast in situ. “I went to somebody’s apartment years ago to see a cast-in-situ kitchen,” she explains. “The effect is almost like... I can afford it and my beams are good enough... because it’s a major commitment. The only way to get it out is get in an industrial drill. Or blow it up.”
If you want the look and feel without putting aside up to three months for casting and finishing (during which your house will become a building site) Cast Advanced Concrete’s innovative offsite Mass range sounds sensible. A kind of concrete veneer, produced in 15 to 100 millimetre sheets that can (just) be carried in, it’s also anti-microbial, durable and highly polished to an attractive finish. It costs roughly the same as “good granite”.
So what about the future? Could this be just a passing trend? Gaventa sees new techniques driven by enthusiastic early adopters pushing concrete even more hi-tech. A few companies are currently experimenting in etching photographs in concrete surfaces. The results are apparently surprisingly detailed, rich and beautiful.
“I guess that’s another form of luxury isn’t it?,” says Gaventa. “Using a technology before it’s ready for mass production. It’s the same principle as when people who had flat screen tellies a few years ago, before they became cheap enough for Dixons. So I look forward to seeing who, over here, gets the first LiTraCon apartment wall. What an architect needs is a very rich client who wants to divide up their flat using it; and, God, wouldn’t it be stunning?! Linton Chiswick
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