ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Concrete Skins’

“Concrete has a telluric backwardness, and its story is in part a playing out of the tension between its progressiveness and its residual primitivism.”

 

—Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, (London: Reaktion Books, 2012, p. 15)

 

 

Concrete is a remarkably versatile material that allows endless morphological configurations while offering a wide range of technical and design possibilities. It is plastic and malleable when mixed; hard, strong, and durable when cured. Concrete is by far the single most common construction material worldwide; yet, in the United States, it is usually either associated with high-end modern architecture or considered a utilitarian material.

 

In the last few decades, alterations in its material properties have opened up a large number of innovative utilizations. Today, chemical enhancements and advanced admixtures have resulted in the proliferation of different types, including 3D printing concrete, self-healing concrete, photocatalytic concrete, biological concrete, and smart concrete, among many others. Progressiveness in the material composition poses an opportunity for changing the perception of a rather primitive material and finding new applications, while making it more accessible, tangible, and familiar to everyday users. 

 

Funded by a Teaching Development Grant from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, this course aimed to explore concrete through speculative testing, innovative formwork techniques, and large-scale mockups. Students investigated, sought to understand, and challenged the possibilities and limitations of concrete as a building material. In the first phase, students worked to decode concrete’s essence and properties through intuitive experimentation with concrete mixes and a variety of formwork techniques. 

 

Using concrete as the primary constituent material, the second phase of the studio focused on its architectural applications through the design of a 250,000-square-foot building. Attention was placed on the development of a concrete enclosure system informed by strict envelope-related performance criteria, tested as both generic prototypes and project-specific design. Design work addressed prefabrication and mass-customization features while incorporating highly creative and digitally fabricated geometries and assembly systems. 

 

In the final phase, as part of the design process and final deliverables, students materialized concrete mock-ups of their building enclosure systems at a 4-inch=1-foot scale. These large-scale models served as proof-of-concept prototypes.