Concrete solutions:
New materials make old favorite more versatile
Two Bay Area companies are leading the concrete renaissance: transforming dirt and water into surprisingly pliant textures and shapes unimaginable a decade ago.
Considering the ubiquity of concrete in the visual landscape, in the form of sidewalks, bridges and apartment buildings, it seems disingenuous to talk about concrete as a new design trend. But this humble material, comprising water, aggregate (of rock, sand and/or gravel) and cement, is shifting into high gear for residential and commercial use, thanks to innovations over the past 20 years in materials, modeling software and milling machinery.
Mark Rogero, owner and president of design and fabrication studio Concreteworks in Oakland, says, “There’s renewed excitement about the authenticity and substance of concrete. We’re transforming dirt and water into a building material that’s hard wearing and can be made beautiful by virtue of its imperfections.”
According to the Cement Sustainability Initiative, concrete is the most widely used man-made material on the planet. Though building with concrete is a practice that goes back as far as the ancient Egyptians, it was only in the mid-18th century that its usage began to climb.
“Once you put rebar into concrete, it had tensile and compressive strength, and could be much more expressive,” says Fu-Tung Cheng, principal/CEO of Cheng Design in Berkeley and author of several authoritative books on concrete design in the home. Referring to the 1910 church in Berkeley that is a designated national landmark, Cheng says, “Think of (architect Bernard) Maybeck’s Church of Christ Scientist and its sculpted concrete facade. From 1910 through the 1940s was really an era of the ‘art of concrete.’ ”
By the 1950s, however, concrete in design had started to play understudy to glass, steel and plastic, and remained in the background through the 1980s.
Rogero says, “Around 1990, a lot of the concrete used in major infrastructure was deteriorating.” It spurred research centers, like the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Northwestern University, to explore ways to improve on traditional concrete, for instance by adding lightweight nylon and polypropylene fibers in place of rebar.
Rogero says, “Fiber-reinforced concrete shifted the whole vocabulary of what concrete could do as a surfacing material. It could be stronger, lighter, more flowable, it could set up faster or slower, de-