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Concrete: Material of the Future!

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Will you two be working with concrete when you come out of art school?

[laughter]

Haslbeck: As you can see, we are still at it now, although the project is long over! We’re still improving the objects we’ve designed.

Knust: We are constantly improving the molds, making them less complicated, allowing us to avoid additional rework steps, like sanding. It’s a long process: the molds are the most important and the most difficult thing ...

Haslbeck: In the project at school, we already spent a lot of time and energy on the molds: You should be able to use them not just once, but a few times. One could say we have professionalized our work a bit.

E.T.A. Litfass column shelf by David Oelschlägel

Zick Zack by Robert Haslbeck

Knust: We have acquired an incredible amount of know-how in a very short time. Not least, we benefited enormously from working in a group of eighteen people and sharing our findings. If you were to set about this all by yourself, you’d need at least two years to collect the same information! The knowledge just multiplied through the teamwork.

Having gone through this experience, would you say concrete has a “character” and what would it be?

Haslbeck: In the most intense phase, we were really confronted with the moodiness and capriciousness of concrete. At times, we were cursing the material for having such an unsteady character. Every time, you’d get a different result, despite following all the same steps you did before, precisely. It’s a very idiosyncratic, quirky material.

Knust: For me, it’s a kind of “molded” stone – one of my first associations around concrete was that it’s like a warm stone, as if it had lain in the sun. It’s of natural origin and that shows in the holes, in the color, in the surface. And every piece is unique. That’s the challenging and attractive thing about it; it’s not as predictable as synthetic material. If I were to mold a plastic table, the surface would be homogeneous and dead.

Heureka! holder for floating candles by Ilja Oelschlägel

So concrete is a “natural” material … Is concrete also a trendy material?

Knust: There is talk of concrete being a new trend material. I don’t really know where that started. Certainly, the concrete industry is trying hard to improve the image of that “cursed stuff” – the building material with which so many architectural sins were committed. Concrete used to be the epitome of cold, damp and moldy! So they done a lot with it. New mixtures with new possibilities, etc. But if it is a “trend” material, it’s definitely thanks to designers who have experimented with it.

Concrete is said to be much more environmentally friendly than ceramics as it doesn’t have to be fired, thereby saving energy ...

Haslbeck: Yes, you don’t need too much equipment to manufacture concrete objects. And the material itself is not expensive. The main cost comes from the work of development.

Knust: There have been people exploring this: one classic would be the ornamented concrete heater developed by Dutch designer Joris Laarmann as his diploma project. It was a huge success. So the way has been paved by designers who chose to work with concrete. I don’t know how it corresponds with the consumer’s taste, though.

Frisch Ausgeschalt set of bowls by Stefan Schulz

Haslbeck: Yes, it’s very different to the urban style with highly polished, synthetic surfaces – the whole “glossy magazine” aesthetic – it’s very different to that.

So, on the one hand, the material’s character is urban – but on the other hand, it’s very “natural” …

Knust: In the end, it’s a material I would want to make furniture out of. There’s not many materials aside from wood I would like to use for that. Well, there’s plastic, metal – well, they’re very cool, cold, very expensive ...

It’s always very exciting to see new combinations of things and new design usage of old materials. You talked about pigments and about coloring concrete ...

Haslbeck: We worked mostly with darkening it, as the yellow, blue and green we tried looked like washed-out plastic and we didn’t like that. Hence, we stuck more to grey tones, dark-grey and so on, which looks more like it’s been tinted. As color would never shine, always seeming washed-out, we didn’t pursue that.

Mars & Venus by Julia Lodes

Anything else you’d like to mention about your experience?

Knust: If you want to be “in”, buy concrete! [laughs] Well, there’s a lot going on in research at the moment: I’m working with two professors on concrete mixtures, and they have a completely different approach to it! Sometimes, the concrete they mold is like water and produces a wonderful surface. They are “small researchers with big ideas”, tinkering away, and I think they will produce some very good results. For instance, on concrete and heating energy, or cheaper ways of mass-producing concrete houses that do not feel cold, etc. Many people are working towards this ...

A “concrete revolution”, so to speak!

Knust: Yes, improved characteristics; none of the old flaws of concrete: cold, dampness. New concrete will be warm. You can also combine it with natural fibers, flax, for instance, or glass fiber, carbon fiber … So things are being rethought.

It is the material of the future!

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