Heavy Light – Fabric-Formed Concrete Structures by Mark West

 

It is a dream of mine to someday build my own house, but one thing that has always bothered me about architecture of all types, and certainly residential architecture, is how overwhelmingly rectilinear it all is. I especially have a soft spot for concrete because I know how flexible it is. The only problem is that flexibility comes at a price. Unless maybe, you get creative. Prof. Mark West, the founding Director of the acronymically ironic CAST (Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology) at the University of Manitoba, has been experimenting with inexpensive techniques for making concrete more interesting while at the same time getting more structural integrity out of less concrete. You’ll have to set aside about an hour to watch the entire presentation, but Mark and his students and teams have developed some very interesting techniques with even more interesting results.