CD Designs Blog

Concrete tube, or eco-friendly concrete house?

Until now, most of us have only experienced concrete in everyday situations. A favourite material of civil engineers, concrete is commonly found in large industrial buildings, on our motorways, and in throughout our urban areas. At home we use it in more discrete ways – popular concrete patio areas, attractive pattern imprinted concrete driveways or highly polished and naturally coloured kitchen splash backs, workspaces or floors for example.

But designers are turning their hands to using this flexible material in a number of more futuristic ways. Step forward Hugon Kowalski from H3AR – a firm of architects based in Poland. A prominent figure on the competitive design scene, he has recently created an ‘instant house’ for a competition in Milan. Made from concrete tubes of light Styrofoam and coated lightly with titanium dioxide to cut surrounding air pollution, the design caused great interest amongst the young and forward-thinking.

With Kowalski predicting that concrete will eventually be made from recycled rice husks, his futuristic concrete home designs featured no internal stairs, one room per stair-level, and tall, tube-like appearances.

Certainly, it’s an opportunity for the future, and meanwhile most of us will focus on presenting our cars most attractively on a well installed pattern imprinted concrete driveway, as the extent of our experimentation with concrete. But for future generations, it looks as though ‘eco’ concrete buildings may just be one of the developments they have to look forward to.

Image via designboom

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