Concrete Houses

Concrete has conviction, strength and directness. It has plasticity, too, which makes the possibilities for form-making almost endless. Concrete Houses explores the sculptural possibilities of concrete as the material of choice in landmark contemporary houses across Australia, Brazil, Portugal, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands and the USA, from the hands of major international architects including Sou Fujimoto, Tom Kundig, Valerio Olgiati and Marcio Kogan, and Australians such as Peter Stutchbury, Alex Popov, Ian McDougall and Neil Durbach. Illustrated throughout with exceptional colour photography, and selected plans and drawings, Concrete Houses celebrates the incontrovertible fusion of concrete's versatility and brute force to make timeless architecture of lyric beauty.

Robust and raw, concrete has been a rudimentary building material for centuries, but it is only relatively recently that architects have begun exploring its softer, tactile side in the design of houses. Concrete is durable, recyclable, and thermally efficient, and it goes up quickly compared to wood or metal framing. The appeal for architects, though, is its plasticity and potential for magic, making poetry out of the mundane. Witness concrete's endless form-making possibilities in this collection of contemporary homes by A-list architects in diverse locations across Japan, Australia, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, the US, and more. Along with exquisite color photography and plans, the architects share their design approach to projects ranging from 10,000 square feet on spectacular sites, to compact urban gems. This close-up of 20 striking houses celebrates the texture and physics of a material that has long been taken for granted.

Concrete will be the key material for Mankind to create the built environment of the next millennium. The requirements of this infrastructure will be both demanding, in terms of technical performance and economy, and yet be greatly varied, from architectural masterpieces to the simplest of utilities.Radical design and concrete practices forms the Proceedings of the one day International seminar held during the Congress, Creating with concrete, 6-10 September 1999, organised by the Concrete technology unit, University of Dundee.

"The purpose of this book is to make clear the advantages of concrete in the construction of dwellings. ... as applied to houses [in the United States]"--Page 6

The Concrete Solutions series of International Conferences on Concrete Repair began in 2003, with a conference held in St. Malo, France in association with INSA Rennes, followed by the second conference in 2006 ( with INSA again, at St. Malo, France), and the third conference in 2009 (in Padova and Venice, in association with the University of Padova). Now in 2011, the event is being held in Dresden in Germany and has brought together some 112 papers from 33 countries. Whereas electrochemical repair tended to dominate the papers in earlier years, new developments in structural strengthening with composites have been an increasingly important topic, with a quarter of the papers now focusing on this area. New techniques involving Near Surface Mounted (NSM) carbon fibre rods, strain hardening composites, and new techniques involving the well established carbon fibre and polyimide wrapping and strengthening systems are presented. Seventeen papers concentrate on case studies which are all-important in such conferences, to learn about what works (and what doesn’t work) on real structures. Thirteen papers are devoted to new developments in Non-Destructive Testing (NDT). Other topics include service life modelling, fire damage, surface protection methods and coatings, patch repair, general repair techniques and whole life costing. This book is essential reading for anyone engaged in the concrete repair field, from engineers, to academics and students and also to clients, who, as the end user, are ultimately responsible for funding these projects and making those difficult decisions about which system or method to use.

"The purpose of this book is to make clear the advantages of concrete in the construction of dwellings. ... as applied to houses [in the United States]"--Page 6

During the years 1919 into 1925 Frank Lloyd Wright worked on four houses and a kindergarten located in metropolitan Los Angeles using concrete blocks as the main building material. The construction system has been described by Wright and others as ’uniquely molded’, ’woven like a textile fabric’ and perceived as ground breaking, truly modern, unprecedented. Many have attempted to uphold these claims while some thought the house-designs borrowed from old exotic buildings. For the first time this book brings together Wright’s declarations, the support of upholders and inferences in order to determine their accuracy and correctness, or the possibility of feigned or fictional stories. It examines technical developments of concrete blocks by Wright and others before his experiences in Los Angeles began in 1919. It also studies the manner of Wright’s design process by an examination of relevant pictorial and textual documents. A unique, in-depth and critical analysis of the houses is set within historical, biographical and theoretical contexts. Consequently, the book explains the impact upon Wright of California contemporaries, architects Irving Gill and Rudolph Schindler, and their instrumentally profound role upon the course of modernism 1907-1923. In doing so, it allows a full appreciation of Wright’s, Gill’s and Schindler’s buildings beyond their experiential qualities.