It used to be only Superman who could see through concrete walls, but an exhibit at the National Building Museum shows mere mortals can do it too.
Lets the light shine through
WASHINGTON
It used to be only Superman who could see through concrete walls, but an exhibit at the National Building Museum shows mere mortals can do it too.
The show, called Liquid Stone, features variations of translucent concrete, a new-fangled version of the old construction standby that offers a combination of esthetics and practicality.
One display is a wall of translucent concrete blocks. When someone stands in front of it and light is shone from behind, the person’s shadow can be seen clearly on the other side.
“I think it’s beautiful in itself, so it might be attractive in a restaurant or a hotel,” said G. Martin Moeller Jr., the museum’s senior vice-president. “But it might also be used in an indoor fire escape where you wanted light to come through in case of a power failure. It could become a lifesaver.”
The translucent blocks are made by mixing glass fibres into the combination of crushed stone, cement and water, varying a process that has been used for centuries to produce a versatile building material. The process was devised by Hungarian architect Aron Losonczi in 2001.
“The idea came from a work of art I saw in Budapest,” he said in a telephone interview from Csongrad in southeast Hungary. “It was made of glass and ordinary concrete, and the idea of combining the two struck me. Then I went to Stockholm to do post-graduate work in architecture and it developed there.”
One of the first demonstrations was a sidewalk in Stockholm made of thin sheets of translucent concrete. It looks like an ordinary sidewalk by day but it is illuminated at night by lights under it.
A company in Aachen, Germany, called LiTraCon for “light transmitting concrete,” makes translucent blocks and plans to have them market-ready this year. Andreas Bittis, in charge of marketing, said that thus far, they have mainly been used in demonstration projects, such as the Stockholm sidewalk.
Bittis has many ideas for practical uses.
“Think of illuminating subway stations with daylight,” he suggested in an e-mail. Or using the concrete for speed bumps and lighting them from below to make them more visible at night.
Translucent concrete is strong enough for the uses for traditional concrete, and chemical additives can greatly increase the strength. Moeller pointed out, however, that until demand increases, experimentation continues and production costs fall, the price of any new product will be significantly higher than similar older products.
Will Wittig, who teaches architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy, has developed concrete panels shown in the exhibit that in some places are only a quarter of a centimetre thick. He said he has ideas about an all-concrete building, part of which would consist of ordinary opaque concrete and the translucent kind.
Today’s concrete buildings have skeletons of steel, but Moeller said that could become obsolete with the development of a recently invented self-reinforcing concrete, though that may be many years off.
The Lafarge Group sponsored the exhibit and is showing off a recent variety called Ductal that does not need steel reinforcement.
The Associated Press
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