Lavassa Furniture: Peter Harrison

One of my favourite magazines is Dwell, a contemporary architecture magazine with an interesting bias towards both modernist and green design. At the back of the magazine I discovered an ad for a furniture designer who works near Saratoga Springs, NY. Peter Harrison uses combinations of concrete, wood and stainless steel.

I like that way that he uses concrete as simply another material in a vocabulary of materials. It seems entirely appropriate where it is used in each individual piece. Often designers seem to do one of two things with concrete: either disguise it—making it look like stone for example—or brag about its rough, urban appearance. Here it's just another material for constructing functional, simple but beautiful objects. It's made into shelves, columns and even corner connectors.


Harrison's work is at http://www.lavassa.com/.

Dwell magazine also has an extensive web site at http://www.dwell.com/.

Garden Sculptures: Pieter Doef

As a visitor on a recent studio tour around Merrickville, Ontario, I discovered the work of Pieter Doef. His human figures are about half life size, modelled in clay, then cast in concrete from a plaster mould of the form. Most of the sculptures in the gardens of his rural property are of people, but there are also some abstracts forms.

Pieter explained that he uses a simple mix: one half builder's sand and one half cement. He's also a prolific painter.

There are more images on a Facebook group started for him:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2889151170#/group.php?gid=2889151170

More on Green

Portland cement production is said to account for about 5% of greenhouse gas (CO2) production in the world. One company is working on a cement that actually absorbs greenhouse gases and emits less in its production.

Novacem (U.K.) won an award in January of this year, the Rushlight Award, for innovation and environmental benefits in the development of this new type of cement. Quoting from Novacem's press release:

"In contrast to Portland cement, the Novacem process causes minimal CO2 emissions. It then hardens by absorbing CO2 and so locks atmospheric CO2 into construction materials. This means that for every tonne of Portland cement replaced by Novacem cement, ~1 tonne of CO2 is captured and stored indefinitely. This will transform the cement industry from a significant emitter to a significant absorber of CO2."

The recyclable cement system is based on magnesium oxide and special mineral additives.

The sooner this product is in production, the sooner we can feel better about using cement, both in the construction industry and our own artwork.

Fame in Turkey

A magazine published in Istanbul, Turkey, called BetonArt, has published several articles about contemporary concrete design. Unfortunately I don't speak Turkish, but the pictures are worth looking at. I've uploaded a PDF file (1 MB) to the GoogleGroups ArtConcrete web site if anyone wants to take a look. (You have to join the group before you can look, but maybe it's a group you'd be interested in joining?)

They used some of my concrete jewellery in one article: page 57 images 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7. The magazine's mandate is about promoting concrete to the architecture community. The articles cover such topics as furniture, Litracon, bowls, jewellery.

Here's a quick link: http://groups.google.com/group/ArtConcrete/files then click on Betanart23.pdf. If you're not a member of ArtConcrete you'll have to subscribe.

Veijo Rönkkönen Concrete Figures

Photo: Veli Granö, from the book Self-Made Man, by Veli Granö

Veijo Rönkkönen is a Finnish artist who lives near the Russian border. On his small farm near Parikkala he has created almost 500 life-sized human figures in concrete, many of them exercising and stretching. His sculpture park is apparently open to the public.

There are two good sets of images to look through on Flickr:
http://tinyurl.com/ktjxhc
http://tinyurl.com/mcpyne

Mountainous Molding Project

MuseumRock Products from Louisville KY have made what may very well be the largest molded concrete object ever made. They made the mold in California, shipped it to Hawaii, and poured in hundreds of thousands of pounds of colored grout over a matrix of steel rebar. The finished "rock" measures 136 feet long and 22 feet high. It is part of an educational and interpretive Navajo Indian Memorial located in Na Aina Kai Botanical Garden and Sculpture Park which is slated to be open to the public in 2010.



The mold was made of rubber coated EPS styrofoam. 17,000 pounds of pigment was used to colour the concrete.

http://museumrock.com/most_outrageous_project.htm

Forest Boone of MuseumRock says: "My mix was just a standard grout mix 4,500 psi... one part course manufactured sand and two parts dune sand from Asia mixing in an auger mixer. I poured it in about 20 different lifts, changing colors each lift."

Photo credits: MuseumRock

Concrete Camera Parts...

Lens pins. 2009. 3.5 cm (1.5"). Concrete, pigment, gold leaf.

This is an extension of the ideas I was writing about in my previous blog about the concrete cameras. I used the same silicone mold, but only cast small parts of it in the medium of concrete. As I mentioned before, the process of seeing is what interests me, so I have gold-leafed what would be the glass lens in these pieces. I'm still exploring the contrast between precious and non-precious in the jewelry world, so concrete and gold leaf are perfect to express that.