[ Page 2 of 9 ]

By Sara Hart

Le béton armé

The French building-products manufacturer LaFarge (www.lafarge.com), exclusive underwriter of the Liquid Stone exhibition, sponsored a three-day event in October, which began in Washington at the exhibition and ended with an intense symposium at Princeton University, in New Jersey, hosted by the School of Architecture. Billed as Architecture & Technology: Concrete Futures, the symposium attracted practitioners and journalists from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the United States. Presenters included an impressive group of architects, engineers, historians, and academics.

 

French architect Rudy Ricciotti won a competition to design the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille. Its intricate latticework is made from Ductal, an ultra-high-performance concrete. Scheduled to open in 2009, it will be sited on the waterfront near the historic Fort Saint-Jean (above). Renderings: Courtesy Rudy Ricciotti

French architect Rudy Ricciotti (whose work is discussed later), principal of RCT Architects and professor at the Institute of Art in Marseille-Luminy, France, delivered the keynote address. He set the stage for discussions that ranged from how to get emerging technologies out of the laboratory and onto the building site to the beauty of European formwork and the unconventional methods of construction in China. From the stream of images that crossed the screen throughout the day with examples of all sorts of methods and theories, it became apparent that of all the materials currently available, concrete stirs the imagination more than any other. Thus, the drive to innovate. It also evoked a more emotional response from the otherwise stolid gathering: One participant enthusiastically remarked that concrete at once meets the need for tactility and for historic meaning.