Insulating concrete can be known as lightweight concrete, expanded concrete, thermal concrete or even “feel-good concrete”. Swiss civil engineer and architect Patrick Gartmann feels so comfortable between concrete walls that he built his house in Chur as a shell.
The architect and civil engineer Patrick Gartmann
The architect and civil engineer Patrick Gartmann
The entrance to Patrick Gartmann's house
Swiss minimalism at its finest
Spatial framing of the mountains
Frameless windows: the pane runs into a groove
With a love of shell aesthetics
The floorboards of the Swiss pavilion by Peter Zumthor and Patrick Gartmann were used.
View of the house from the garden
A magnificent view from the living room
What you see is what you get
What makes the hairs on the back of many clients’ necks stand on end, Patrick Gartmann sees as a material of possibilities. But why do architects and laypeople have such conflicting opinions when it comes to concrete aesthetics? Gartmann’s explanation: “People often have in mind the concrete that you see in road construction: gray and not beautiful. From my point of view, that’s partly true. You can design concrete surfaces in a thousand different ways: formwork, mechanical treatment, sandblasting, washing. Concrete can be gray, but it can also be colored. Theoretically, you can work with it like an artist.”
The arguments in favor of insulating concrete do not stop at design freedom. The material unfolds its potential in the fact that an entire building can theoretically do without any other material – in Chur, Gartmann even dispenses with window profiles in part by running the glass pane into an oversized groove in the wall and ceiling. Not to mention the elimination of shapeless window panels, plaster, insulation and vapor barriers. 60 centimeter thick walls take over the functions that are divided into construction, air and insulation layers in the classic onion wall structure. The formula for insulating concrete is therefore: mass equals load-bearing structure equals architectural expression. And that is why this material has so much architectural explosive power: construction and spatial impression are reunited in insulating concrete. A house cast from a single mass, solid, homogeneous and freely formable – what architect wouldn’t want that?
You can read more about this in the latest Baumeister 9/2016
Photos: Thomas Dix