betonvorhang Concrete Textile / Betontextil

red dot: best of the best
red dot award: product design 2008

Changing shape – the poetry of a material
Hardly any other building material has marked contemporary architecture as much as concrete. With its often rough looking surfaces, concrete has become an integral part of our everyday environment, and the forms it may take are all too familiar to anyone. Design gets interesting when it not only questions generic forms such as these, but also produces new sensuous perceptions in our daily lives. The betonvorhang is one such object that challenges the senses. It places concrete into a new context and thus lends the material interesting new qualities. The betonvorhang consists of only two elements: concrete cushions are attached to one another through a solid fabric and form a texture that is reminiscent of a quilt. Since the carrier material is flexible, it takes on the shape of a curtain that convolves like textile and can be pushed aside just like a textile curtain. The betonvorhang is visually enticing because sunlight shining through the individual cushions is refracted in various ways on the often raw edges of the concrete. In acoustic terms this curtain also holds a surprise because it produces scraping noises when rustling in the wind, noises that one has probably never heard before. The betonvorhang can serve many different purposes and has excellent sound-absorbing and heat-absorbing and -storing qualities. In outdoor installations, it can thus serve as an effective sun or windscreen, a privacy screen or facade element, while indoors it may serve as a room partition. Innovations like this one are inspirational for architecture – a new aesthetics is generated through the poetic appearance of this material.