As part of a lobby renovation on MIT’s campus, we designed a series of concrete tables and benches whose motivated forms and constrained budgets resist conventional approaches to formwork.

For complex geometries, traditional concrete formwork tends to be difficult to produce and wasteful in materials: either built-up with supports or milled from solids. We turned instead to bent enameled aluminum and developed a way of creating formwork that is not only able to produce curved surfaces and intersections, but is reusable and lightweight. The self-structuring formwork is made of strategically bent sheets, riveted together at their seams.

The coincidence between developable surface geometries (the set of shapes possible using sheet materials) and concrete arch structural behavior produces forms evocative of ancient histories, despite the contemporary techniques.

Project team: GLD (Joel Lamere + Cynthia Gunadi), Daniela Covarrubias, Toshiro Ihara