Once considered cold and impersonal, dull and uncreative, “mud” and “gravel” to some… now is everything it can be.  I was watching National Goegraphic’s “Mega Structures” program and was sooo floored to find out that concrete has evolved.

Litracon … Light-transmitting Concrete
www.litracon.hu

This new discovery won iF Material Award 2008.  It’s inventor… Swiss Aron Lozonczi.

Since the dawn of the 1900s, concrete has played a major role in man’s “building” dreams.  From the highest concrete building of six floors in the USA to Petronas Towers glory, if one wants to build something high, it’s got to be made of concrete.

The Empire State Building, though made of concrete, is really steel at heart.  Architects in the USA are confident that because the heart of the building is steel, you can add 30-40 more floors to it and still abide by the city’s building code.  Concrete is more exact, they say, plan to built say 200 floors and you cannot exceed it by one more, it will just give way.

Well, back to Litracon, have a look at their website and see how a perfect mixture of concrete and glass can make “mixed concrete” that can allow light to pass through.

Amazing.  Limitless possibilities for this material.

Imagine the amount of art from it.

Imagine the amount new living.

I’ve heard of “breathing concretes”… now we have the “seeing concrete” of today.

Here’s a blurb from their website:

Litracon™ is a combination of optical fibres and fine concrete.  It can be produced as prefabricated building blocks and panels.  Due to the small size of the fibres, they blend into concrete becoming a component of the material like small pieces of aggregate.  In this manner, the result is not only two materials - glass in concrete - mixed, but a third, new material, which is homogeneous in its inner structure and on its main surfaces as well.

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