Hey guys!

Take a look at this: http://www.litracon.hu/about1_en.htm

Another image.

I don't mean to be pedantic but it's not transparent, it's translucent. Glass is transaprent and that's what you'd probably call concrete that was transparent.

I understand that they do it by embedding fibre optics into the the Concrete aggregate or something to that degree. This caused quite a sensation a couple of years ago when it was first revealed, although it has yet to have been applied to any wide-scale or notable projects to date. I just hope it's not one of those flash-in-the-pan type innovations which ends up not finding any practical long time uses in the AEC fields; too bad there's a dearth of imaginative, daring and bold architects, engineers and designers out there these days.

Ok, you´re right I´ll fix it up.

I think the reason it hasn't caught on is that its 1000 dollars a cubic-foot or something equally ridiculous.

Jake has hit the nail on the head. It's simply to expensive. The solution they are trying to sell at the moment is cutting or pouring the product into thin slabs of about two centimeters in thickness. It's still to damn expensive. The possibilities are intriguing once they get it out at a reasonable price.

link: http://optics.org/articles/news/10/3/10/1


Concrete casts new light in dull rooms


Light transmitting concrete is set to go on sale later this year.

The days of dull, grey concrete could be about to end. A Hungarian architect has combined the world’s most popular building material with optical fiber from Schott to create a new type of concrete that transmits light.



Letting the light in

A wall made of “LitraCon” allegedly has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of glass fibers can display a view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of a tree, for example.

“Thousands of optical glass fibers form a matrix and run parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of every block,” explained its inventor Áron Losonczi. “Shadows on the lighter side will appear with sharp outlines on the darker one. Even the colours remain the same. This special effect creates the general impression that the thickness and weight of a concrete wall will disappear.”



Light-transmitting concrete

The hope is that the new material will transform the interior appearance of concrete buildings by making them feel light and airy rather than dark and heavy.

Losonczi, a 27 year old architect from Csongrád recently came up with the idea while he was studying at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden. After demonstrating the material at design exhibitions all over Europe he has now formed a company to commercialize the concept.

His new company, also called LitraCon, is now optimizing its manufacturing methods and hopes to start selling prefabricated blocks of the material later this year.



Commerical possibilities

“In theory, a wall structure built out of the light-transmitting concrete can be a couple of meters thick as the fibers work without any loss in light up to 20 m,” explained Losonczi. “Load-bearing structures can also be built from the blocks as glass fibers do not have a negative effect on the well-known high compressive strength of concrete. The blocks can be produced in various sizes with embedded heat isolation too.”

concrete2

concrete3

An interesting idea, though Im sure the obvious expense of the technique would put most people off. Would it work here in overcast Britain. The images all show bright light behind and the shadow casting object is close to the concrete- is it so effective in less illuminated conditions??

I think the reason it hasn't caught on is that its 1000 dollars a cubic-foot or something equally ridiculous.

Yes but the very rich will love it because of its price tag so it is still worth developing & marketing

An interesting product. I'm not sure how it will be used, but I'm sure a designer is out there that will make use of it.

http://www.innovationlab.net/sw22811.asp

From the website:
In co-operation with Christoffer Dupont, student of engineering; Lene Langballe, student of architecture and Dalton Beton (a Danish manufacturer of concrete components), the Innovation Lab project team has developed the first screen of transparent concrete that the world has ever seen. A revolutionising screen type – a novel concept which will come to influence building industry, architecture, design and a vast array of business areas. The first firms of architects were already queuing up long before the manufacturing process had been completed. Innovation Lab therefore has great expectations to this creation and anticipates a massive influx of attention, national as international, cementing the significance of the see-through concrete screen...

The screen consists of concrete with embedded optical fibres, arranged as pixels, capable of transmitting natural as well as artificial light. The light-admission points are on the back of the screen where the fibres are positioned. The light, or the picture, will then be displayed in pixels on the front. The light source can be a projector emitting either pictures or film footage. In principle, the screen is capable of acting as a window since – owing to the combination of the screen concept's light-absorption and optical cables – it has a capacity for transmitting natural light.

Is this an application of this technology?
Translucent Concrete (http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=633)

Thank you! I somehow missed this thread!

One of my professors suggested that I use translucent concrete for a project of mine. I wanted to use the material to encase stair towers, so at night the towers could be lit up and seen from the outside of the building. I found some companies with the material but they only give the compressive strength, density, and light transmittance. If I were to use the material as fire rated walls, I would need to know what the fire rating is. Does anyone know? I wanted to ask here first before the company because I probably would get a quick response and I wanted to bring the product to people's attention. Any info.. thanks

links:http://www.litracon.hu/index.php

http://www.gizmag.com/go/5093/

Hello Halsey,

I'm uncertain if this thread answers your question but it does talk about the product... it would be a good read for your project research.

http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=633

thanks for the thread, it did give some insight on pricing and other things,lol, also to add, I know most concrete has a fire rating of 4 hours but because there is a glass aggregate in it i would think that it lowers the fire rating but not sure if it really does and if so by how much.

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0401/shulman/index.html



An idea hatched in the research department of OMA promises to transform the nature of buildings. Inventor Bill Price conjures up the ultimate material: translucent concrete.

By Ken Shulman
April 2001

Bill Price's spartan third-floor office in the University of Houston architecture building does not look like the office of an inventor of a new material that might change the way buildings look and function. The whitewashed room's modular ceiling-high bookshelves are almost empty. The walls are bare except for two creased lecture announcements and a class schedule. The file cabinet next to his desk is littered with humble objects: a triangle made of untreated, laminated wood; a brick; a shard of terra-cotta; a section of an I beam; a knobby amber-colored resin block; a heat-rolled steel tube cut with a drop saw, and another cut with a plasma torch. In the corner--almost hidden from view--stands a two-foot-high column of poured concrete, its crushed-gravel aggregate studding through the composite like shreds of sacred ore. The light, one notices immediately, is scarce and stingy.
"I had a vision," Price says. Understated yet solid, like the materials around him, he is wearing blue jeans and a black jersey, his limp brown hair just a shade too long about his ears to be businesslike and too short to be bohemian. Price looks like a pop star attending his son's communion. "I was living in Rotterdam," he says, "in one of the illuminated towers on the Maas River near the Erasmus Bridge, standing on my balcony gazing out at the cityscape at night. Before me I saw an unskinned concrete building going up, with light sifting through all the perforations in the concrete. Suddenly I saw an inverse image, with the perforations solid and the concrete letting light enter the building. The vision spread quickly across the scene. All the buildings were built with a material that would transmit light. I asked myself if we could make a whole new city this way."

During the past four years the 35-year-old Price has had several of these powerful visions. They seize him in various locations--exiting the highway on his way from Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris; in his Houston office; and at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Rem Koolhaas's firm in Rotterdam, where Price worked for four and a half years. The inspiration for these visions was a question Koolhaas uttered during a meeting about a concert hall the firm was designing in Porto, Portugal: "Could we make the concrete translucent?"

"Rem was very much into researching transparency," Price says, switching on the two slide projectors placed at opposite sides of his computer monitor to begin his presentation. "Transparency in building--but also in modeling. At one point in almost every OMA project the models were constructed to be transparent. It was like X-raying the program arrangement."

Price's presentation begins with a slide of Europe at night, taken by satellite. The sleeping continent spreads across the white office wall; constellations of light, concentrated in Paris, London, Lisbon, and Brussels, flicker their poignant, indecipherable messages out toward the distant sky. "When we were working on the Porto concert hall, I started thinking about how the complex might be seen from above. I saw it as a glowing ember in the landscape--a sort of lightbulb on the skin of the Earth. What kind of icon could this structure be for the people flying over it? Could it be a sign, representing the heart of European culture?"

Translucent concrete is more of an embryo than a grown child. The first samples were produced in September 1999. Early last year Price conducted compression and flexural strength tests on several small samples and produced a series of stress-and-strain diagrams for the material. Last September he began sending discreet inquiries to commercial manufacturers in hopes of expediting his research. Yet aside from those manufacturers, and a few trusted friends and associates, Price has not publicized or published his research. There has been no mention of "translucent concrete" in either the mainstream or trade press. Koolhaas may have been the first to utter the words, but there's no question that it's Price's baby. Only someone like Price, with an architect's broad vision and an artisan's narrow focus, could tinker with the composition of a new material while simultaneously exploring its applications in building and design.

Born in 1965 in Fort Knox, Kentucky, he grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of five children, Price spent his childhood reading Thoreau and Emerson, tending cattle, and building elaborate, environmentally friendly tree forts with his twin brother, Robert. The family frequently worked together restoring their nineteenth-century rural home. "I grew up in an environment where you could make freely," Price recalls, switching to a slide of a silicate-fabric chimney fastened with Velcro that he designed for OMA's award-winning Villa Floirac, in Bordeaux, France.

In fall 1984 Price enrolled in the architecture program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), in Blacksburg, taking a bachelor's degree in 1991 and a master's of architecture in 1994. Descended thematically from the Bauhaus, with strong ties to Switzerland, Virginia Tech has a teaching tradition of making and materials. "The first time I saw Bill's work was at the villa of one of the Virginia Tech faculty in Blacksburg," says Gary Bates, an American-born architect with Space Group in Oslo, Norway, and a former classmate. Bates also worked at OMA (1992 98), and was responsible for bringing Price there. "Out back, in a garden, there were twenty 24 x 36 constructions. They were most like collages, composites made using textiles, clothing, painting on canvas, plasters, cement. They weren't models as such, but investigations into space, into the construction process. Interesting, and beautiful. I knew, even from these, that Bill was an amazingly physical guy, and not just a paper architect."

Upon finishing his master's, Price took a job with Rudy Hunziker in Tesserete, Switzerland, near Lugano. On Bates's suggestion, he was hired by Koolhaas in 1996 to establish a research-and-development office. Price's work at OMA centered on the creation of a corporate memory. With the Rotterdam firm's high turnover rate--the average length of stay for an associate there varies from three months to two years--there was little cross-referencing from one project or solution to the next. Much of the studio's experience and knowledge was lost or poorly placed. Price recalls that in his first year at OMA almost half the research requests he received were redundant. With the help of three software engineers he enlisted from the United States, Price developed an intraoffice Web site with databases in materials and specifications, drawings, and images. Designers could search under "glass" or "transparency" or "houses," and access all of the studio's work in those categories.

During his four years at OMA, along with his design responsibilities and duties as director of R&D, Price continued to ruminate on Koolhaas's idea of translucent concrete. It wasn't an obsession--Price is not the type of man who has obsessions. But it was an original, practical, and just trendy enough idea to animate a good deal of his thinking. Price's notebooks from those years are filled with sketches, diagrams, random notes, and philosophical reflections inspired by his not yet defined material: drawings of trees near Charles de Gaulle Airport sleeved in plastic insect mesh (the notes below one sketch read "157 kilometers per hour" with the exact time listed at "1:13--made translucent, almost weightless, levitating in the midday sun"); diagrams of the various components and magical proportions that might yield this elusive mixture; notes that Angelica from Rugrats uses a makeup that is activated and deactivated by the temperature of the water with which she washes her face; and syllogisms that differentiate between the desire that drives the quality and nature of a thing, and the need that dictates that thing's physical properties.

"It's something my father taught me," Price says, switching to another slide of the OMA Villa Floirac, "to find solutions quickly, with the materials available to you. At the Bordeaux house, one of the sliding glass windows kept sticking. The concrete mass above it kept expanding during the heat of day. People involved in the construction said we should change the motor or redesign the track. But it was a matter of sanding down the area where it was pinching."

For translucent concrete, the desire was to transform the traditionally opaque elements of a building--foundation, walls, roof, supporting column--into components that could transmit light. Light travels through it in different quantities and intensities, depending on its composition. Most of Price's samples and renderings emit a glow, like a soft-light bulb, or Greek marbles shedding hours of absorbed daylight as the sun sinks into the sea.

The need (those physical questions Price is so good at answering) was that the translucent material be pourable--and that once solidified it support weight, absorb shock, insulate, and endure as well as or better than traditional concrete. Price chose to concentrate on the material itself and launched a systematic analysis of concrete to find which of its four traditional components--or which combination of aggregate, binder, reinforcement, and form--was best suited as a carrier of light. He wondered whether the aggregate, which is usually made of crushed gravel, might permit some light to travel through its mass if he varied the density. He looked to replace cement--the customary binder in concrete--with translucent materials like plastic. For reinforcement, normally effected with opaque steel rods, Price thought of ferrying light through the cement mass by using translucent reinforcement such as plastic. He even experimented with manipulating the surface of the concrete to create points for light transmission.

"My ultimate goal was to create a material to change concrete--but still keep the construction technique intact," Price says, switching to a slide of a poured block of translucent concrete made from a crushed-glass aggregate and a plastic binder. Lit from underneath, it seems to breathe light like the sun breaking through winter ice. He reaches behind him onto the bookshelf, takes a small cylinder made from the same material, and places it and two other samples onto his desk. They look like high-design paperweights: crushed glass, plastic tubes, and crushed opaque gravel frozen in translucent plastic. It's easy to imagine a tabletop made of this material--or an entire wall of a house, theater, or museum.

"This could be made into blocks or bricks," Price observes, switching to a slide of yet another OMA project, a series of weight-bearing translucent columns he helped design for a social-services center commissioned by Samsung in Korea. Here too, the solution is ingenious and simple: a glass cylinder within another glass cylinder, with a film between them that transforms into foam to create a fire barrier. "But ultimately, I'd love a material that you can just pour into a form. It would restructure the whole scene. What a great thing for architecture--to have this new element given to it. I'm working with an architect's fever. I'm not trying to solve a specific structural problem. I'm trying to develop this new material, then see what we can do with it."

Price may claim to have ignored--or at least shelved--considerations of how his new composite might transform his profession. But he has expanded his research into usability patents and potential industry partners. "The university development timeline is notoriously slow," he explains. When forced to speculate, Price believes his material could be used in construction as well as for design objects: bathtubs, toilets, tables, even lamps and lampshades.

Translucent concrete will need to be further researched, perfected, and tested before widespread applications are possible. The analyses conducted thus far--tests done in the laboratory at Virginia Tech on small columns and cylindrical sections of translucent concrete with the crushed-glass aggregate and plastic binder--have shown the new material to be superior to traditional concrete in compression and flexure. But large-scale applications of his new material are still months--if not years--away. Neither Price nor anyone else can respond to questions about thermal dynamics, heat transfer, seismic stability, or a host of other construction parameters. The material is currently being considered for two small case-study houses, and for a construction experiment in Europe.

Economics is also a factor. The costs of the components in the most successful mix make translucent concrete about five times more costly than traditional concrete, and would limit at least first-generation applications to large-budget projects. Price argues that this too is relative, because builders would need less of it to obtain the same performance they would get if they used ordinary concrete.

Several of Price's colleagues and mentors exude boundless enthusiasm over the potential applications of Price's research. "Architecture is still kind of medieval in its nature," says Frank Weiner, head of the Department of Architecture at Virginia Tech. Weiner knew Price when he was a student, and likes to point out that a wooden speaker's podium Price designed as an undergraduate remains in use. "We're still building buildings from the ground up. It's exciting for someone to challenge some of the fundamental facts of architecture. But what's important about this is that finally we can say we may be on the threshold of being able to build the first modern buildings."

Robert Dunay, associate dean of the Virginia Tech architecture department and director of industrial design, believes translucent concrete might solve one of architecture's oldest dichotomies. "Historically, solidity and lightness have always been at odds," says Dunay, whose industrial-design students helped Price develop and test his samples during Price's tenure as an adjunct professor of architecture in the 1999 2000 academic year. "Translucent concrete might give us the ability to deal with some of the attributes of concrete--strength, stability, and molding--but also give the qualities people normally associate with glass. This would have both large- and small-scale applications."

Wim Eckert, a Zurich-based architect who worked with Price at OMA, believes translucent concrete could solve a problem with a house he and his associates are designing for an information-technology magnate. The house fronts a lovely view on the Zurichsee, the freshwater lake bordering Zurich. But the remainder of the environment is insipidly residential. "It could be really interesting to incorporate natural lighting conditions into a totally opaque facade with this material," Eckert says, "so that the structure becomes a kind of skin for light. You could have the ghost of mediocrity--the natural light of the surroundings--without being confronted with the physical presence."

Even more than the specific project, Eckert is excited by the structural possibilities translucent concrete might provide. "If we work with transparency, it usually needs to be held," he says. "This means you constantly add joints to the building. If we could reduce this into one material, which could have a structural cohesion with concrete, you lose a joint. It would be really interesting to have a jointless building, because joints are always a technical problem. If we could use this material to eliminate the weak points in a building, that would be a groundbreaking architectural concept."

I was just thinking this was published a couple times here.

I was just thinking this was published a couple times here.I posted it almost 2 weeks ago, someone else asked about it about 4 days later in a different thread... so yes, popular topic last week!

hi all.

i have no idea about transparent concrete though it ha been invented for years.

any project be built by this material?
and how it work?
how about the light and texture?
how it compare with glass?
how it be used in ur country?

thanks!

and i kown shadows on the lighter side will appear with sharp outlines on the darker one.but how about shadows on the darker one?

Ziga, i believe this thread is informative enough to answer your questions.
You can try googling it on the net as well.

Just to show more pictures; when a supplier was pushing this product to me recently.

It is made of fine grained concrete embedded with optical fibers which ae cast layer by layer in prefabricated moulds. This combination creates a new translucent material which allows light to transmit freely between the two sides of the concrete. Even through thick walls, light displays with colour changing effects and shadows can be seen.

Luccon– The material
Dimensions: 25 x 50 cm, 30 x 60 cm and 30 x 90 cm
Thickness: 25 – 100 mm
Colours: Lava grey
Compressive strength: Greater than 80 N/mm2
Bending tensile strength: 4-5 N/mm2
Gross density: 2100-2300 Kg/m3
Processing: All common methods for processing concrete, such as sawing, grinding, drilling and polishing are also possible with Luccon.

Custom-made products (different sizes, thicknesses and colours) available on request.

Interesting as a concept, but just to expensive, i mean a similar effect can be made with a reinforced concrete lintel and translucent glass.
However, i can't NOT see the investors going "i want translucent concrete! it's the latest thing, dude!" :bang head

U never know what ideas and inspiration u can imagine if you have something like this to play with.

I have seen small samples of this material in the UT Materials Lab, and done some research as to availability when we first started the Kivik Pavillion (http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6191) project. It would seem that it is only available in pretty small units (much like the ones you see stacked with the woman standing behind in the examples above).

They've got a process to make this stuff, but it doesn't seem to scale up all that well. The image above with a whole wall and trees outside is just a model. "Translucent Concrete Blocks or Tiles" would be a better title.

Neat idea, but still quite a few years away from being 'usable' for anything other than small scale projects as far as I can tell.

it seems that no one use it in a project?

the pictures mostly show the voyeuristic aspect of this material...
but if You use it You never now who will stand behind it - so it`s not worce the expence... on the other hand - there are a lot of combination of glas and thin stone (allready translucent) on the market -
for shops and presentations reasonable..

bernhard

U never know what ideas and inspiration u can imagine if you have something like this to play with.

True, i take my statement back as i'll use it in a hypotetical project. :rolleyes::D

what the construction technique of translucent concrete?