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Similar to the apartment building concept, it is planned to use infra-lightweight concrete walls as “Load-bearing thermal insulation” – the weight is reduced through the addition of recycled glass to a value of about 1,000 kilograms per cubic meter; floor decks are of glued-laminated timber panels.
The project led by Barkow Leibinger Architects for low-cost apartments incorporating smart materials in Hamburg, Germany, is an outstanding achievement in terms of concrete technology, typology, and energy efficiency in the context of affordable housing.
Firstly, the concrete technology makes it possible to cast wall elements with particular shapes in a prefabricated panel system. The design can be created with only two different wall prototypes, and yet achieves a surprising variability in the plastic expression of the walls.
Last updated: September 12, 2012 Zurich, Switzerland
Depending on the orientation of the elements, the system can generate an astonishing array of variable ground plans. Since the walls only take vertical loads (horizontal loads are taken up by the central core), the system accommodates a high flexibility in the spatial organization of the ground plans. The concrete walls themselves are 50cm thick. The concrete is mixed with an aggregate of recycled glass, which reduces its density to less than 800 kilograms per cubic meter. The weight of the concrete is further reduced by using glass fiber for reinforcement instead of steel. Snake-like tubes inserted in the outer portion of the concrete serve as solar collectors. Thanks to these measures, the concrete is thermally self-insulating, and does not require insulating materials to be applied to the exterior – its bare-faced concrete again, like in the heyday of modernism, but this time environmentally sound.
The outstanding merits of this innovative concrete production method are fourfold: First, it eliminates the need to use expensive and marginally-recyclable construction materials such as wood and steel sheet, while replacing the traditional materials for concrete formwork by wax. At the same time, it reduces formwork-related construction waste almost to zero. Second, it considerably cuts down the tremendous volume of manual labor necessary to produce highly complex concrete formwork because robots take-over the majority of the workload. Third, the relatively low cost of this formwork technology is a prerequisite for the economical production of geometrically complex precast concrete elements in small series. Fourth, there are virtually no limits regarding the three-dimensional shape of precast concrete elements with a hitherto unimaginable degree of accuracy.
Overall, this visionary formwork technology for geometrically complex concrete elements is a real quantum leap combining the utmost computer-aided manufacture (CAM) technologies with the latest generation of robots that has the potential for revolutionizing the construction process enhancing sustainable construction.