Discussion: Concrete - A Yearning for the Monolithic
Monolithic buildings radiate a sense of strength. The pervasiveness of a single material, in conjunction with only a few restrained details, creates an agreeable impression of archaic simplicity in our modern society. If one seeks to achieve a unified design for the structure, facade, pavings and other ancillary elements of a building in temperate climatic zones, the versatility of concrete makes it the ideal material. Many different surface treatments are possible for the design of facades. In the Swiss embassy in Berlin, Diener and Diener sought to achieve a monolithic effect by avoiding all trace of working joints. The walls were concreted in a continuous process over a period of 26 hours (see Detail 6/01). Another method of circumventing the constraints of joints can be seen in an office building in Munich by MVRDV (ill. 4), where a series of U-shaped precast concrete elements were offset to each other from storey to storey to create a series of projections and recesses. Sometimes the pattern of formwork ties may be exploited to lend the surface a certain structure. In the Schöller Bank in Vienna (Detail 7-8/02), however, Jabornegg and Pálffy used an elaborate expanding shuttering technique to avoid precisely this effect.
