Since 2009, Thorsten Klooster and Heike Klussmann have headed the BlingCrete working group at the University of Kassel.
www.blingcrete.com
Heike Klussmann
Heike Klussmann is an artist and a professor of art and architecture at the University of Kassel. Her work has been shown in recent exhibitions at the Detour Hong Kong, the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Aedes Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, and the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art. Her many honours and awards include first prize in an international competition to design Düsseldorf’s new Wehrhahn subway line, as well as an Artists Grant from Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, and the Goslar Kaiserring Grant.
www.klussmann.org
Thorsten Klooster
Thorsten Klooster is an architect in Berlin and the editor of the book Smart Surfaces — And their Application in Architecture and Design. He was a member of the Technical Science Research Group at the Fraunhofer Institute, and a design professor at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus. In 2007 he founded the firm TASK Architekten in Berlin. He has presented workshops and lectures at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Università IUAV in Venice, NIEA Sidney and the University of Michigan. He is currently a referee for the 2013 IBA Hamburg’s “Smart Material Houses” competition.
www.task-architekten.de
It was a tight squeeze in our photo booth this issue: the artist Heike Klussman, the architect Thorsten Klooster, and a couple of pieces of BlingCrete - the multi-functional, light-reflecting concrete that they’ve developed, patented, and that is coming soon to a building near you …
Please describe BlingCrete.
Heike Klussmann: It’s a newly developed material that combines the heavy surface of concrete with light-reflecting qualities, created by embedding little spheres of glass into the concrete to about 50 per cent depth. You immediately get a unique prismatic effect, with each sphere acting as a retroreflector — meaning light is reflected away from its source at an equal and opposite angle.
It came out of a project Heike did for a subway station in Düsseldorf. The idea there was to use light-reflecting material but it turned out that nothing on the market complied with fire regulations, so something new needed to be developed.
Heike’s an artist, and she already used retro-reflective materials in her work, whilst I’m an architect, more on the technical and scientific side, and have written a book on smart surfaces. So we combined our two specific types of knowledge and experience in making BlingCrete.
What’s the background of the product’s development?
Thorsten Klooster: It came out of a project Heike did for a subway station in Düsseldorf. The idea there was to use light-reflecting material but it turned out that nothing on the market complied with fire regulations, so something new needed to be developed.
Heike’s an artist, and she already used retro-reflective materials in her work, whilst I’m an architect, more on the technical and scientific side, and have written a book on smart surfaces. So we combined our two specific types of knowledge and experience in making BlingCrete.
And the name?
HK: … of course comes from the hip-hop “bling”: shiny stuff, jewellry.
So how can BlingCrete be used? What are its applications?
HK: There are so many functional applications: for reflective road markings, industrial hazard signs, platform edges, tunnels … and in architecture, it can be used on façades, in interior design, as a way-finding system — or for small, special situations where a message or graphic needs to be seen but only at a certain point where the information is required. It can also function as a tactile system for blind people.
TK: What’s nice for designers is playing around with ideas of the visible and invisible, and the material’s special ability to change from being active to passive.
So a balance then between use and beauty …
TK: There’s a big discussion at the moment about art and science. But our work on BlingCrete and functionalizing concrete surfaces are practical projects that combine these two fields. What’s inspiring is having the chance to work with people from all types of fields: scientists and experts in material physics, alongside artists, architects and designers.
Our work is on materials, but we are interested in the immaterial! We only use the material as a reference to things that are more conceptual: that’s what we do.
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