Concrete is anything but a consensus. Some love it, others hate it. It can feel as hard as granite or soft as velvet – depending on whose hands do the shape. Treated with technical precision or a touch of artistic flair, the concrete stops being only a material and begins to act alive. It plays with light, surprises with texture and somehow gives the silence shape. Although densely and structural, concrete can take on an almost insignificant presence: light, essential and contemplative. In certain rooms, it seems to disappear to loosen into the shadow or vibrate with the surrounding light. More than just a construction element, it becomes a language that is able to cause emotions, spirituality and time.
Usually, the material can also be transformed into structural, technical or infrastructural uses and also adopted more sensitive and more domestic roles. This is the sentence of the Italian studio Forma & Cemento, which has spent years to transform concrete into something far beyond the raw. Their pieces cross the structural function to inhabit the area of the delicacy with furniture, accessories and collections that reflect the visions of their designers. A new chapter on this trip comes with the collection Elementary observations on the ornamentDesigned by Marialaura Irvine, the artistic director of the brand. The series invites architects and designers to rethink the surface language of concrete as a neutral backdrop, but as a field for visual and tactile studies.
According to Irvine, the starting point of the collection is almost literary: the title is a tribute to the book. Elementary observations In the building by Erich Tessenow, who directly influenced her early years of training. In his final chapter, Tessenow writes: “Ornament is everywhere, but it is best if it is least intended … a smile that we are not looking for, but that we cannot avoid.” Building on the idea that Orvine is not excess, but a form of attention, Irvine constructs her visual examination. “Concrete is the material with which I grew up,” she reflects.
Brutal, gray, sometimes sad, sometimes hard, but able to adopt any shape. It is a cast material, a material that is not carved to create shape, but pour.
In this collection, simple geometries – squares, circles, hexagon corner – are slightly cut, subtracted or merged to create surfaces that are porous, tactile and contemplative. Here concrete does not pay attention; It invites you.
Each piece in the collection is poured in UHPC – Ultra High Performance concrete – a concrete with extremely high performance that enables thin, strong and incredibly detailed surfaces. This advanced concrete class is defined by its high mechanical performance, dense composition and extraordinary durability. This combination of properties enables the creation of lean elements with complex geometries and refined surface surfaces, which expands the expressive potential of concrete in contemporary design.
Divided into four group festivals, cut, subtracting and 3D, the collection as a visual alphabet and openly for endless possibilities of graphic compositions, tactile reliefs and free form designs. “It is composition that speaks through material, shape, color and texture,” says Irvine and emphasizes that her understanding of ornament is not only based on the intrinsic imperfections of concrete, but also from minimal gestures – subtle cuts, joints and overlays.
The collection is created by a rich and nuanced chromatic palette, ranging from earthy ochres and terracottas to deep wine -red, burned pink and pale, sun -like yellow. These tones, which are drawn from natural matter, give the surface heat and subtlety – they earth in the physical world and at the same time invite abstract and narrative architectural gestures. Each tile, defined by elementary geometries – squares, circles, trapezoids – becomes a modular unit in an open composition system. Whether to symbolic facades, calm wall reliefs or seamless flooring, these forms speak in patterns and repetitions, build the meaning through the surface.
In order to accompany this vocabulary, the designer Moodboards related to architectural archetypes – the house, the castle, the church – did not develop as fixed references, but as open requests. They serve as the starting points for spatial stories in which the function and shapes change fluently, one in the other. The result is a collection that exceeds the traditional boundaries of architecture, interior design and sculpture and suggests a poetic and modular method that builds the meaning through the surface.
In this work, Forma & Cemento confirms its commitment to the redefinition of concrete – not as a brutal structural medium, but as an expression surface that can convey form, silence, memory and intentions. By using the high performance and the fine details made possible by the UHPC technology, it questions conventional ideas of the material and changes its role from the infrastructure to artifacts. Through working with elementary geometric shapes – squares, circles, rectangles and hexagon – and transforming them through cuts, subtractions and reliefs, the collection creates a new visual lexicon. At the intersection of the technical precision and the openness of the composition, concrete is no longer a passive support, but an active language for creating poetic, modular and emotionally resonant designs.