SOFTCRETE

From Auguste Perret’s pioneering approach, moving through Le Corbusier’s Copernican revolution, to Tadao Aando’s purity, the use of concrete in architecture has been a permanent feature of the modern language. Be it interpreted as liquid stone, velvet modular pattern, plastic surface, or material magma, concrete has always been viewed by architects and designers as a material with a rough texture and cold soul, to be investigated, shaped and taken to extremes as in the Brutalist experiences of the 50’s. The project stems from a drawing for the restaurant Marimoto in New York It was only with designer Ross Lovegrove that concrete became a synonym for comfortable, soft and warm. And in this wonderful contest we find the chemistry between the company Gufram and the English designer. Softcrete, the name of this family of seats whose name is an oxymoron of contents, is today a comfortable and comforting sitting room outside the box. Made of polyurethane foam, this modular couch, made up of central elements, angle elements, and a coffee table, it comes in 2014 within a new chaise-longue, and provides infinite ways of arrangement. With Softcrete Ross Lovegrove defines a new tautology: soft as concrete. Please make yourselves at home.