concrete design
Concrete is an utterly amazing material, but it’s so widely used – so pervasive in our world – that it’s easy for the average person to take it for granted and barely give it a second thought. As watershapers, of course, we don’t have the luxury of underestimating concrete: With the sole exception of water, it’s far and away the most essential of all the materials we use across a huge range of applications. We simply could not do what we do without it. But how often do we deploy concrete in purely aesthetic ways? Some of us use artificial rock or specialized decking treatments, but isn’t it mostly true that we build our structures from concrete and then systematically cover it up with plaster, stone, tile or some other surfacing material? It didn’t take long for me to start
The people who once inhabited modern-day Mexico's Yucatan peninsula were remarkably sophisticated. Their civilization was based on a deep-rooted knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, hydraulics and engineering. They quarried stone and moved it hundreds of miles on rollers, using this raw material and incorporating it into highly refined buildings, temples, roads and monumental works of art that rival those of the better-known cultures of ancient Europe, Africa and Asia. In 2001, I traveled extensively in the Yucatan to experience the region's culture and view masterworks from many centuries past. What I found was a sense of form, line and pattern in the ruins of
