Concrete is anything but a consensus. Some love it, others hate it. It can feel as tough as granite or soft as velvet — all depending on whose hands are doing the shaping. Treated with engineering precision or a touch of artistic flair, concrete stops being just a material and starts acting alive. It plays with light, surprises with texture, and somehow gives form to silence. Although dense and structural, concrete can take on an almost immaterial presence: light, ethereal, and contemplative. In certain spaces, it seems to disappear, dissolving into the shadows or vibrating with the surrounding light. More than just a construction element, it becomes a language, capable of evoking emotion, spirituality, and time.
Usually relegated to structural, technical, or infrastructural uses, the material can also take on more delicate and domestic roles. This is the proposition of the Italian studio Forma&Cemento, which has spent years transforming concrete into something far beyond the raw. Their pieces transcend structural function to inhabit the realm of delicacy, with furniture, accessories, and collections that reflect the visions of their designers. A new chapter in this journey comes with the collection Elementary Observations on Ornament, designed by Marialaura Irvine, the brand's artistic director. The series invites architects and designers to reconsider the surface language of concrete, not as a neutral backdrop, but as a field for visual and tactile inquiry.
According to Irvine, the collection's starting point is almost literary: its title pays homage to the book Elementary Observations on Building by Erich Tessenow, which directly influenced her early years of training. In its closing chapter, Tessenow writes: "Ornament is everywhere, but it is best when it is least intended… a smile we do not seek out, but which we cannot avoid." Building on the notion that ornament is not excess but a form of attention, Irvine constructs her visual investigation. "Concrete is the material I grew up with,"she reflects.
Brutal, grey, sometimes sad, sometimes harsh but capable of taking on any form. It is a cast material, a material that is not carved to create form, but poured.
In this collection, simple geometries — squares, circles, hexagons — are lightly cut, subtracted, or fitted together to create surfaces that are porous, tactile, and contemplative. Here, concrete doesn't demand attention; it invites it.
Each piece in the collection is cast in UHPC — Ultra High Performance Concrete — a concrete of extremely high performance that allows for thin, strong, and incredibly detailed surfaces. This advanced class of concrete is defined by its high mechanical performance, dense composition, and exceptional durability. This combination of properties enables the creation of slender elements with complex geometries and refined surface finishes, expanding concrete's expressive potential in contemporary design.
Divided into four groups — Solid, Cut, Subtract, and 3D — the collection unfolds as a visual alphabet, open to endless possibilities of graphic compositions, tactile reliefs, and free-form designs. "It is composition that speaks, through material, form, color, and texture," says Irvine, emphasizing that her understanding of ornament stems not only from the intrinsic imperfections of concrete but also from minimal gestures — subtle cuts, joints, and overlays.
The collection emerges through a rich and nuanced chromatic palette, ranging from earthy ochres and terracottas to deep wine reds, burnt pinks, and pale, sunlit yellows. These tones, drawn from natural matter, lend warmth and subtlety to the surface — grounding it in the physical world while inviting abstract and narrative architectural gestures. Each tile, defined by elemental geometries — squares, circles, trapezoids — becomes a modular unit in an open system of composition. Whether arranged into symbolic façades, quiet wall reliefs, or seamless flooring, these forms speak in patterns and repetitions, building meaning through surface.
To accompany this vocabulary, the designers developed mood boards around architectural archetypes — the house, the castle, the church — not as fixed references, but as open prompts. They serve as starting points for spatial narratives in which function and form shift fluidly, one into the other. The result is a collection that transcends the traditional boundaries of architecture, interior design, and sculpture, proposing a poetic and modular way of building meaning through surface.
In this work, Forma&Cemento reaffirms its commitment to redefining concrete — not as a brute structural medium, but as a surface of expression, capable of conveying form, silence, memory, and intent. Leveraging the high performance and fine detailing enabled by UHPC technology, it challenges conventional notions of the material, shifting its role from infrastructure to artifact. By working with elementary geometric shapes — squares, circles, rectangles, and hexagons — and transforming them through cuts, subtractions, and reliefs, the collection establishes a new visual lexicon. At the intersection of technical precision and compositional openness, concrete is no longer a passive support, but an active language for creating poetic, modular, and emotionally resonant design.
