190: Five projects where the material remembers how it was made
Concrete, cedar, latex, ironbark — and a mushroom dome on the Mexican coast
This week we kept finding projects where the material remembers how it was made. Concrete that records the grain of its formwork. Cedar repurposed from the mould it shaped. Latex cast from a body that is no longer there. Five projects this week are really about traces — what a material holds after the hands leave.
In Mexico, Casa Wabi Mushroom Pavilion by OMA is a domed concrete pavilion for cultivating mushrooms at Fundación Casa Wabi — burlap-stamped walls that age with iron-rich water, an oculus flooding a cave-like interior, architecture as closed-loop sustenance between the mountains and the Pacific.
The Crack into Sleep Is the Crack into Dreaming by Li Hui is a minimalist photography series exploring the fragile boundary between waking and dreaming — double-exposure technique layers memories into single frames, shifting between sharp focus and soft dissolution.
Concrete Stories just added two new projects this week — a mushroom dome on the Mexican coast and a spiralling tram stop in Switzerland. 100+ projects tracing how concrete moves between monolithic and intricate, raw and refined.
In Tokyo, Le Labo Store by Schemata Architects redesigns Le Labo’s Daikanyama flagship through a single act of material circularity — the cedar formwork that casts the concrete walls is repurposed as the shelving that lines them.
In Germany, Vessels of Unbecoming by Leon Simonis presents sculptures in latex, resin, and stainless steel that dissolve the boundaries between human, animal, and plant — materials treated as fragile bodies, snapshots of transition.
In Australia, Ironbark House by Not All Architecture is a 240 m² family dwelling on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road — ironbark timber cladding and raw steel shaped by coastal wind, Utzon-inspired modular planning that opens to protected courtyards.
In Switzerland, Hölstein Süd by Raeto Studer Architekten turns a five-metre height difference into spatial experience — an exposed concrete ramp and staircase spiralling 540 degrees around a 55-metre girder for the BLT Linie 19 tram stop.
