alt Hacker NewsI wonder what the practical limit is on how thin and light you can make concrete for non-structural items? I can see someone selling concrete mugs on Etsy, for example. Maybe with clever use of fillers and thin walls you could have a version of this you could actually lift. It looks great, especially in contrast to a white IKEA-style office.
Re: decay, I regret not taking more photos of the final days of the RBS "Ziggurat": https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/stark-ph... ; at the end it had plants growing from much of the upper levels, making it look extremely Horizon Zero Dawn.
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Even structural items can be made quite thin! There is a college design competition to make concrete canoes which can be 3/8" to 7/16" thick: https://www.concretecanoe.org/2008Triva/Florida2008DesignPap...
You could mix concrete with other materiais too. I worked as a lab assistant in a engineering lab for some time. Putting styrofoam into the mix would result in lighter concrete within acceptable levels of resistance (for low level buildings). You might be onto something
I've read that adding a little bit of graphene can make concrete much stronger, lighter and easy to shape, so would allow for thinner objects.
> Maybe with clever use of fillers and thin walls you could have a version of this you could actually lift
You could likely also pour something like this out of aircrete, which would make it a lot lighter even at the same thickness
People who make concrete counter tops use a lot of fibreglass fillers to get them fairly thin but if you wanted it truly light weight you’d probably need to make it out of a dense foam and coat it with something that looks like concrete.