The Visual Concrete Group Limited

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    • Opaque Pigments in Cement
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  • Media
    • May/June 2012: Reactive Stain Effects Using Household Items
    • October 2011: Using Brass and Glass to Create Concrete Poetry
    • July 2011: I Have Seen the Future, and It Is Gray
    • April 2011: Let’s Be Careful Out There
    • Feb/March 2011: Staining Was Never Easy, But Now It’s Complicated
    • January 2011: Patina Stains and Embedded Fish in Wyoming
    • Nov/December 2010: Freehand Means Freedom for You and Your Customer
    • October 2010: Lead Bricks and Black Holes: Weight and Scale
    • Aug/September 2010: Berkely’s Street of Concrete Dreams
    • July 2010: A Tale of Two Topping Slabs
    • May/June 2010: Good/Evil, Day/Night, Color/No Color
    • April 2010: Bubbles, Balloons and Broken Glass: Concrete Ideas from Outside the Box
    • Feb/March 2010: Far Far Away
    • January 2010: Entering the Strata-Sphere
    • Nov/December 2009: Residential Concrete Reminiscences
    • Sep/October 2009: Underappreciated Structural Slabs Can Be Recycled
    • June/July 2009: Designing Concrete That Is Maintenance Free
    • May 2009: This Stamp is No Cookie Cutter New-school Methods of Concrete Embossing
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Sustainability

BP-Helios-HouseGreening the Mix by Mary Burger, while studying landscape architecture and environmental design at U.C. Berkeley, and featuring the concretist. (read more)

Approaching a project with sustainability in mind, for us, boils down to simplicity. The finish can still be rich, colorful, and tactile, and perhaps exemplifies our mission better than most or many of our projects… because a simple approach most often encourages and embraces the most elemental properties of concrete and translates them into fine finish. One example would be a floor with a former life… one that has lived through a series of remodels, and now wears the history of those past times with visible patches, spalls and trenches. On numerous occasions, we have been given the gift of working with those “imperfections” and successfully integrated them into a composition that is rich, unique, and utterly honest. In new construction, there is opportunity to work more sculpturally, in the concrete, with techniques such as seeding of objects or materials like recycled glass, steel, grain (yes, like chicken feed!) or other materials. Physical and visual texture can be manipulated; either with the freshly placed slab, during the cure, or after the slab is hard. In conjunction with these techniques, there are applied materials (such as dyes, pigments, and sealers) that are suitable for LEED projects, and manufacturers continue to make more and better products with a reduced carbon footprint and LEED certification in mind.

The Clarke Residence (CLICK image to see larger view)


The Burnham Residence


The Quintessa Winery


UC Berkeley


  • Archives

    • Media
      • May/June 2012: Reactive Stain Effects Using Household Items
      • October 2011: Using Brass and Glass to Create Concrete Poetry
      • July 2011: I Have Seen the Future, and It Is Gray
      • April 2011: Let’s Be Careful Out There
      • Feb/March 2011: Staining Was Never Easy, But Now It’s Complicated
      • January 2011: Patina Stains and Embedded Fish in Wyoming
      • Nov/December 2010: Freehand Means Freedom for You and Your Customer
      • October 2010: Lead Bricks and Black Holes: Weight and Scale
      • Aug/September 2010: Berkely’s Street of Concrete Dreams
      • July 2010: A Tale of Two Topping Slabs
      • May/June 2010: Good/Evil, Day/Night, Color/No Color
      • April 2010: Bubbles, Balloons and Broken Glass: Concrete Ideas from Outside the Box
      • Feb/March 2010: Far Far Away
      • January 2010: Entering the Strata-Sphere
      • Nov/December 2009: Residential Concrete Reminiscences
      • Sep/October 2009: Underappreciated Structural Slabs Can Be Recycled
      • June/July 2009: Designing Concrete That Is Maintenance Free
      • May 2009: This Stamp is No Cookie Cutter New-school Methods of Concrete Embossing
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