I have a twin brother who really likes concrete. We are both engineers. He is a Civil Engineer, and I am a Mechanical Engineer. Whenever I tell someone that I have a twin and that he is a Civil Engineer, I always go on to talk about how much my brother loves concrete. I then usually tell the age old engineer joke that civil engineers design targets and mechanical engineers design the weapons. But recently I have been hearing a lot about concrete and it isn’t only from my brother.

Concrete is being used everywhere including interior design and product design. I would say that it is a new trend, but concrete never really stopped being used in design. Much of the recent rise in popularity has been in the DIY maker spaces.

One of my favorite concrete designers is Benjamin Uyeda. He runs the YouTube channel Home Made Modern. He has a really unique story that he shared in a TEDx talk about his journey as a designer. He went from working as an architect to designing furniture and making YouTube videos to share the process of how to build that furniture.

Below is a video from his channel where he shows how to make a chair out of concrete. His videos are clean, concise, and very informative. The projects he makes are also very modern and practical.

Concrete is such a universal material to work with that it is really fun to see different manufacturing methods with it.

Below is a video I posted a video earlier this week about how to bend concrete during the curing process. The video isn’t nearly as polished and fun to watch as the Home Made Modern video, but it is a really cool video showing the exact process to create some really unique furniture.

I am dying to try to make this coffee table. I just think it looks amazing and is incredibly modern. The gentle curves as the top of the table bends into the legs are so minimal and perfect. I may have to convince my twin brother to help me out in making something similar.

The last thing I want to mention about concrete is to recommend a podcast. One of my favorite design podcasts, 99% Invisible, produced an episode last year all about concrete and it is really worth listening to. Overall the 99% Invisible podcast is amazing, but the episode all about concrete structures is really good and really gets into the love hate relationship we have with concrete.

One more thing, the picture up at the top is from an Instagram page I follow called @concretegeometric. Their work with concrete is amazing and worth following.