#HTE

Cool Production Method: Soft Baroque’s “Puffy Brick” Concrete Casting Technique

Soft Baroque is the brand of Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin, a pair of artists and designers who create work “with conflicting functions and imagery, without abandoning beauty or consumer logic.” As part of their goal to “blur the boundaries between acceptable furniture typologies and conceptual representative objects,” the duo invented a rather nifty production method by experimenting with balloons, concrete and a containing mold:

“By injecting concrete into balloons and arranging them in a mould, a set of perfectly fitting set of concrete bricks is made. A new method of generating distorted soft architecture and objects and an exploration in the visual and tactile exchange between soft and hard.”

They refer to the technique’s yield as “Puffy Bricks.” Its most recent commercial application is a reception desk at the headquarters of Stockholm-based design brand Hem:

Hem previously commissioned Soft Baroque to make a furniture piece for a pop-up event in 2018, which prompted SB to invent the technique.

While I’d hate to be the guy assembling the thing (last summer I temporarily removed a series of perfectly-fitting flagstones on our property, forgot to record their positions and orientations, and failed miserably in putting them back), it does look like they’ve figured out a system: