An outstanding project even for a professional concrete manufacturer like dade – to be able to realize a challenging assignment for marte.marte architects for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016. As the only Austrian architects, marte.marte were invited to talk in the main exhibition at the Arsenale about small victories in their projects which serve to improve the quality of the built environment. With the title: “In the search of the unexpected”, 5 concrete cubes were planned, each of which contained a succinct detail of realized projects. At the same time, film sequences by Andreas Waldschütz were shown on monitors. These large concrete cubes were produced by dade-design.com using state-of-the-art technology – the shapes for the terrain structure as well as the elaborate architectural models were realized with the 3D printing process developed over the last two years. Subsequently, the grain was worked out manually from the acidified surfaces by the artist Gregor Weder by hand. Since the cubes are exhibited in the venerable Arsenal and transported across the canals in Venice, the weight of the blocks, each with 160cm side length had to be below 2t. Normal – i.e. fully poured – the cubes would weigh about 10.5t. dade design succeeded to match the weight limit by applying sophisticated mold and formwork technology as well as making use of the high-performance concrete dade ROC.
