Tutor: Sitnikov Vasily
Advisor: Lloret Fritschi Ena

Concrete has historically been one of the most popular building materials thanks to its availability, durability and versatility. Thanks to its ability of taking virtually any form, a thoughtful design can allow us to build more with less. There are some important drawbacks in non-standard concrete casting. The production of non-standard concrete is labor intensive, time consuming, expensive and producing large amounts of formwork waste. Several researchers have focused on developing no-waste, recyclable and self-demolding concrete formwork material systems.

Graded Ice Matrix Structures is a research for a controlled, lean-production-model of spatially graded concrete elements using ice formwork. It taps on Vasily Sitnikov’s Ice Formwork research and aims to contribute to the design and production of controlled and precise spatial grading of concrete components.

Ice aggregate is investigated in terms of geometry, size and packing densities within two main groups: regular and autonomous. The resulting concrete elements, negative cast of the graded ice matrices, are then evaluated for their structural integrity, their performance on a larger scale and their potential applications and affordances in architectural design.