AFP – Hollywood stars have a taste for homes with a particular aesthetic. And Robert Downey Jr is one such star. The American actor has built a Binishell on his property in Malibu, Los Angeles County, in the United States (US). But this house, made of concrete shell, is more than just an architectural oddity, […]
Binishells use a construction technology invented in the 1960s by Dante Bini, who, with some 1600 structures globally made from his designs, is the largest dome-builder in history.
Reinforced concrete is, by a large margin, the most widely used building material on earth - by mass, we use as much reinforced concrete as every other material combined. One reason for this volume of use is concrete’s versatility - because concrete is placed as a liquid, it can be used to form structures of virtually any size and shape. Placing concrete thus requires some way of forcing the liquid concrete into the shape that you want it to take. This is traditionally done with concrete molds called forms or formwork [1]. Liquid concrete gets poured into the formwork, it solidifies [2], and the formwork is removed, leaving behind solid concrete in the shape of your structure.