“A new world of Terrazzo.”
Crosini was contacted by a renowned commercial builder that we had worked with on a previous build in Glebe. The brief was astounding involving the forming, casting, grinding and polishing of a sculptural terrazzo table that doubles as bench seat.
There were numerous challenges including getting the piece to fit within budget, the inability to crane pieces of the table in, grinding and polishing internal radiuses, and completing the scope within the limited timeframe.
We workshopped various concepts for development and found a creative solution to cast the piece in position around a premade concrete structure. This innovative idea brought the piece within budget, and we were able to limit the piece to one joint where the table transitions into the seat, which was remarkable.
Forming the intricate sculptural elements of the table involved having foam CNC carved by a 5-axis robot and hard coated with polyurethane. We designed the form so that foam elements would merge and be housed with formply to create the overall shape. Aligning each element and custom fabricating every facet to develop this piece required diligent precision.
One of the most challenging components of this piece was mixing and casting our high-performance concrete. As the piece was on level 7 of the building, the space around the table was limited and we had to navigate a 900mm wide elevator door opening. The most feasible solution was to dismantle a 300-litre mixer and reassemble it next to the table.
We mixed 12 times, divided the mixes into 96 buckets, place the perfectly measured marble stones into each bucket, remixed each bucket by hand with the marble stones, and had placed over 5 tonnes of material into the form.
Specially designed tooling and practices were used to grind and expose the beautiful marble stones, polish, and seal this one-of-a-kind piece. This project has been our biggest challenge to date, and we were ecstatic with the result as were the clients.
