“The cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world,” wrote Frank Lloyd Wright of concrete blocks in his autobiography. That said, he saw the potential of the material and wrote that he “would take that despised outcast of the building industry”, “find a hitherto unsuspected soul in it” and “make it live as a thing of beauty”.
And a thing of beauty he did create, which he called the textile concrete block. These were Wright-designed blocks that could be moulded on site into different patterns, giving the finished building an extraordinary decorative quality.
Wright’s exploration of this material in the 1920s yielded four textile-block houses in California, of which only one remains (and is now on the market for 21 million USD): the Ennis House. But the legacy of textile blocks continues thanks to Swedish furniture brand Offecct and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Wright’s intricate pattern for the Ennis House concrete block has been reincarnated as Offecct’s trademark acoustic panel Soundwave. Made from recyclable moulded polyester, Soundwave Ennis improves the sound quality in spaces as well as preserving a legendary architect’s exploration to ameliorate and assign additional value to a utilitarian material.
Australia wide, Offecct is carried by Flokk. Images courtesy of Offecct.
