Architecture in board-formed concrete · est. 2009
FORMWERK designs and builds in one material only: raw concrete cast against rough-sawn timber shuttering. No cladding, no paint, no second skin. Thirty-four built works across nine countries, each poured once and finished forever.
We are not minimalists. We are maximalists of a single material, convinced that one honest substance, poured with care against rough timber, says more than a catalogue of finishes ever could.
Structure, facade, and interior are the same pour. What holds the building up is what you touch. Nothing is applied, nothing can peel, nothing pretends.
We design the formwork, not the wall. Board widths, grain direction, tie-hole rhythm, and joint lines are set on paper months before the first truck arrives.
Raw concrete streaks, darkens, and blooms with rain and lichen. We pour for the building at year forty, not the photograph at week one.
A 420 m² family house cast in twelve continuous pours over fourteen months. The shuttering was milled from pines cleared on the site itself, so the grain pressed into the walls belongs to the hillside the house now occupies.
A maritime records museum on the North Sea, its walls cast with salvaged dock timbers still carrying rope burns and salt stains. The concrete inherited every scar; visitors read the harbour's history in the corridor walls.
A windowless chapel for a mountain hospice, lit by a single full-height slot facing due east. The interior pour used boards charred shou-sugi-ban style, leaving walls the colour of dusk that hold the morning light like a held breath.
A desert events hall whose single horizontal window frames the horizon for ninety uninterrupted metres. White cement and local marble aggregate give the walls a pale, bone-dry tone that flares orange at sunset.
Carpenters build the building first, in negative. Every board is numbered, oriented, and oiled by hand. A typical house takes 11 km of sawn timber.
Duration · 3 to 9 monthsConcrete arrives in one continuous lift per wall. We pour at dawn, in cool air, with the whole studio on site. There is no undo.
Duration · one day per wallRemoving the formwork is the project's only reveal. Whatever the timber gave the wall, the wall keeps. We repair nothing cosmetic, ever.
Duration · day 5 to day 9Walls are kept damp for a month and then left alone for a century. We return at years 1, 5, and 25 to photograph what the weather has written.
Duration · 28 days + 100 yearsFounded in Zürich in 2009 by Anneke Vogt and Tomás Ferreyra, FORMWERK is a seventeen-person practice of architects, structural engineers, and two full-time master carpenters.
We accept four commissions a year. Each one begins with a week on site, in every season we can manage, before a single line is drawn. Our carpentry workshop in Oerlikon builds 1:1 formwork mockups for every project; clients approve a real cast sample wall, never a render. The studio's research arm publishes Cast, an annual journal documenting how our completed walls age.
"They handed us a house with fingerprints of a forest on every wall. Eight winters in, it is more beautiful than the day they struck the forms."Elena Marchetti /// Casa Encofrado precursor, Ticino · completed 2018
We are reviewing commissions for 2027 pours now. Write to us with a site, a budget, and a reason the building must be concrete. We answer every letter within a week.