The timber stays in the wall
Sawn boards are the mould. Their grain, knots and butt-joints transfer permanently into the face - the formwork becomes the finish.
FORMWORK is an architecture studio with a single material discipline. No render, no cladding, no paint - every wall carries the grain of the timber it was cast against, left exactly as struck.
Board-formed concrete is not a finish we offer. It is the entire premise of the practice - structure, surface and detail resolved in one continuous pour.
Sawn boards are the mould. Their grain, knots and butt-joints transfer permanently into the face - the formwork becomes the finish.
Every concrete element does structural work. Nothing is veneer; the wall you see is the wall holding the building up.
Tie-cone holes, pour lines and the seams between boards are kept open and visible. We record the process, we don't hide it.
We design the shuttering as carefully as the building. Board width, grain direction and joint lines are drawn before a single bag of cement is mixed - because once the formwork is struck, that pattern is permanent.
Before the building, we draw the mould. Every board, joint and tie position is set on the elevation, so the finished surface is designed - not discovered on site.
Carpenters assemble the timber shuttering to millimetre tolerance. The grain direction and butt-joints are agreed as drawings, then mocked up at full scale.
A single, continuous pour wherever the structure allows, vibrated to bring the fines to the face. Timing the pour is the difference between a flat grey wall and a living surface.
The formwork comes away and the wall is finished. No grinding, no filler, no seal - the tie-holes and pour lines stay exactly as the casting left them.
We take on a small number of buildings each year where raw concrete is the point, not the budget option. Send the site, the programme and the constraint.
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