Looking for a versatile building material that can be used both indoors and outdoors? Have you considered cork?
Designer Yves Béhar is using the material most commonly associated with wine bottle stoppers and push pin bulletin boards to create “Port-All,” an installation made from patterned cork tiles. The tiles will eventually be available for purchase.
“Cork is a unique material that is versatile, resilient, and sustainable, with a large range of performance characteristics,” Béhar tells Fast Company. “It has become my new favorite material since I have become more familiar with all of its capabilities.”
Cork comes from the bark of a cork oak tree, which can be harvested every seven years. “The trees are climate change resistant as they need little water, and can resist fires pretty well,” Béhar says. He also likes how the material is anti-microbial, water resistant, can recover from compression, and insulates from heat, cold, and noise.
His work “Port-All“ is a mini tower visitors can walk through to explore the material first-hand. The installation is opening in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 6 as part of City Cortex, a cultural program about contemporary urban contexts. Behar says working on the curved tower surface made him think of “molding cork in patterns that permit bending in both convex and concave directions.”
He first considered building the tower by bending thin sheets of cork or casting cork mixed with another material into pre-curved shapes. He didn’t find either of those solutions elegant enough, so instead he and his team proposed bendable tile. “Long-lasting wall coverings with insulation and anti-microbial capabilities in a renewable material is the perfect solution that comes from the past and is adapted to our future,” he says.
The exhibition is designed as a functional piece of art. “As a designer, I live to create micro experiences of perception,” Béhar says. “A person can pause for a few seconds and feel the change created by the material and the form.”
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