In 1968, the town of Gibellina in Sicily, Italy, was destroyed by an earthquake. Its residents decided to rebuild the town in a nearby (and hopefully more stable) location, thus turning the original site into a ghost town.

That's where art stepped in. Juergen of the travel blog for91days wrote

Between 1985 and 1989, a Sicilian artist named Alberto Burri used the old city’s ruins as the canvas for his most audacious work of modern sculpture. The resulting concrete cemetery is a bold piece of art, a comment on death, and a moving tribute to the devastated city.

Burri covered the streets of Old Gibellina with concrete, preserving the layout of the blocks. Walking around his monument is unsettling. You’re not just standing on the gravestone of a city, but actually tracing the lines of its corpse. Block after block of grey concrete rises from the concrete ground, like the ghosts of buildings. They’re high enough to peer over, so that the rest of the graves are always visible, along with the verdant valley stretching out into the distance.

See more pics: Link - Thanks Juergen!

She was rescued by workers along with her two sisters and a tom cat – called Clouseau, Dusty and Cerise. It is thought that they came into contact with red pigment used in concrete manufacturing which had caused their unusual appearance.

The dying is less obvious in three of the cats but Pink Panther has a creamy fur so she appears bright pink.

Attempts have been made to wash the dye out because different variations of red are seen as ‘danger colours’ to animals but they failed.

Instead, Cats Protection manager Claire Rowe says they will have to wait until the pink fur has grown out.

She said:’They are absolutely adorable, but Pink Panther is probably the pick of the bunch. It’s amazing. Until we washed her we had no idea what her natural colour was.

Link -via The Daily What

(Image credit: SWNS.com)

The Best Case Scenario forum user D.Heiße has created a number of unique case mods, including one in a tree trunk and one shaped like a sine curve. His most recent endeavor was to make one out of concrete. He built a mold with of Plexiglass, sheet metal, and welding rods and then poured concrete in. You can see process photos at the link.

Link via Technabob

This couch is a solid block of concrete. It was made by the British firm Grey Concrete as a demonstration of their new, precise molding techniques:

The sofa is made by taking a mold from a real Chesterfield, which is then used to make a glass textile reinforced casting. The cushions are a part of the casting. Before making the mold, the padding inside the cushions was replaced with a rigid foam which was modeled to make “bum prints.” The molding techniques used by Gray Concrete pick up detail really well so the concrete sofa really looks leathery. There’s even a concrete 50p piece stuck down behind one of the cushions to complete the realistic effect.

Link via OhGizmo! | Company Website | Photo: Design Milk

The Medium Awards is an annual materials sciences recognition program in the UK. Cliff Kuang of Fast Company has a slideshow of seven winners, including a carbon fiber alternative made from carrots, a sponge that absorbs oil but not water, and a very lightweight substitute for kevlar. Pictured above is an inflatable tent made from concrete-embedded cloth. Just add water, and it turns into a hardened structure.

Link | Photo: Concrete Canvas

Time is tight if you are just starting to make Halloween decorations, but this one can be ready in a day. Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has instructions for making your own concrete tombstone! It might not be fancy enough for an actual grave, but it is sturdy and customizable for Halloween. Link

The Crack Garden is an award-winning project by CMG Landscape Architecture in San Francisco, California. The project transforms a desolate concrete landscape into a lush garden:

Inspired by the tenacious plants that pioneer the tiny cracks of urban landscapes, a backyard is transformed through hostile takeover of an existing concrete slab by imposing a series of "cracks". The rows of this garden contain a lushly planted mix of herbs, vegetables, flowers, and rogue weeds retained for their aesthetic value.

Link – via Pruned

This is real, construction-grade concrete. It is not totally transparent, but the optical fibers embedded within it allow the concrete to transmit sufficient light to allow for some interesting (and useful) applications.

The fibers can transmit light up to 50 feet, and because they take up only a small portion of the block, they do not affect the structural integrity of the building material. 

Filled with optical fibers that run from one end of a poured piece of concrete to the other, these prefabricated blocks and panels effectively transmit light from one side to the other. Colors and light remain remarkably consistent from end to end, but with a natural variation from the pouring process that actually softens the effects considerably.

Link – via darkroastedblend

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

The movement was initiated by French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, known more popularly as Le Corbusier. The Brutalist approach was marked by an unashamed display of building functions and construction using poured concrete in a way that did not disguise the rough materials with which buildings are made. Brutalism [sic] completely rejected the classical norms of beautification and decoration for hard angles, rough surfaces, and exposed plumbing and machinery.

Link | Brutalist Architecture at Wikipedia | Brutalist Architecture Flickr pool

(Photo: Barbican Centre in London by GarySmith70 [Flickr])