GFRC or granite for a memorial?
Two good materials, chosen the same way you would choose anything that has to last: by understanding what each one is actually made to do.
Read →Journal
Material, method, and care.
Notes from the studio, written for the questions families and clients actually ask. Mostly about what a material will do over a hundred years, and how we know.
Formed, not cut
Every carved memorial begins as a block and ends as whatever is left. Every cast one begins as a drawing of the space the material will fill. The two ways of working produce different objects.
Read →Caring for a memorial, simply
Very little, and none of it urgent. If you take one thing from this: clean water and a soft brush, and nothing from under the sink.
Read →Salt, sun and the Cape: a hard place to leave anything outdoors
A memorial in the Overberg is not in a museum. It is standing in salt-laden wind off the Atlantic, under hard summer ultraviolet, cooling forty degrees between afternoon and dawn.
Read →What a hundred-year design life actually means
It is a phrase worth being sceptical about, because it is used loosely. Here is what it means when an engineer says it, and what it does not.
Read →It is not the concrete you are picturing
When people hear concrete they picture a driveway: grey, coarse, poured over steel bars, cracked within a decade. That material and ours share cement, and very little else.
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