Barrisol® LOVEGROVE - Belgium

Barrisol is the world’s leading manufacturer of stretched ceilings. The material has an inherent capacity to appear illuminated and attached to buildings while providing acoustic dampening.

It is mainly used for ordinary interior spaces as a flat, horizontal sheet that offers a lightweight and easyto- install alternative to other hung ceiling systems.

By intensively studying the stretch behaviour of the material, we found that it had an ability to take the form of minimal surfaces, as they are known in mathematical terms. This means that while the sheet itself is flat, when it is cut out with precision and mounted in a highly controlled way, it can create three-dimensional volumetric shapes.

The goal of this project is to illustrate the inherent value of this material by using advanced manufacturing technology, such as numerically controlled cutting and digitally controlled threedimensional bending machines to achieve a high level of precision on an architectural scale.

Together with the stretch behaviour of the material, seen in the first iteration of the design, this results in beautiful large-scale lighting objects, which illuminate and enhance the acoustic quality of the spaces that they inhabit. The Barrisol stretch foil and the tubular three-dimensional framework form a coherent entity.

These lights are showcased in a pavilion-type installation at the Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Belgium, which is also built by Barrisol, in order to highlight the possible applications of the material. In its entirety, the project explores a variety of different properties of Barrisol’s stretch-foil materials, such as mirroring, acoustic dampening and exceptional translucency.

Architect : BARRISOL - Normalu SAS & Ross LOVEGROVE