From Expo 2015 to the international market, i.active BIODYNAMIC cement by Italcementi is now officially available and on sale worldwide.
The innovative cement-based mortar used in the construction of the exterior structure and interior facades of Palazzo Italia, designed by Nemesi & Partners was launched at an event held on 10 September in front of an audience of international building community members.
It took a team of 15 researchers over 12,500 hours to come up with this new material for sustainable architecture: an eco-friendly, chromium-free cement that's strong, durable and ready for use in high-profile architectural works like the one it was tested on, because it also offers high levels of aesthetic quality.
"Palazzo Italia derives from the idea of a natural architecture that becomes a landscape," explained Susanna Tradati, who designed the work with Michele Molé and Nemesi & Partners. "Like a petrified forest whose complexity is made possible by the plasticity of the biodynamic cement. As architects, we normally find that our ideas are limited by the constraints of the materials and manufacturers at our disposal, but with Italcementi, for the first time in our careers, we found a company that actually urged us to take things further, and overcome the design limits so often associated with traditional materials. The success of Palazzo Italia is partly due to this exceptional new cement."
i.active BIODYNAMIC has a high degree of fluidity, which makes it suitable for producing non-structural, pre-fabricated architectural elements with complex geometries and slender cross sections.
The product's name encapsulates its innovative characteristics. The "bio" prefix derives partly from the fact that the product is chromium-free, but more importantly from the photocatalytic properties of its active ingredient, TX Active, which is covered by an Italcementi patent.
In contact with sunlight, the active ingredient in the material makes it possible to capture certain airborne pollutants and convert them into inert salts, thus helping free the atmosphere from smog. What's more, 80% of the mortar's content consists of recycled aggregates, partly from scrap generated by the machining of Carrara marble, which gives it a much brighter sheen than traditional white cements. And last but not least, the workability and strength of the product are outstanding by comparison with conventional mortars: i.active BIODYNAMIC offers significantly higher compression strength, flexural strength and weather resistance.