Tongue Bench 2 | 2024

The designer draw inspiration from the volumetry of the Casar de Cáceres bus station in Spain, a 1982 work by Jesús García Rubio, a highly expressive sculpture featuring undulating forms created from a thin sheet of concrete that curves and folds upon itself.
Alejandra Castañeda, the designer, played with clay and wire to understand its structural principles and interpret them in the design of an urban bench that was originally intended exclusively for Quetzalcóatl Park in Naucalpan, Mexico.
Using double-curved curves that were shifted where they were most needed, a two-meter span was bridged without intermediate supports. A sinuous line that thickens, thins, and twists in a way that reminds us of a tongue.
Three people can sit on it to rest or chat; thanks to its non-straight base, it allows for different heights that adapt from a child to a tall adult. You can also lie back and read or contemplate the sky, feeling almost like you’re in a hammock thanks to its organic shapes that cradle the body.
Initially, it was made of ferrocement, for which the patterns for each rod and bracket were prepared using 3D software in order to reproduce it many times over, optimizing costs and reducing the time it took to complete on-site. However, due to the artisanal casting process, the weight of the metal structure and its various finishes (terrazzo, colored tiles) exceeded half a ton. Although no piece had ever had a structural flaw, it felt visually heavy.

So, a second version of the bench was considered, but this time using a prefabricated construction process. A prototype was created with a thickness of 2.5 cm. The bench was built using Escofet’s Slimconcrete®, a concrete that incorporates inorganic glass fibers in the mass, as well as aggregates in different colors, achieving a resistance to compression, flexotraction, and impact three times greater than conventional concrete, allowing the creation of thin elements like this bench and achieving a weight less than half that of the first version.