Designing the Future Since 1886
Escofet is a Barcelona-based
design firm who, through the creation of luxury site furnishings and urban elements, is an international
leader in the movement to transform and beautify public landscapes. With over a century of mastery and
innovation in cast concrete, Escofet is seen as a universal benchmark for the medium, continually
pushing the boundaries to enable new structural properties and open up new design possibilities.
Caption: For more than a
century, Escofet has been an international benchmark in landscape architecture thanks to its mastery of
concrete and its capacity to transform it and turn it into the skin of the city.
At the heart of Escofet is Barcelona, the city that is not just the firm’s
headquarters, but a showcase for its work and creativity. "More than 130 years of history have set Escofet
as a company one hundred percent involved with Barcelona, not only for its birth and location, but mainly
for its participation in the development and growth of the city,” describes Enric Pericas, Director of Urban
Elements for Escofet. Since its foundation in 1886, in the heart of the modernist movement, Escofet has
sought out the talent of local designers and architects, working with the likes of celebrated Catalan
creatives Antoni Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, and Alexandre de Riquer to compile the best catalog of
hydraulic pavement tiles of the era—a catalog that secured Escofet’s leading role in the architectural
history of Barcelona.
Caption: The company’s
development is marked by two elements that have been converted into icons of our identity: concrete and
Barcelona.
Throughout its history, Escofet has employed a pioneering strategy of pluralism in
design, continuously collaborating with leaders in art and architecture to push boundaries, further
innovation, and generate new design language. "Few companies can argue that design, as a management tool,
has been present in its publishing base for 130 years,” describes Pericas. "Our basic principles are
multidisciplinary exchanges with teams of consultant architects, designers and artists who have a special
ability to reinterpret every process, each material, over and over again until they come up with results
that provide us with the ability to create and disseminate new solutions.”
Since the 1970s, as the company expanded its focus from pavement tiles to luxury
concrete site elements, Escofet continued partnering with renown industrial designers and artists from
around the world, among them Ricardo Bofill, Arata Izozaki, Jen Nouvel, Richard Rogers, Buro Poppinga, and
Toyo Ito. Inspiration from this new class of design visionaries coupled with the firm's mastery of materials
and technological developments in Ultra High Performance Concrete opened up a whole new realm of
possibilities for Escofet‐large‐scale organic forms, crisp‐edged geometric pieces,
thin‐profile shapes, and
seemingly weightless suspended architecture. “The new generation urban furniture in UHPC defies the old laws
of physics. The matter is now seemingly freed of weight — a material that once needed to appear rigid
and
heavy can now seem soft and subtle. The new UHPC concrete technologies allow us to carry out designs that
only 10 years ago were not possible,” explains Enric Pericas. “While the matter has changed, the spirit of
Escofet‐a commitment to creativity and a constant dialogue with architects and
designers‐continues to remain
the same.”
Caption: Escofet designs
functional, comfortable, ergonomic products that increase diversity in use and offer an optimum
experience to users.
Through developments in UHPC and a diversification of its authors and offerings,
Escofet has been able to further its mission to help create vital public spaces. Like Landscape Forms,
Escofet believes in the transformative power of beauty, design, and creativity to better the urban
landscape. In this design process, Escofet not only considers the functionality, comfort, and ergonomics of
its products, but also deeply considers the more intangible social and emotional qualities the forms
promote. "Public areas can be evaluated by the quality of the social relations they generate, and the
capacity to stimulate interaction between people,” says Pericas. “So in designing for the urban landscape,
it is a question of insisting on projects in which the positive social and human-centric impact is
deliberately assigned a fundamental role."
Caption: Landscape Forms
offers a full range of Escofet's urban elements.
Beginning in 2012, Landscape Forms has been the exclusive North American partner of
Escofet, offering a broad collection of its expressive and functional site elements. Escofet and Landscape
Forms’ partnership is a natural one—each company shares a respect for design and the contribution of
great
designers and artists, a focus on craft, and a drive to innovate through materials, techniques, and
processes.