Cement is one of those much-aligned materials. We rail against concrete buildings, slabs, roads and the like, but take an architect like Tadao Ando and he will show you what can be done with concrete when there’s a good design by it.
And here’s one.
Nobuhiro Sato is a craftsmen from that center of the art of monozukuri, Kyoto. He is a designer who likes to use procured materials such as plastic bags. Sato first worked with cement to make incense burners, molded into the shape of mini houses. Since then he’s gone on to try out coasters and other small domestic objects, taking what is usually relegated to the exterior and bringing it inside the home.
There’s something about cement that looks soft and cute when it’s reduced down to a household scale. What is usually masonry, propping up walls or roads, is somehow compelling when we can hold it in our hands as, in this case, a tack for pinning up photos.
The Cement Push Pins are a set of six tacks that will bring in a sense of construction and stone to your office or home.
Sato actually uses ice cube trays to make his pins by hand each time. It’s time-consuming to get them perfectly vertical and he had to experiment till he understood the curing process.
Now he makes two types of his sets of six; smooth or pebbles.
Made in collaboration with Pull + Push Products, the Cement Push Pins are available from JapanTrendShop.
