MMo | Vilnius

The concept of the MO Museum required that the furniture of the souvenir shop in the ground floor lobby, the curtain of the cafe bar and the benches in the café have concrete parts, as other materials would not have been suitable here.

The concrete parts of the museum furniture were made of glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC). The main difference between this and standard concrete is that GFRC concrete uses fiberglass instead of standard reinforcement. Additional additives such as quartz dust, polymers, etc. make GFRC concrete stronger than the regular construction concrete. All this makes it possible to manufacture much thinner, at the same time lighter, but very strong concrete. For example, all the concrete slabs of a souvenir shop (doors, drawer facades, countertops) are made of 19 mm thick concrete. It looks really impressive, knowing that the length of the tabletop, which is parallelogram in shape and the long diagonal, is 357 cm.

The architectural concept of architect Daniel Libeskind was very specific: the furniture had to have certain angles and shapes. Therefore, it was difficult to make the concrete parts of them, especially the furniture of the souvenir shop. Joining the  corners made of concrete was a particularly challenging part of work.

The furniture made for the MO Museum was non-standard, so we had to look for different solutions. It was especially difficult to come up with the idea of how to make the souvenir shop’s furniture because it is not rectangular but parallelogram in shape. It was also necessary to find a solution to make concrete facades of drawers and doors.