BFV Architectes is the name that unites Jean Bocabeille, Olivier Fassio and Jean-Brice Viaud. They now have over 25 years of experience in the construction sector. In his testimony, Jean Bocabeille provides us with his vision of architecture and the use of ProtectGuard Color stains for his concrete projects.
At BFV Architects, we like construction, constructive systems, construction materials, their implementation… We love to explore the new possibilities offered to us by our partners, whether they are contractors or the manufacturers working to develop these materials.
We have been working with Guard Industrie for a few years now. In the beginning, we acknowledged that, mainly for housing projects, the budget constraints of these programmes would inevitably lead to coating all or part of the façades in plaster, and what is more, mediocre-quality plaster.
We have known for a long time that plaster only gives you one guarantee: premature ageing! In today’s suburban context, with an environment that is already degraded with a lot of pollution, plaster ages poorly! Plaster façades, whatever their original colour or tone, will quite quickly become covered with a grey dust. This gives a generic grey tone to suburban buildings and enhances the morose atmosphere of these areas that are already so profoundly impacted by an unavoidably banal nature.
Concrete poured on site, and then coated with a water-repellent, coloured stain, has become a viable alternative to plaster.
For a slightly higher cost, we can recommend raw concrete façades, taking care to divide the concrete up with horizontal or vertical joints in order to avoid fissures and we choose stains that cover more or less of the surface depending on the appearance of the concrete.
We’ve found a large range of expression among metallic shades and effects of volume by alternating gloss or matt finishes, which allows us to play with a certain ambiguity in the material.
Some of our projects appear to have a metallic coating, others seem to have been made from masscoloured concrete. The stains not only have an aesthetic quality to emphasise, but also its water- and oil-repellent nature enables it to resist grime, directly linked to continuous pollution in the air. Water slides off the surface of the protected concrete, also removing any polluted dust. The building then resists ageing and keeps its initial allure.
Jean Bocabeille, for BFV Architecte
