Ordinary cement concrete is the world's most important building material today, serving not only as a building material but also as a decorative element. Due to its good plasticity, concrete can be poured into various complex shapes; its good fluidity makes it suitable for road surfaces, bridges, and docks in transportation and highway engineering; and for urban road engineering, it's primarily used for city roads, sculptures, and other artistic creations.
However, the biggest drawback of ordinary cement concrete is its monotonous, dull, and lifeless appearance, which can create a sense of oppression. Therefore, people have devised methods to treat the walls, floors, and roofs of buildings, giving ordinary cement concrete surfaces certain colors, lines, textures, or patterns, producing decorative effects and achieving an artistic design. This type of concrete with artistic effects is called decorative concrete.
In colored concrete for road surfaces, the main categories are white concrete and colored concrete. White concrete is made with white cement as a binder, white or light-colored minerals as aggregates, or with the addition of a certain amount of white pigment. Colored concrete is a type of concrete made from white cement, colored cement, or white cement mixed with colored pigments, and colored aggregates and white or light-colored aggregates in a certain proportion. Colored concrete for road surfaces is mainly used for beautifying urban roads and for highway traffic signs, and it has been widely used both domestically and internationally.
In the design and construction of architectural decoration projects, to make the surface of buildings aesthetically pleasing, decorative finishes are generally applied, such as painting decorative coatings or laying decorative panels. These finishes not only consume a lot of time and materials, greatly increasing project costs, but also often experience fading, peeling, and flaking over time, seriously affecting the building's appearance.
As early as the 1920s, researchers both domestically and internationally studied the direct production of decorative materials from ordinary cement concrete, such as prefabricating concrete blocks to resemble natural mushrooms. In the 1940s, research began on colored concrete, transforming the original gray concrete into various colors, and colored decorative concrete developed rapidly. Entering the 1970s, with economic, technological, and social development, various types of decorative concrete emerged and were widely applied in engineering projects, gradually expanding from its use in low- and mid-range buildings to its application in high-end buildings.
From a developmental perspective, the application proportion of decorative concrete in architectural decoration, especially in the exterior wall decoration of buildings, has been increasing. With the continuous improvement of the quality and performance of decorative concrete and the increasing variety of types, its application will inevitably become more widespread.
Decorative concrete integrates decoration and function, with structural construction and decoration carried out simultaneously. It fully utilizes the plasticity and material composition characteristics of concrete, taking appropriate measures during the molding of walls and components to give their surfaces decorative lines, patterns, textures, and colors to meet the decorative requirements of architecture. Therefore, decorative concrete is also known as "architectural art concrete" or "visual concrete." With the continuous development of architectural decoration technology, the understanding of decorative concrete has also gradually changed. Decorative concrete mainly refers to white concrete and colored concrete. Countries such as the United States, Russia, Japan, and others have conducted extensive experimental research on these two types of decorative concrete and achieved considerable success. Experimental studies have shown that the raw materials used in white concrete and colored concrete are basically the same. The difference lies in the fact that colored concrete, in addition to using white cement and white aggregates, also uses colored aggregates and pigments. The pigments used are mostly red, yellow, brown, blue, and green.
The raw materials used in decorative concrete are basically the same as those used in ordinary concrete, but the requirements for the color of the raw materials are more stringent. For cement used in a project, cement from the same factory and batch number should be selected; for aggregates, materials from the same source should be selected, and the color of the aggregates should be consistent; for colors, mineral pigments that are insoluble in water, do not chemically react with cement, and are alkali- and light-resistant should be selected; the selection of water and admixtures is the same as for ordinary concrete.
