A Swiss Startup Reinvents Concrete Flooring with Gothic-Inspired Engineering

Imagine fully demountable, prefabricated concrete floors that reduce emissions by two-thirds and are beautiful to boot. This is what Swiss company Vaulted claims to deliver with its Rippmann Floor System (RFS), named for the late Matthias Rippmann, a member of the Block Research Group (BRG) at ETH Zurich, Switzerland’s prestigious polytechnic university.

The RFS uses concrete only “where it wants to be in compression,” says the company. Unlike the Gothic technology on which they are based, Vaulted’s RFS shells are stiffened by ribs located on their hidden, upper surface, with the lines of force inscribed on their visible face underneath. As currently available, they come in two versions: double span (RFS-D) and single span (RFS-S). While the RFS-D modules fit together to form what resembles a classic quadripartite vault, which is to say curved in two directions and supported at the corners of its square perimeter, RFS-S is curved in just one direction, its components forming a barrel vault that must be supported along its two edges. This dual offer, says Francesco Ranaudo, Vaulted’s CEO, responds to RFS-D’s limited flexibility with respect to internal partitions, since running them through the middle of the vault is inelegant; with its narrower spans, RFS-S is better suited to housing, for example, which generally requires smaller rooms than offices. “We’re really going back to a tectonic appreciation of architecture,” comments Ranaudo.