Artists with wood make dreams come true in concrete

Verhoeven Timmerfabriek makes wooden concrete molds for construction and infrastructure projects. Large, national and international concrete factories and contractors have known how to find the Venray-based wood specialist for more than forty years, and with good reason: it produces beautiful works and the possibilities are sometimes beyond imagination.

In Venray is the large workshop of Verhoeven Timmerfabriek where the perfect mold is worked on daily. Michiel Hendriks, company manager of concrete forms: "Usually it's for a prefab concrete factory, sometimes it's for a project where concrete is poured on site, such as a bridge. But it's all about form in the end."

Fencing

Verhoeven distinguishes differences in working methods. "In the simpler projects, we work from flat drawings that we convert to a negative mold of wood via 'fence thinking.' For the more complex works, 3D drawings are used to build a mold. Spatial insight is essential in this work and we also train our employees in that. You must constantly keep in mind that after curing, the concrete element will dissolve properly from the mold without sustaining damage."

The end result over the A12.

Let yourself go

With the knowledge that the joinery has accumulated over the years, the possibilities for making beautiful things with exposed concrete have increased enormously. Verhoeven: "Our biggest formwork project ever was the Verlengde Waalbrug near Nijmegen from 2015. A double-curved bridge for which we made 12,000 square meters of formwork from 250 wooden elements in our hall. It is unique that something like this was conceived in clean concrete. That's also our message: don't be too quick to say it can't be done, let yourself go first. Then together we'll see how we can execute it." 

Seamless end result

Of more recent date is the Boekelose Bridge in Hengelo, for which Verhoeven supplied the formwork for the two abutments. The identical abutments are 35 meters long and six meters high and have a double-curved shape. The formwork consisted of forty elements. After pouring the first abutment, everything was disassembled and reassembled on the other side. Hendriks: "All those loose elements don't leave a seam anywhere, the end result is perfectly smooth. That requires a lot of handwork, in the form of sanding, filling, sanding again and painting. That's how you get nice smooth concrete and a good release."

Template for Lansingerland Station.

Lansingerland

"We took a different approach to the cladding of the new Lansingerland station. This station runs across the A12 and has as an edge trim a very finely woven concrete panel with open and closed shapes, like a kind of branch structure. For this, we did not carpenter the mold with the counter shape, but made it from thick sheets of plywood with a five-axis milling machine. These too were extensively sanded and properly painted until the end result was perfect. CUR Recommendation 100 is seen as the benchmark in the world of exposed concrete, for us it is
the bottom line."

Heidelberg

"It doesn't matter whether it's a beautiful balcony or a large work of art for the Department of Public Works, as long as it's challenging," Hendriks emphasizes. "We like to make unique works, in which we are at our best. We recently made the molds for the concrete facade elements of Heidelberg Cement's new headquarters in Germany. Those are really unique and extremely precisely detailed. A prestigious project that suits us very nicely."

Forty skilled workers roam the workshops of Verhoeven Timmerfabriek. "Three have been working there for 45 years, two have recently returned from retirement. That says something about the working atmosphere and how beautiful this trade is. And a great project comes in every time. As an approved training company, we also train our people ourselves, constantly training three apprentices. Of everything our craftsmen can do, they learn 99% on the job."