What is Rebar?

When pouring concrete, one must take into consideration several factors that will affect the strength of the final hardened slab. Fluctuations in temperature, ground water, and air quality can affect the overall strength of poured concrete, and so engineers needed to find ways to ensure the quality of the finished product. Today, metal bars called rebar are included in the poured concrete to help distribute the load and reinforce the hardened concrete. The rebar is usually made of carbon steel and is cast with ridges for better adherence to the concrete, and when placed in poured concrete, it strengthens the completed structure. Concrete is a relatively strong substance once it sets, but it has low tensile strength and therefore does not adhere to itself well during expansion and contraction due to changes in the weather or ground conditions. Therefore, rebar is placed in the concrete to compensate for the concrete's low tensile strength. It keeps the concrete from separating, which ...  more

Re:mix. Re:make. Re:configure. Re:consider. REBAR is an art and design collective based in San Francisco. Rebar’s work ranges broadly in scale, scope and context, and therefore belies discrete categorization. It is, at minimum, situated in the domains of environmental installation, urbanism and absurdity. Rebar was formed in 2004 to design and construct the Cabinet National Library - a functioning library built out of a file cabinet in the middle of the New Mexico desert. The Cabinet National Library, as the name might imply, is the national library for Cabinet magazine, a non-profit arts & culture quarterly based in Brooklyn. Rebar was founded by Matthew Passmore, John Bela, Jed Olson and Judson Holt, all of whom built the library. Rebar’s work is fundamentally motivated by the desire to animate the arbitrariness of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the doxa: the uncontested acceptance of the daily life-world and the adherence to a set of social relations we take to be ...