Cork’s architectural career also began with the Romans, when it was used as insulating roof covering. It’s still employed in wearable items today in the soles of Birkenstocks and combined with cloth to make everything from couture handbags to neck ties. ![]() For example, Roman soldiers made the most of cork's ability to thermally insulate by using it in their helmets to protect them from the sun, and small Roman women are thought to have made the most of its strength, light weight and compressibility by fashioning some of the earliest platform shoes. These extraordinary properties are revealed by cork’s long catalogue of uses from antiquity to today. This waxy, hollow, honeycomb structure gives cork its unusual array of properties: impermeability to liquids and gases, strength and light weight, flexibility, compressibility and excellent thermal and acoustic insulation. The cell walls are made from a fatty biopolymer called suberin (which is also responsible for the tough skin and long storage life of the potato) and are filled with an air-like gas that makes up 90% of the material’s volume. This renewable, spongy coat has a honeycomb structure that consists of billions of tiny, hollow, pentagonal or hexagonal cells. The cork oak tree can live for up to 250 years, whilst the material we know and love is skilfully harvested from the stem every nine years or so, without harming the tree. All trees have a thin layer of cork in their bark, developed as an adaptation to protect against fires, but in this particular oak it grows to form layers up to thirty centimetres thick. In this week’s up-close material exploration, we pop open this cork-er of a material, delving into its long history of quiet competence.Ĭork is the bark of the cork oak tree ( Quercus suber) a slow-growing, long-lived oak that mainly grows in the savannahs of southwest Europe and north Africa. What’s more, cork oak acorns make an excellent foodstuff for goats, and are particularly beloved by Spanish pigs, contributing to the sweet flavour of Iberico ham. Without it we would be a sober, heat-crazed and forgetful bunch!īut cork’s versatile repertoire also spans applications as varied as life jackets, fishing floats, anti-ageing creams and orthopaedic shoes. This characterful, warm and tactile Mediterranean material may be most familiar as the chewy, beige bung that stands in between you and a glass of wine, the insulating coaster that stops your hot tea from cracking a varnished table, or the bulletin board where you pin up that important reminder to feed the neighbour’s cat.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |