As a building material, jade has good application and innovation in the field of architectural design. Today, let’s take a look at some basic common sense of jade building materials. This common sense will help us better understand the presentation form of onyx jade as a building material.
Onyx Jade concept
The Asian Gem Association (GIG) said: The scientific name of jade used for building materials and handicrafts is “calcite jade”, also known as “carbonate jade” or “onyx jade”, and the English name is Onyx. Its Mohs hardness is 3 and it is widely distributed in the southern foothills of the Himalayas and the Andes.
Onyx Jade formation
The formation of natural jade takes more than one billion years. Over the long years, the process of carbonate deposition, crustal movement, high-temperature dissolution of magma, alteration, and crystallization, etc., followed by washing, transportation, precipitation, and mixing with sand and gravel will eventually form a sedimentary mine of jade. Its gorgeous and changeable textures are beautifully changed due to the different sand materials wrapped in the natural formation process, the degree of crystallinity, and the different washing directions. These textures are the unique and precious features of natural jade when applied to the field of decorative architecture.
Blocks
We call the jade material that has just been mined. The raw materials of construction stone mined from mines without any processing are calculated in cubic meters and priced by volume. Good jade blocks have large and square shapes, high jade quality, uniform and fine color, and fewer impurities and holes. The opposite is true for poor jade blocks.
Slabs
The large slab is a semi-finished product. The block is processed into a polished sheet with a length of 1.2m or more and a width of 0.6m or more. The thickness is generally 16-18mm, and some thickness is 18-20mm.
Whole bodyboard
The whole body plate is the finished plate made of the pure jade plate without any other materials after cutting.
Common specifications are as follows (unit: mm):
300×300×16, 300×600×16, 600×600×16
600×800×16, 600×900×16, 800×800×16
Composite board
According to the thickness, it also includes the whole body composite (16mm thick) and the cross-sectional composite (3-6mm thick). The common media for composite panels are 9mm for ceramic tiles, 12-15mm for granite, 5-12mm for glass, 15mm for artificial stone, and 5-20mm for aluminum honeycomb.
The whole board and composite board have their own advantages and disadvantages. The whole bodyboard is warm and moist, has a strong sense of jade, rich texture, good light transmittance, and good finish authenticity. However, it has poor stain resistance, large color difference, poor sound insulation, high cost, and easy breakage. The composite board is energy-saving and environmentally friendly, lightweight, strong anti-fouling, good anti-fracture and damage, easy to control color difference, easy to install, can be used for ceilings, and has good sound insulation. However, hollow drums, weak jade, thin finishes, and easy distortion.
Specification board
The specification board refers to the stone processed into the required size according to the drawings (excluding other processing techniques such as edge making). In other words, the specifications of jade materials need to be customized according to the actual situation, not a unified standard. However, in actual use, the standard boards of common sizes are usually cut out first for demand. Common specifications board size (unit: mm):
400×400, 800×400, 600×600, 900×600, 800×800, 1200×600
Jade material craft
The common techniques for cutting jade and building materials include waterjet mosaics and Rubik’s cube bricks.
Waterjet parquet is a high-pressure water jet cutting process in stone parquet, which ensures that the cutting edge is flatter than the cutter. Stone waterjet mosaic is currently the most common waterjet mosaic on the market. It uses waterjets to cut various colors of stone into the required shapes, and then splice them with glue.
At this stage, stone mosaics are mainly used in star-rated hotels, large shopping malls, villas, home improvement living rooms, restaurants, and entrances. It is currently the most beautiful and noble decorative product in stone decoration.
Rubik’s cube bricks are spliced by specification boards, and the craftsmanship may be waterjet mosaic crafts.
Jade building materials are mostly used as background walls, screens, etc., and can also be matched with other materials such as metal and wood. The combination with metal highlights the precious texture, and the combination with wood has a Zen taste. Today, with the gradual improvement of material living standards, the beauty of jade building materials has received more and more attention from designers, and they have begun to be presented in various architectural spaces with simple and modern aesthetics.
