This story was first released in issue 003 of the speedarticle Post!
When you make a mold, you have to think backwards. The object you want doesn’t exist yet. What exists is its inverse. The outer shell. The negative space. You’re building a container for something that will only become real once you pour into it, wait, and break everything apart. It’s a strange way to create anything. It’s an especially strange way to create a car.
Louis Dos Santos does not build cars. He builds concrete sculptures of them, eight to nine inches long, heavy enough to thud when you set one on a desk but small enough to hold in your hand. A 930 Turbo. An F40. A Mercedes Evo 2. An RX-7. An E30. Each one is poured from cement into a silicone mold he made himself, pulled from a 3D-printed positive designed from scratch. Every detail, every proportion, every vent and fender flare is modeled before it becomes resin, then silicone, then concrete. The process sounds clean. It is not.
Concrete wants to be a sidewalk. It wants to be a foundation, a retaining wall, a slab. It wants to hold up buildings, and intimidate an entire populace. It does not want to be a tailfin on a 1959 Chevrolet Brookwood. It does not want to fill the tiny columns between half-rolled windows on a lowrider. But Louis asks it to do all of these things, and most of the time it cooperates. When it doesn’t, he repairs the chip, repours the mold, or starts over. He’s been doing this for three years.
At events, people pick up his work and think it’s soap. Or clay. Or plaster. Then they feel the weight, and something changes in their face. It’s concrete. The surface has character. Small natural air bubbles pock the finish like imperfections in old paint. Some people love that. Some don’t. Louis is unbothered either way. That’s what the material does. It’s honest, and it’s heavy, and if you drop it, it chips.
He studied civil engineering at San Diego State. Fell in love with architectural concrete during internships on luxury residential job sites. The raw finish of poured floors and formed walls got to him. There’s a thing that happens when you watch a building go from drawings to structure to something people live in. You start to understand the distance between design and reality. Louis understood it early. He just didn’t know yet what he’d do with it. When people ask what he does for a living now, it takes a minute. “It’s like a whole five to ten minute presentation,” he says, “because there’s a lot of questions that come up.”
In March of 2023, messing around, he bought a 1/10th scale Tamiya RC car body. A Porsche. Probably a 911 Turbo, maybe an RSR. He doesn’t remember exactly because the plastic shell was minimal. You could tell the shape but not much else. He filled it with concrete. He wasn’t expecting anything. It was funny. A dumb experiment. The kind of thing you do when you’re bored and have a bag of cement and an idea that makes you laugh.
When he demolded it, the thing was 17 inches long and weighed 20 pounds. It looked cool. Like something Daniel Arsham might have made, though Louis was already thinking past that comparison and toward something of his own. He shot a simple video. Porsche reposted it. Then people started hitting him up. I need that for my space. He was two months in.
He tried to ship one of the big ones to a guy in Florida. It cracked right in half. The customer kept it anyway. Louis sent another one. They still talk. “Right in half,” he says. “But he liked it. I told him keep it, I’ll send you another one.” The logistics of shipping 20 pounds of concrete across the country in a plastic mold he’d cut in half and taped back together was not, in his words, sustainable. That’s when he went smaller. Proper 3D-designed models. Resin prints. Professional silicone molds. The 930 Turbo was first. It still sells.
The question people always ask someone who didn’t come up through art school is when did you start calling yourself an artist. Louis doesn’t have a clean answer. He was always building things. Always drawing on the side. Always had the entrepreneurial itch. The Santos Collective, his brand, merged both instincts. But in the beginning it was just a guy messing around with cement. A hobby that got loud fast.
BMW reached out six months in. He was freaking out. Then Red Bull Racing came for a Formula 1 collaboration. When someone asked him recently at a talk what his dream collab would be, he stumbled. “I just worked with Red Bull Racing for Formula 1 and that’s honestly like... damn. I don’t really know.”
But the work that matters most lives in the details you can’t see until someone explains them. The BMW E30 project has a hidden pipe system inside. You 3D print the tubes, insert a backflow incense cone, light it, and smoke rolls out the exhaust. Nobody had done it before. It was the pivot from novelty to craft. The cars were no longer just little sculptures sitting on a shelf. They did something.
Then came the Brookwood.
Armando Delator runs Giz on Sunday, a small car culture brand out of LA. He was one of the first real collaborations. His idea was a lowrider. But not a solid pour. Hollow the thing out. Roll the windows down halfway. Drop an incense cone inside and let the smoke seep out through the half-open glass like a hotbox. Homage to the lowrider community and everything around it. Louis was into it. Then he started thinking about the mold.
The car was based on Mr. Rhythm’s 1959 Chevrolet Brookwood, a real car owned by a real pinstriper in LA. It was a two-part mold. The roof lifted off to place the incense. But the columns between the windows, the tiny pillars that gave the piece that look of glass rolled halfway down, were so small that cement wouldn’t flow into them on its own. Louis had to reach his hand inside the mold and fill them manually. “We had the windows rolled down halfway and you can still see those two little pillars,” he says. “That way it gives off that window feel.” The rear fins were thin enough that they barely wanted to take cement at all, and once they did, they’d snap if you rushed the demold.
They went all in. Custom product cards. A gifted piece to Mr. Rhythm himself, who painted and pinstriped it. A custom license plate cast into the concrete. Spokes on the wheels so detailed that Mr. Rhythm kept posting it months later. Dude, this thing’s crazy.
Every new project presents a new problem. That’s the part Louis keeps coming back to. The Brookwood taught him about fragile geometry. Other pieces taught him about color. He uses pigments and a liquid additive to change the concrete’s hue, but sometimes the color fades. Sometimes a dark pour bleeds into a light one if he doesn’t sequence them right. Sometimes he’s drilling a hole for an incense stick and the whole thing cracks because it hasn’t fully cured. Timing. Feel. Experience. Most of the mixing he eyeballs now.
He pours three times a day. Nine molds per pour. Reviews the orders on his website, stages the projects by color and size, calculates what goes in what box, and pours. Then waits. Hours of curing. During the dead time he takes meetings, runs errands, eats lunch. When the pours set, some need paint. He offers painted options on certain pieces. Paint. Dry. Another coat. By nighttime he’s packing orders. He does all of this alone. Customer support. Shipping. Design. Production. Everything.
He drives a 2020 Honda Civic. “Honestly, I just have a daily,” he says. “So it’s just like... reliable.”
The Civic gets a reaction every time someone asks. People see the E30, the F40, the 930, the RX-7 on his website and expect something with a badge and a story in the garage. He used to have an ’87 F-150. Dual tone, red and white, 302 under the hood. He loved it. But parking in San Diego is a nightmare. One spot, shared with his fiancee. Three cars, two spaces. Math doesn’t work. The truck got sold. He wants a K truck eventually. Maybe a Japanese pickup. Something weird and useful for hauling inventory to events in LA three times a month. For now, the Civic does what it does.
Custom requests come in daily. Everyone wants their car in concrete. Louis is straightforward about it. The design is from scratch. He has to pay his designer. Print the positive. Build the mold. Pour the first sample, then the real one. Minimum cost is around $500, and that’s basically what it costs him. One woman in Europe commissioned a Renault wagon for her boyfriend. $700. Louis remembers thinking she must really love this guy.
Where it makes sense is in collaboration. Brands fund the development of a model, both parties sell it. That’s how the lowrider happened. That’s how the bigger drops work. He’s also started folding in furniture. A miniature Togo sofa that doubles as an incense holder blew up the same way the Porsche video did, pulling in a whole new audience of interior design and furniture people alongside the car crowd. A conversation pit ashtray. A Dune sofa tray. A DJ turntable deck that’s been taking off lately. Each one drops, each one lands.
There’s a rhythm to it now. Research the idea. Make sure nobody’s done it. Design from scratch. Drop it. Watch the reaction, then move on. The medium stays the same. Cement. Concrete. Heavy, fragile, honest, full of character it didn’t ask for. A material that wants to be infrastructure but keeps getting turned into art by a guy who understands exactly what it is and asks it to be something else anyway.
It weighs more than anyone expects. And every single time someone picks one up at an event, there’s that same moment. A pause. A shift in the hand. A recalibration of what they’re holding. That’s the reverse of everything. The mold. The process. The entire path. A civil engineer who became an artist by accident. Making cars he’ll never drive, out of the last material anyone would choose to make them from.
speedarticle collaborated with Dos Santos Collective on a limited edition of 100 concrete Porsche 917s, numbered and signed, mounted on a plinth of concrete.
Available now in the speedarticle shop.
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