Innovation in Concrete Lecture
Sasa Zivkovic and Kenneth Hover (Cornell CEE) lecture at the From Lab to Site: Innovation on Concrete symposium at the Taubman College of College of Architecture and Urban Planning at University of Michigan. The symposium is organized by Tsz Yan Ng and Wes McGee.
“From the climate imperatives to make the built environment carbon positive to novel material forming techniques such as 3D printing, concrete is undergoing a transformation along different fronts in the building industry. As computational design and digital fabrication technologies become mainstream in the AEC industries, scaling up to address construction level challenges, concrete holds tremendous promise for the future, not only in shaping our built environment but also in how we build, our ethos and aspirations. Yet, there are many hurdles to overcome. With traditional building processes steeped in protocols and regulations, moving R+D to the building sector requires an awareness of the different players, institutions, and contingencies that shape the contours of concrete innovation.
What approaches contribute to a smooth transfer of innovations to the building sector? Given new modes of manufacturing, what are the new codes and standards that will govern the path toward implementation? What cross-platform systems will need to be in place in order to facilitate automation and construction productivity? What are the new technologies and associated expertise that will emerge to redefine architectural practice and the building industry, especially to navigate and manage the increasingly multi-disciplinary teams?
This symposium, rather than a survey of contemporary concrete architecture, brings researchers and industry experts together from diverse disciplinary fields and areas of production – history & theory, engineering, construction technology, material science, design, and manufacturing – for a timely discussion centered on concrete as a building material with enormous potential for innovation. The symposium aims to foster and identify trajectories for advancing concrete research and align potential collaborative exchanges.” — Tsz Yan Ng and Wes McGee.
Protecting the Public: Safeguarding the end-users of our art and technology
By Sasa Zivkovic and Ken Hover
New concrete technologies fundamentally challenge and inspire the way buildings are designed and constructed via robotics, digital fabrication, and computation. New tools and materials enable applications beyond the fundamental assumptions that underlie conventional architecture and engineering practice, building codes and regulations, and the standard test methods and specifications upon which those regulations are based. While these codes are essential for preserving the Public’s right to safe, reliable, and durable spaces, they are highly complex documents and address the material and microstructural scale, the assembly scale, and the scale of the overall structure. It takes years of testing and observed performance under a range of environmental conditions to be able to reliably predict performance, and to reduce the risks of unacceptable performance. While progress is underway, there is comparatively little long-term environmental exposure or long-term monitored structural performance for many innovative technologies, making some format for over-arching, public regulations perhaps even more essential in these non-traditional applications. Can building codes and new technologies mutually adapt to the ever-accelerating pace of innovation in construction without compromising safety and service life? The recently updated ACI 318-19 contains at least 3 examples of “adaptive” code development that may inform our search for a way to protect the public at an acceptable level of risk while not inhibiting innovation. Those three examples are adoption of comprehensive code language for pneumatically applied concrete (Shotcrete, Sprayed Concrete, Gunnite), and the conditions for accepting the use of “Alternative Cements” and “Recycled Aggregates.”
More information on the symposium here.