Archinect - News

Has a cure for “concrete cancer” been found in Australia?

2019-11-04T00:01:00-05:00

Next year, if all goes well, a pair of footbridges intended to be cancer-proof will open in Geelong, a town 75km south-west of Melbourne, Australia. These bridges, which will act as prototypes for more than 150 others planned for the expanding city, will be constructed using a novel approach that combines glass-fibre and carbon-fibre rebars. They will, though, cost about the same as equivalent conventional bridges.

The potentially ground-breaking construction approach has been developed by Australian university Deakin and Austeng, an engineering firm. The structural system selectively deploys pricey carbon fiber rebar to strengthen the construction assembly where necessary, while glass fiber rebar members are used round out precast concrete frames that are then used as a base upon which the remainder of the bridge is assembled.

According to The Economist, a three-meter section of the bridge was recently tested and has passed inspection; The design team is moving forward with a 10-meter-long section to be installed in the field. The publication reports that the bridge’s carrying capacity has increased by 20-percent while its cross-section area has fallen by 15-percent.

To boot, the bridge’s concrete mixture is made from a low-carbon “geopolymer concrete” blend that includes fly-ash and other alternatives to carbon-intensive Portland cement.

FIU bridge collapse tied to flawed design and minimal project oversight

2019-10-24T12:24:00-04:00

The National Transportation Safety Board members that have been investigating a March 15, 2018 bridge collapse at Florida International University have concluded that the design firm FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc. responsible for the project underestimated the loads created by the bridge's concrete structural system and overestimated the strength of their designs along a critical section that had shown signs of splintering, NBC News reports.

The bridge was, according to previous reports, designed under the Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) method that utilizes prefabricated components, a key reason the bridge was built out of concrete and not steel as is more often the case for similar spans.

Prior to the bridge's deadly collapse, investigators found that contractors had discovered large cracks 40-times larger than what is normally accepted for this type of application in a concrete section of the bridge. Despite the cracking, no one involved the project made an attempt to close th...

Calatrava's WTC Oculus continues to leak

2019-09-26T14:07:00-04:00

Few things are as embarrassing for an architect than having a building you’ve designed spring a leak.

Unfortunately for Santiago Calatrava, that is exactly what's happened at the World Trade Center Oculus, a $3.9 billion transit hub built to memorialize the September 11th terrorist attacks. The transit center and subterranean mall contained within the hub are topped by a sculptural pavilion that is itself capped by a 355-foot skylight. The skylight, made up of a dozen glass panels that are designed to open mechanically every year to mark each anniversary of the attacks, has been leaking since at least 2017.

In 2018, according to The Wall Street Journal, a rubber seal that runs along the length of the roof ruptured as the skylight was opened for the annual remembrance ceremonies. Officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have spent over $50,000 since attempting to repair the tear, and plan on spending at least $200,000 more to seal the entire skylight with a waterp...

This Architecture is cursed

2019-04-16T13:53:00-04:00

We have profiled many social media profiles on Archinect, but this may be the first haunted account we have come across. Cursed Architecture (@CursedArchitect) has showcased "The best of the worst in questionable design decisions, horrible DIY, and existential terror" through its twitter page with over 800 examples of the built environment gone awry.

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— Cursed Architecture (@CursedArchitect) April 11, 2019

@CursedArchitect and other social media profiles have collected material to provide architecture enthusiasts a previously unexplored avenue of design documentation; one that revels in the horrors and failures of the built environment laid out by hasty developers and distracted craftsmen.

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— Cursed Architecture (@CursedArchitect) April 2, 2019