Archive for category: news

Swiss engineers have developed a construction technique that could change how buildings are designed and built. It’s called a “Smart Slab:” A mixture of concrete, rebar, and carbon fiber that form a super-light, super-strong slab ceiling. It’s an entirely new way of building structural elements, and even at less than an inch thick and less than half the weight of a conventional concrete slab, its creators at the Digital Building Technologies group at ETH Zürich claim it can support more weight–surpassing Swiss building code standards. Read more.

Construction is booming, and with growing population and increasing urbanization requiring new homes and offices to be built, industry momentum shows no signs of slowing down. Despite increasingly sophisticated structures, construction remains one of the least digitized industries. Read more.

Canada’s road network, as reported by this survey, was long enough in 2016 to circle the Earth’s equator more than 19 times. Statistics Canada, in partnership with Infrastructure Canada, has launched its first-ever catalogue of the state of the nation’s infrastructure to provide statistical information on the stock, condition, performance and asset management strategies of Canada’s core public infrastructure assets. Read more.

Canada’s latest steel tariff proposal has alarmed construction companies, who have warned it could have an outsized impact on the country’s coasts, boosting costs in places like Vancouver, already Canada’s most expensive housing market, while protecting steel producers in central Canada. Read more.