Endangered Buildings Preserved in VR
3D archive brings threatened heritage to a wider audience.
Blank Canvas: Can You Make Construction Weather-Proof?
Three WSP engineers contemplate on how to make construction weather-proof.
Ingenuity
Digital Modelling Technologies: Reals Within Reals
The latest digital modelling technologies allow us to step inside building designs and conceive of places we never thought possible.
Blank Canvas: Development Around Transport Hubs
Transport hubs play a key role in their communities as places to gather, arrive and depart. How they can best be used for development.
Welcome to Virtual Chicago
WSP’s 3D model incorporates infrastructure and covers 450 square miles.
Timber Structures: Does Wood Cut It?
The use of timber in buildings can have its advantages such as smaller carbon footprint and eco-aesthetic. But will timber become the material of the future?
Beyond Cement: Geopolymer Concrete
What’s different about geopolymer concrete is that it uses no Portland cement at all, and therefore the “cement” or binding element of the concrete is almost carbon-neutral.
Is CLT The Answer For Seismic Zones?
New-generation timber-framed buildings have properties that make them ideal for surviving earthquakes.
Tall Timber: How High Can CLT Go?
Timber could be an alternative to concrete when building high. Being lighter than concrete, it also speeds up the construction time.
Concrete Play-Doh Overcomes ‘Square Thinking’
Smart Dynamic Casting could be faster than 3D-printing concrete, with the creation of columns at a rate of 1m/hour.
Three New York Skyscrapers That Wouldn’t Exist Without High-Strength Concrete
One World Trade Center (2013), 432 Park (2015) and 56 Leonard (2016) were all made of high-strength concrete.
Marvellous Mutations: Advances in Materials Science
Completely new materials may not come along very often, but scientists are remixing old ones — and it’s changing the shape of our cities.
Blank Canvas: Can We Make A Totally Recyclable Building?
How do we recycle a building or materials in a way that we could really benefit from? Three WSP engineers responds to this question with no constraints.
A Capsule History of Modular Architecture
From Montreal’s Habitat 67 to Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, modular architecture has taken different shapes in all parts of the world.
Alder Hey: Anatomy of a Modular Hospital
Laing O’Rourke and WSP have designed and built a Liverpool children’s hospital out of 15,000 pre-assembled elements.
Serious hardware: Concrete 3D Printing
Central to the modular debate is the issue of how mass-produced elements can be made to work with creative architecture. One area that might offer a solution is 3D printing.
Early Riser: La Trobe Tower
Trobe Tower in Melbourne was constructed almost twice as fast thanks to Hickory’s system, which uses hot-rolled steel box frames incorporating an engineered concrete floor.
Six Common Fears About Modular Construction
There are a lot of fears around modular construction – from aesthetics to cost. But there are solutions to those issues.
Stacked Up: The Long-Held Dream of Modular Construction
Modular is finally becoming reality, thanks to advances in computer modelling, 3D printing and robotics.