A winner of an architectural competition held for the conversion of the Guy-Gagnon Arena into a cultural centre for the borough of Verdun, Montréal, Quai 5160 includes a 360-seat performance room, an art gallery, a mediation room, a circus school for the neighbourhood children, as well as the additional offices and spaces necessary to implement this mission.
Parking garages and other concrete structures are often exposed to severe corrosive environments leading to deterioration that necessitate the need for evaluations, repairs, and rehabilitation.
Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana) engineers have developed sensors that can instantly measure concrete strength, thereby speeding up a construction timeline.
The American Concrete Institute has released the new ACI 301-20, Specifications for Concrete Construction, along with the companion ACI Field Reference Manual.
Growing awareness of the role buildings and infrastructure plays in Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions profile is driving important discussions about low-carbon design and materials, as well as the role of various construction industry actors in reducing emissions from the built environment.
Concrete is susceptible to fluid and vapour infiltration and migration. Crystalline waterproofing technology improves the durability of the concrete by filling and plugging pores, capillaries, and micro-cracks with a non-soluble, highly resistant crystalline formation.
The winner of the 2020 International Highrise Award (IHP) for the world’s most innovative high-rise is the ‘Norra Tornen’ twin towers project in Stockholm, Sweden, designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam.
Design firm DIALOG has developed a prototype design that could see hybrid mass timber towers sprouting in major cities and climbing as high as 105 storeys. The patent-pending design will also produce hybrid timber towers that are zero-carbon—a made-in-Canada solution to one of the world’s most pressing issues: climate change.
When the topic of buildings and carbon emissions come up, most people think of climate control, minimizing power usage, and sourcing renewable electricity—all of these are important ways to do better by the environment. Operations are the major source of sustained, long-term emissions, and the primary focus of Canada’s Climate Action Plan as it relates to the commercial building sector. However, there is an opportunity to improve the environmental impact of buildings from the ground up.
