The Concrete Award 2025 includes the category of infrastructure construction for the first time. What do you hope to gain from this expansion and what role can infrastructure construction play in terms of sustainability and innovation?"
Of the approximately 15 million cubic meters of concrete used each year, around 7% is used in infrastructure construction. At the same time, there are fewer alternatives to concrete in infrastructure construction due to the higher demands on load-bearing capacity and durability of the materials used. Careful, efficient and resource-saving use of concrete is therefore at least as important in infrastructure construction as it is in building construction.
Load-bearing structures are an essential component of civil engineering. What potential do you see for saving material and resources through optimized load-bearing structure planning?
The savings potential through optimized use of materials is actually very high. In the case of concrete ceilings, for example, up to half the material can be saved if an optimized ribbed ceiling is used instead of a flat ceiling - if a slight vault effect is added, the material savings are even greater. Similar potential is hidden in the concrete mixes; in many cases, especially in building construction, mixes could be used that achieve lower strengths or exposure classes than the standard types and have a correspondingly lower ecological footprint.
Both optimizations, the geometric and the material-technological, gain massively in importance as soon as aspects of sustainability are included as equally important criteria in the design and execution. The fact that the work of us engineers is thus gaining in relevance is a nice side effect of this development and is now also being recognized accordingly by the Concrete Prize by awarding the prize to the planning teams, not just the architects.
Are there any current developments or innovative approaches that you think could shape the future of structural design in concrete construction?
You can already see the trends in building construction if you look at competition entries from recent years. Flat concrete ceilings are no longer in keeping with the times; they are being replaced by ribbed ceilings, lightweight vaulted ceilings or even beam systems with inlaid wooden ceiling elements, for example. They are an expression of the strategy of only using concrete where it makes structural sense and can fully exploit its strengths, while at the same time not using more material than is absolutely necessary.
A further trend is towards dismantlability and thus the possibility of reusing components at a later date. From today's perspective, casting all components together on site is also not sustainable.
What is still not being done enough is the project-specific optimization on a material technology level described above, which will hopefully see some movement in the coming years.
Compared to the general discourse a few years ago, an enormous amount has changed in the minds of planners and clients, new (or rediscovered) technologies, material concepts and structural typologies are being discussed and increasingly implemented.
