JEC Group reports that Prof Mark Goulthorpe, associate professor at the Department of Architecture, MIT, will be the keynote speaker at the Future of Composites in Construction Show taking place in Chicago, USA, on 21 June 2017.
The new show is focused on end users in building and civil engineering, the third largest growing market for the US composites Industry.
Goulthorpe is currently Head of the new design stream in the master of science in architecture studies program and his current research centers on robotic fabrication and a variety of composite fabrication methodologies, as well as a new iteration of the dynamically reconfigurable HypoSurface.
‘Mark Goulthorpe’s vision makes him the perfect choice to support this endeavor and actively take part in substantially expanding and generalizing the use of composite materials in the building and infrastructure fields,’ said Nicolas Baudry, North America shows director at JEC. ‘The building industry is facing a productivity and affordability crisis in developed and developing markets, largely due to its inability to embrace new material-processing: over the past 30 years the building industry has decreased in productivity (despite a digital revolution) where the manufacturing sector has effectively doubled productivity. Evidently buildings face particular technical challenges, especially fire retardancy, adaptability and longevity; but many of these issues have nascent solutions developed in other sectors.
'However, there are no official industry leaders in the building industry to take a decisive first step; and the thought-leaders (architects and engineers) are caught in a project-by-project procurement logic that doesn’t suit sustained research and development drives. So, there is a profound need for the polymer industries to initiate comprehensive building-focused research to devise a range of emphatically-beneficial composite buildings, materials and methods that offer versatile, economical, code-compliant solutions.’
This story uses material from JEC, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
