International Concrete Design Competition for Students

Recent developments in concrete such as high strength concrete and self-compacting mixtures have improved its strength and processability.

These new properties are bringing a different level of inspiration to architecture students and practitioners alike by generating new possibilities in themselves, which are much more than technical solutions to design ambitions whose motivations come from other sources.

Already explorations of concrete's inherent qualities such as mass, weight, density, strength and durability are leading to innovative applications.

But new possibilities could open up an imaginative field if one could experiment with the degrees of opaqueness offered by concrete.

If so, concrete would finally be able to add 'transparency' to its obvious plasticity, combining the two great characteristics of modern architecture in one material.

Various developments are engineering a shift in our notions of transparency and lightness in architecture.

Ever more rigorous physical (or environmental) demands will reduce the surface area of glass in buildings, but advanced technologies mean this will not necessarily result in less transparency.

Computing power allows us to identify structural 'cold spots' which can be 'dematerialised', and there are seemingly unlimited techniques for generating form.

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