Concrete is an integral part of our everyday lives, responsible for the safety, durability, and aesthetics of buildings. It resists corrosion, maintains its performance in a variety of climates and environments, and plays an important role in improving our quality of life.
Think about a typical day in your life. You wake up at home, wash your face, eat breakfast, and head to your workplace or school, passing dozens or hundreds of buildings by whatever mode of transportation you use. After you finish your main job, you pass through many buildings again to attend to other errands, and finally you return home to sleep at the end of the day. There are many materials that have been with you all day: fiber, steel, glass, and so on, but you don’t often think of stone as being with you 24/7. Your home is made of stone, and you walk past many stone houses and eventually enter a stone house to see what needs to be done. You don’t realize how close you are to stone because it’s mostly hidden by paint, wallpaper, or sheetrock.
There’s a reason why concrete has become so ubiquitous in your environment. Concrete’s role in the modern civil engineering and construction industry is indispensable. Not only is it readily available, but dams, bridges, and buildings would be very difficult to construct without it, not only for safety but also for serviceability. Most structures built since the turn of the 20th century have been constructed with concrete. In addition to their safety and serviceability, concrete structures are also very aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Distinctive buildings play an important role in beautifying a city, and with the increasing importance placed on the aesthetics of architecture, various attempts to transform the appearance of buildings have been made using concrete.
The reason why concrete is recognized as such a great building material today is because it has several advantages over other materials. First of all, concrete is more resistant to corrosion and fire than other materials. Concrete has a specific heat of 0.22 kcal/kg-c. Another common building material, iron, has a specific heat of 0.11 kcal/kg-c. Moreover, the specific gravity of concrete buildings is much higher than that of steel buildings, so the actual heat capacity of concrete buildings is more than ten times higher. This means that in the event of a fire, concrete buildings heat up more slowly, providing better safety for the evacuation of people inside the building.
Concrete is also corrosion-resistant and resistant to chemical reactions once hardened, making it easier to maintain. Over the course of a building’s lifespan, water, acid rain, and other acidic and basic substances rarely cause durability issues. This is an important factor in improving living conditions and extending the lifespan of buildings, especially in urban centers.
Concrete transmits very little noise from airborne vibrations. Concrete is also a solution to the problem of interfloor noise, which has become a hot topic in recent years. Concrete’s excellent sound insulation properties prevent the transmission of sound, and it’s being used in combination with other sound-absorbing materials to achieve soundproofing. In addition, concrete itself has very low vibration, which can increase the usability of the building. No matter how safe a building is, if it vibrates too much, the people inside will feel uneasy. Concrete buildings are not only safe, but they also don’t vibrate much in strong winds, which can give users a sense of security.
No matter how good the performance is, if the supply of concrete is not smooth, the construction period will be long, which will increase the construction cost. Cement, the main ingredient of concrete, is readily available in most countries. It is also abundant in the world, so the unit cost is low. For a typical building, concrete can save more than 2030% in unit costs compared to steel framing. It takes 23 hours for cement to harden. If the cement plant is close to the construction site, concrete construction can be very efficient.
Different types of concrete have been developed to ensure that concrete with the right properties is available for construction according to the architectural design plan. Concrete can be designed to vary in strength, and high-strength concrete can be chosen for skyscrapers that require large compressive forces. Concrete is also less affected by the construction environment: in winter, when curing is slow, cold weather concrete can be used, which uses admixtures to aid curing. Conversely, in the summer, when curing is too fast, use hot weather concrete, which uses admixtures to delay curing. In this way, concrete can be applied all over the world in different climates. Even in Dubai, where temperatures can reach over 30°C, concrete buildings can be constructed without problems. Thanks to cold weather concrete, it’s not uncommon to see concrete houses in Alaska.
Concrete is free from form constraints. Depending on how you use the formwork, you can create different shapes. Its constructability gives you the freedom to design whatever you want. Even though concrete is made from the same materials, you can build different and unique structures. In the old days of building houses out of stone, if the required size of material was not available, it was impossible to build anything larger. Either the materials that met the requirements couldn’t be found, or they couldn’t be transported. Nowadays, however, we can create stones of any size and shape we want, right where we need them.
Thanks to these advantages, we’re seeing a lot of exposed concrete construction these days, where the concrete itself is the finish. It’s a technique that fuses the color of traditional concrete, which is often perceived as dull, with free-form shapes, and it’s gaining a lot of positive attention. This technique, which takes advantage of the color, texture, and form diversity of concrete, is becoming a new trend in urban architecture.
From the Empire State Building in the early 1900s to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in 2010, the world has been fascinated by skyscrapers. Countries around the world have sought to have iconic structures that draw attention to themselves. All of these eye-catching structures that help us appreciate our cities started with the discovery of a building material called concrete. When you think about living in a stone-covered world, the world can suddenly seem like a dull and uninteresting place. But the stone that covers us, concrete, is providing useful value to your life. Over the course of more than two thousand years, concrete has become one of our most essential materials.
