Other stories by Mary K. Hurd

  • Problem Clinic: Use Updated Wall Pressure Formulas

    ACI's Formwork Standards have changes with regard to wall-pressure formulas.

  • Climbing Formwork System Goes Horizontal

    Environmental protection issues shaped the plans for a twin-tube vehicular tunnel, 1.45 miles long, outside the village of Steinhaus in Upper Austria.

  • Pressure on Wall and Column Forms

    Who makes the rules for form design? The American Concrete Institute (ACI) Committee 347, Formwork for Concrete, is generally regarded as the standards-setting authority in the United States—not only for vertical formwork but also for deck forms, shoring, and reshoring.

  • Self-Compacting Concrete

    A concrete that places itself? Self-compacting concrete (SCC), or self-consolidating concrete, as some prefer to call it, comes close to doing just that. Well-proportioned SCC can flow under its own weight through and around congested reinforcement, filling forms completely and producing a...

  • New Developments in Forwork Sheathing

    If you don't remember what formwork was like before plywood, take a look at the exposed concrete in historic structures, and you'll see the marks of hundreds of boards that made up the form faces. The advent of plywood with dependable, waterproof glue was a revolutionary development for form...

  • At Home in Concrete

    "I felt it would be a lot of fun to design and build a cast-in-place reinforced concrete house, so I sketched out this little bungalow on the brow of a hill," says Harold Ashton, founder and CEO of The Ashton Company, Tucson, Ariz. He took his drawing to Tucson architect Diana Kuhel Osborne, who...

  • Roden Crater

    After 2 years and numerous changes, in January 1999 the final contract was signed for the first phase of artist James Turrell's largest work based on the changing experience of light.

  • Resisting the Pressure

    With most available modular wall forming systems offering pressure ratings no higher than 1650 psf, EFCO made news at World of Concrete 2001 when it introduced a new modular form system designed to handle 2400 psf lateral pressure.

  • White Concrete Brightens "Highways of Hope"

    Two expressways with a total price tag of $3 billion and a construction schedule that could span 15 years have been referred to as "highways of hope" for the region around Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. The Mon/Fayette Expressway will extend about 70 miles south from Pittsburgh through the...

  • Forming the Gates of Time

    The morning of April 19, 1995, marked the worst terrorist attack ever experienced in the United States, when a truck bomb destroyed the Edward P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 men, women, and children. Five years later, to the day, a memorial at the site of the tragedy was...