Sharing a passion for concrete excellence

Source: CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION MAGAZINE
Publication date: 2006-12-01

By CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION Staff

Perhaps more than any other person in the world today, Santiago Calatrava is pushing the limits of architecture, using mostly concrete to build the world's most daring structures.

With an architecture degree and a Ph.D. in civil engineering, Calatrava is also an artist. His sculptures, drawings, watercolors, and ceramics have appeared in museum exhibitions in Athens, Dallas, Florence, London, New York City, Vienna, and Zurich. The relationship between artist and architect is very important to him. His building designs often start out as artistic sketches, many having to do with the human form. For instance, his inspiration for the new World Trade Center Transportation Hub came from a sketch he did of a child's hands opening to allow a dove to take flight.

Calatrava doesn't limit himself in the use of materials for his buildings, making use of concrete, steel, wood, and glass. His use of concrete as an architectural medium is spectacular but extraordinarily difficult in the demands it places on structural engineers and contractors to build the formwork to produce the graceful, curved shapes. The June 2004 cover of CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION magazine featured his concert hall in the Canary Islands at Tenerife, a blending of sculpture and architecture that produced stunning giant curvilinear waves of structurally reinforced concrete.

Calatrava stands behind his model for the new World Trade Center Transportation Hub.

Calatrava has two completed structures in the United States: the Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay in Redding, Calif., and the expansion of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Current commissions include the Symphony Center for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in Atlanta, a series of bridges in Dallas, and a high-rise residential building in New York. But it's his commission to design the permanent World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York City that has captured the most attention. The graceful architectural concrete columns that will support the building requires concrete work at the highest levels.

Calatrava was born and raised in Valencia, Spain and now is based there, in New York City, and in Zurich, Switzerland.

“Look at the events that have driven changes,” says Mike Shydlowski, president of BASF Admixtures. “Why do they have to be disasters? Hurricanes, earthquakes, 9-11. Why can't we anticipate these things? We are changing far too slowly.” After more than 40 years in the concrete industry, he is certainly not a man who is moving slowly.

After working on a concrete crew while getting his engineering degree from Marquette University, Shydlowski joined a cement company in 1969 and soon ended up in the chemical admixtures business. In 1986, Sandos, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, acquired Master Builders and shortly after acquired Shydlowski's current employer, Mac USA. “So we were merged into Master Builders, with whom I had competed with for 17 years,” he says. “After about six months I left and went into the ready-mix business where I had the chance to see if this stuff I had been preaching actually worked.” But he returned to Master Builders after three years, in 1989, and has been there ever since.

In 1996, Shydlowski was named the founding chairman of the Strategic Development Council (SDC), set up in conjunction with the American Concrete Institute (ACI) to accelerate the adoption of new technology. Being president of Master Builders gave him the opportunity to pull the top people from across the industry into this effort. “During the commercial construction downturn in 2002 and 2003,” he says, “we went through a re-engineering exercise at Master Builders and realized that innovation and accelerating the rate of innovation, was the key to our success and that's exactly what SDC is trying to do for the entire industry.”

One key to the success of the concrete industry, says Shydlowski, is solving the problem of durable concrete. “It's the holy grail of admixture development, but it will take a paradigm shift in thinking.” He feels that part of the solution is the P2P initiative (prescriptive to performance-based ready-mix specifications). “It's not a way for the ready-mix producer to cut costs by taking something out of the mix, rather it's having the authority and ability to do the things that you already have responsibility for and it's one of the ways we'll differentiate the good producers from the mediocre. As long as we continue to do things on a prescriptive basis, not much changes.”

“This is a fascinating industry,” he says. “I can honestly say that I can't remember five days in my entire career when I woke up and didn't want to go to work. It's always been exciting and there have always been new opportunities and new challenges. It's been a wonderful ride.” And he's not hanging up his saddle yet.

Terry Fricks and his sons have a reputation for constructing durable, well-executed industrial floors. They make it a point to revisit installations years afterwards to see how their work is performing so they can make changes to improve the final product.

Fricks started working for his father's construction company when he was young, discovering that he particularly liked working with concrete. In 1974 he formed his own company and by the mid-1980s was placing as much as 20 million square feet of flatwork a year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. During that time a customer in the food industry hired Fricks to install a “superflat floor”—a new term in those days. After learning how to install them, Fricks began marketing superflat floors as a specialty. Today the company also specializes in highly durable floors. They now have their own in-house materials lab to develop concrete mixes for their jobs all over the country, paying attention to all the components in concrete, particularly aggregates. They also place floors using concrete with maximum slumps between 3 and 4 inches.

Fricks became involved with the American Concrete Institute in the mid-1980s, joining ACI Committee 302, Construction of Concrete Floors. In the beginning he didn't think he knew enough about concrete but didn't like that others were controlling his work with their specifications. Over the years, though, he has become a leading force on the committee and currently is helping in the effort to keep the guidelines updated and in line with current technology.

Fricks has always believed that when contractors grow and their knowledge of the industry improves, industry standards improve. Toward that end he teaches seminars at the World of Concrete each year and supports the work of ACI with his time and talents.

The combination of an enquiring mind and a collaborative spirit is a nearly unstoppable force, as witnessed by the mark Surendra P. Shah has left, and continues to make, on the concrete industry. Dr. Shah is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering at Northwestern University and director of the university's Center for Advanced Cement-Based Materials (ACBM), a position he has held since establishing ACBM in 1989.

Over the years Shah's research has often focused on understanding the connection between concrete's microscopic behavior and its structural response. He has done pioneering research investigating such things as fiber reinforced concrete, high-performance concrete, fracture mechanics of brittle materials, and self-consolidating concrete. Under his leadership at ACBM, hundreds of students and visiting scholars have contributed to our deeper understanding of cement and concrete through research, education, and technology transfer.

A true champion of technology transfer, Shah has co-authored three books and helped edit the proceedings of more than 20 symposia. He has more than 400 published articles and has organized and spoken at numerous technical meetings around the world. Under his leadership, ACBM has sponsored two highly successful conferences on self-consolidating concrete.

Shah earned a bachelor's degree from B.V.M. College, Bombay, India, a master's degree from Lehigh University, and a doctorate from Cornell University. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois at Chicago before joining the Northwestern faculty in 1981.

Among his many accolades, Shah was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering where he was honored “for his work on advanced cement-based materials and for promoting interdisciplinary research and education on concrete materials.”

The legend about Bill Tolley, ACI's executive vice president, is that he can write the minutes for a committee meeting before the meeting even starts, that's how well he knows his committee and the issues on the agenda. “You give them the information they need to make an informed decision,” he says, “but you also give them your opinion.” That, he feels, is the role of an association executive, to guide the members and to help them make the best decision for the future of the organization.

Tolley started as comptroller at ACI in 1975, having been hired by incoming executive vice president George Leyh, but actually starting a few months earlier than Leyh. Those were difficult days for the Institute, with membership dropping and reserves dangerously low. Within 10 years, through tight financial management and some tough decisions, they had turned a declining organization into a thriving powerhouse in the concrete industry with sufficient reserves to expand into risky programs, like certification—which today provides a large percentage of Institute revenues.

In 1996, when Leyh retired, the committee delegated to select a new leader and chose an executive vice president from the outside, which turned out to be a poor fit. In 2002, Tolley was elevated to executive vice president. Many of ACI's members and staff were ecstatic—despite the fact that Tolley is not an engineer and has little technical knowledge of concrete (a shortcoming he readily admits). However, his steady, calm leadership style fits ACI perfectly.

“Remember that the member comes first,” he says. “Set high standards and always strive to exceed member expectations.” Over the past four years, ACI has done that, and continues to do so with new ideas, like free electronic student memberships, a Concrete Knowledge Center to assist designers, and efforts to get things done in a more timely manner.

Looking to the future, Tolley says “ACI's role will remain much as it is today, which is to be one of the world's leading authorities on technical knowledge dealing with concrete, but we will deliver that information in different ways. We must and will take advantage of new technology to improve member benefits and reduce the time it takes to develop committee documents and standards without reducing the technical quality for which we are known. I have no idea what tomorrow will bring, but I am confident that ACI will respond and address the needs of the industry just as it has for the last 102 years.”

Tolley doesn't seek complete control over the Institute's operations—doesn't necessarily want to write the minutes in advance—but he does demand discipline and respect for the Institute's traditions. Those are expectations that most ACI members share.

In 1986, Luke Snell, then a professor in the Construction Department at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE, where he taught for 27 years) brought his students to ACI's concrete cube competition as the reigning champs. The objective that year was to make the highest compressive strength cubes and the rules stated that a cube failed when it shattered. Snell's students made cubes that were heavily fiber reinforced and that behaved like sponges, so that when tested in compression they squeezed down but never shattered. Although the real compressive strength was low, they met the “specification” and thus won the competition. The rules were changed the following year, but Snell's construction students had learned a valuable lesson.

Throughout his career, Snell, along with his wife Billie, has been teaching concrete lessons to students of all ages. Thousands of his floating concrete kits have been sold to kids to demonstrate how concrete is made and how it can attain unusual properties—such as floatability. As head of the construction program at SIUE for 27 years, his students learned practical construction engineering—and of course excelled in the ACI student competitions.

This past summer Snell took on a new challenge—that of starting a new Construction Industry Management program at Arizona State University. Developed with industry-wide support, the CIM program has, until this past fall, had only the single Middle Tennessee State University program. Today there are four programs that are helping to develop the industry's future leaders, including at California State University—Chico, and New Jersey Institute of Technology. Snell's new program, which resides within the Del Webb School of Construction, has both national and local support and is expected to have a stronger construction focus than the more ready-mixed concrete focus at MTSU.

Following the 2006 World of Concrete, Snell was featured on a CBS Sunday Morning segment, conveying his passion for concrete to the entire nation. He has even moved beyond our borders, with two trips to Mongolia and an upcoming trip to Algeria, teaching good concrete practice and helping to establish ACI chapters. In an SIUE publication in 2001, Billie Snell was quoted as saying, “There are other things in life besides concrete ... but my husband doesn't believe that.”

Some successful contractors feel that just doing their job well is enough of a payback to the concrete industry; others feel the need to do more. Clay Fischer, president of Woodland Construction Co., Jupiter, Fla., is in the latter category. For example, he recently made a $25,000 contribution to American Society of Concrete Contractor's (ASCC) Education, Research & Development Foundation, which had been languishing for many years. “We contributed because I think that as an industry we need to be doing more practical research to benefit the contractor and this industry has been good enough to us that we feel we need to give back to it.”

But his industry involvement doesn't end there. Fischer recently served for a year as president of the Tilt-Up Concrete Association (TCA), is currently an ASCC vice president, and serves on the executive advisory council for the Concrete Industry Management program. This industry involvement, of course, is not completely altruistic. “It all pays back in a huge way,” he says. “Just look at the horsepower at a TCA meeting, for example. The wealth of knowledge you get from all these people is powerful and they are willing to share it.”

Fischer founded Woodland Construction in south Florida in 1987, intending to be a small general contractor. The way he tells it, his company ended up in the tilt-up concrete business “by accident.” When a competitor got into financial trouble and was unable to finish some tilt-up work for a larger GC, he was asked to finish the job. “It [tilt-up construction] became a specialty for us and we never looked back—this is the horse we are going to ride,” he says.

Jeanne Fischer, Clay's wife, has been an integral part of the business since the beginning. “Jeanne keeps an eye on the business management and the nickels and dimes and information technology stuff,” he says. “My brother, Gary, also works with us. Between the three of us, it's really a family business and we complement one another really well.”

Fischer runs his entire business like a family. “One of the models we have with all our people is QAL—quality of life—not only for our customers but also for our employees and suppliers. We try to stay away from adversarial relationships and work with the people we want to work with. You have to do the right thing no matter how much it hurts at the time. If we make a mistake we correct it. All you have is your reputation and your people.”

It could be that the planets are in the proper alignment, but it's more likely that bringing a good executive on board just when initiatives and opportunities were becoming abundant has been a fortunate coincidence for the American Society of Concrete Contractors. Bev Garnant signed on as the organization's executive director early in 2003, after having done public relations work for the group for several years prior, including promoting and helping organize ASCC's first annual conference in 2002.

The success of that first conference helped boost the industry's awareness of ASCC, which was further heightened by Tommy Ruttura becoming president of the organization. Garnant points to that period as the time when ASCC began to be recognized as “the voice of the concrete contractor.”

Garnant had always appreciated the passion ASCC board members had for what they were doing for the industry, their desire to improve and also to help each other learn. And as she became familiar with more of the members, she realized this attitude was pervasive throughout the organization. When she became executive director, a real mobilization began within ASCC.

Since then many more people have become actively involved in the group's initiatives. One highly successful project to which many ASCC members have contributed had its genesis at the 2002 CEO Forum sponsored by CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION when flooring issues were the hot topic. Out of that came ASCC's Position Statements, which now number more than two dozen.

ASCC membership has also grown, now numbering about 525 member companies and boasting an excellent retention rate.

Also, since Garnant came aboard the ASCC Education, Research, and Development Foundation has been revitalized. Operating under a new board and with additional funding, the foundation is now supporting the Concrete Industry Management program and is participating in a research initiative with ACI Committee 302, Construction of Concrete Floors.

The group's annual conferences continue to grow, thanks to Garnant, the ASCC staff, and the many active participants. The most recent gathering, in Milwaukee, drew 340 attendees, more than three times the number attending the first conference just four years ago.

Among the things Garnant is most proud of these days are ASCC's liaison activities with ACI and its continued strategic alliance with the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association. And that list, and ASCC, continues to grow.

The United States has had a long love affair with wood-frame houses, even though the benefits of living in concrete homes outweigh wood in almost every way. This is especially true now when energy savings is more important and reducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has become a worldwide issue. More than any other person today, Mike Weber is responsible for marketing and promoting cement-based building systems and products.

Growing up, Weber's family owned a sand and gravel business in Edgerton, Ohio and later expanded into ready-mixed concrete. After college, he moved to Kalamazoo, Mich. and expanded his career with the largest ready-mixed concrete and block producer in the state. On his resume he can list being a ready-mix plant manager, customer relations person, regional sales representative, director of training and product promotion, a master trainer for the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, vice president for a construction company specializing in cast-in-place walls, and director of residential construction for the Portland Cement Association (PCA). His work for PCA includes marketing responsibility for the entire United States.

Weber's mission is to increase the amount of portland cement consumed in residential settings, primarily by emphasizing the advantages of concrete homes. A major achievement was to persuade the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) to form the Concrete Home Building Council (CHBC) to promote the use of residential concrete. Every year since 2004, The New American Home (TNAH), NAHB's official show home, has had a significant concrete aspect. Final preparations are being made for the TNAH ‘07, a pre-cast concrete home, and planning of TNAH ‘08 with autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) walls.

Nationwide, in 2005 over 17.5% of all single family detached above-grade walls in new home construction is concrete. Florida leads the country with over 80% of new homes constructed with a concrete building system. The wood industry isn't giving up, though, and expects to spend $500 million over the next seven years to market the benefits of wood construction. This is a staggering amount of money compared to what the concrete industry is willing to spend. Weber will be very busy for awhile.

Like many of those in the concrete construction industry, Doug Bannister started working with concrete for a family member at an early age in the Erie, Pa. area. After college, and a military stint in Vietnam, he started his own concrete construction company and has worked only for himself ever since. Over the years, his work evolved into a focus on decorative concrete.

Aware of the sustained growth of the decorative concrete market, in 1996 he opened The Stamp Store, a national construction supply house that carries decorative concrete materials and supplies. He soon developed several of his own products, including a well-graded aggregate concrete mix for countertops. He also began to offer training workshops, since from the beginning his focus was not on selling products but rather on helping contractors to install stamped concrete, overlay cement, chemical stains, and concrete countertops. His “Deminars” (his trademarked name for combination demonstrations and seminars) include information about concrete basics, increasing durability, and achieving uniform work from one job to the next—difficult with decorative concrete. He encourages contractors to employ the “Front End Work” principles he developed as a contractor, which make it easier for project owners to write the check.

Today Bannister is a leader in the decorative concrete industry, actively helping to grow the industry with his time, money, and energy, whether it ends up benefiting his business or not. He volunteers help for regional training events and presentations that are organized by groups of manufacturers of decorative products, does presentations for regional associations, supports training seminars conducted by the American Society of of Concrete Contractors, and comes to the World of Concrete early each year with his staff to help form and place the concrete pads for the Artistry in Decorative Concrete demonstrations, an event that encourages more interest in decorative concrete work.

He is a believer that growing the decorative industry will contribute to everyone who is a part of it.