Concrete

Hired to design a vacation home in an avocado field while leaving the field itself intact, Francisco Pardo Arquitecto decided on the radical plan of burying it. The resulting Avocado House blends into the landscape so well that it's barely visible.

Having a place out in the country might be nice, but it would be subject to some harsh natural elements. The Zome was invented with such concerns in mind, as it's designed to last up to 500 years – which isn't the same as saying it actually will.

Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world, but it comes at a huge environmental cost. Engineers in Japan have developed a new technique to make concrete by recycling waste concrete and combining it with captured carbon dioxide.

Scientists have come up with an alternative cement recipe that makes use of unused mining materials to cut its carbon emissions by up to two thirds, while meeting the performance requirements of traditional Portland cement.

Concrete may not seem welcoming, but bacteria do live inside it. A new study has examined this concrete microbiome to find out how they get there, how they change over time, and how we might use them in future to monitor or even repair defects.

A first-of-its-kind 3D-printed concrete bridge has been unveiled in Venice, Italy. The bridge is a demonstration of a new 3D printing method resulting in a structure requiring no mortar or steel reinforcement.

As the world's strongest artificial material, graphene may have a lot to offer the world of construction, and scientists have offered another example of this by using it to create a novel form of cement that is highly resistant to water and cracks.

We have seen some interesting developments around what's known as self-healing concrete that repairs its own cracks, and scientists have now demonstrated an exciting new form of this that makes use of an enzyme found in human blood.

Scientists at Stanford University have demonstrated a cement recipe that swaps troublesome limestone for zero-carbon volcanic rock, which might just help reinforce the finished product through embedded microscopic fibers.

Recent research projects have demonstrated how the wonder material graphene could play a role in stronger, more eco-friendly concrete, and now we're seeing the first real-world deployment of the technology in the foundations of a new gym in the UK.

It sounds like the premise of a comedy sketch, but researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a way to recycle food scraps into construction materials that are stronger than concrete, yet remain edible and tasty.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have put forward a new formula for stronger concrete that not only removes a large amount of damaging materials from the equation, but makes use of upcycled waste clay at the same time.