Construction

When most of us think of freshly poured concrete, we picture a material that should be left to dry as smooth as possible. A new robot drives right over the stuff, however, gouging its surface to make structures stronger yet also cheaper to build.

Using a 3D printer that works with molten glass, researchers forged LEGO-like glass bricks with a strength comparable to concrete. The bricks could have a role in circular construction in which materials are used over and over again.

The ingenuity of ancient Egyptian engineers may have been more advanced than we thought. A currently unexplained ancient structure may have been part of a water purification system feeding a hydraulic lift to raise huge stone blocks to build a pyramid.

This mobile manufacturing machine turns rubble from destroyed buildings into bricks – bricks which can be stacked and joined together Lego-style to form mortarless structures. Years in the making, the first mobile brick factory is headed to Ukraine.

A robotic truck equipped with a mighty telescopic boom arm has just journeyed from Australia to Florida. Now the construction robot will get busy churning out up to 10 houses in a bid to become the employee of choice for building entire communities.

A new solution from Cambridge University could recycle both concrete and steel at the same time, by throwing old concrete into steel-recycling furnaces. If done using renewable energy, the process could make for completely carbon-zero cement.

The 2024 winner of the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture is an ingenious rearrangeable multi-story pavilion designed to be quickly extended, moved, or reconfigured into whatever the community needs it to be.

An experimental new helmet could save drivers of construction vehicles from serious injuries. The device measures the extent to which its wearer is being shaken up while driving, and sounds an alert when the shaking gets to be too much.

Part of the exorbitant cost of offshore wind energy is the massive crane ships required to install the damn things – but Norwegian company Windspider has come up with a brilliantly lightweight crane system that promises to slash costs in half.

A new 3D construction printer from Icon can whip out two-story concrete buildings faster and cheaper than its previous Vulcan printer. It has already been used to build a 27-ft-high structure called Phoenix House, now on display in Austin, Texas.

Thanks to our high demand for concrete, the world may eventually run out of accessible sand. Scientists at Rice University have now shown that substituting graphene can not only save sand, but makes concrete lighter, stronger and tougher.

China's Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group recently took its new XCA3000 wheeled crane to a wind farm in the Liaoning Province to lift a 25-ton blade some 107 meters above the ground, before it was installed in the turbine hub.