Photo courtesy American Concrete Institute
Earlier this month, the American Concrete Institute (ACI) honored the winners of the 2017 Excellence in Concrete Construction Awards during the Concrete Convention and Exposition in Anaheim, California.
The awards celebrate the most creative projects in the concrete industry. Winning projects at the ACI Chapter level are eligible for the excellence awards. An independent panel of industry professionals selected 12 winners on the basis of architectural and engineering merit, creativity, construction techniques or solutions, innovative use of materials, ingenuity, sustainability and resilience as well as functionality.
R·torso·C, a home sitting on an area of 66 m2 (710 sf) in central Tokyo, Japan, won the overall Excellence award and also topped the Low-rise Buildings category. For this high-density residential district, the project team—including architectural firm Atelier Tekuto—pruned away the corner of a rectangular volume to create a sense of spaciousness in the interior of the four-story building.
The Market Street Parking Garage project in downtown Wichita, Kansas, won the first place in the Repair and Restoration category. Whole structural components, including concrete columns, beams, and floor slabs had to be replaced in this old structure. The whole project took 12 months and more than 1337 m3 (1750 cy) of concrete. Project team includes Law Kingdon Architecture and engineering firm Krudwig Structural Engineers.
Denver International Airport—Hotel Transit Center in Denver won in the Mid-rise Buildings category. The 15-story building comprises cast-in-place concrete elements and contains a variety of framing techniques. The upper 10 floors of the building cantilever out 16 m (55 ft) on each side by using concrete columns that leaned away from the structure. A large portion of the building’s façade is clad in a running-bond precast concrete architectural system requiring a complex custom form liner. Engineering firm S.A. Miro and architects from Gensler worked on this project.
The Ryerson University Student Learning Centre in Toronto, Canada, won the Decorative Concrete category. The new, eight-story center features an elevated plaza and glass façade with bridges to the existing library. The building is certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver program, and 50 percent of the roof is dedicated to vegetation.
The Embassy Lake Terraces in Bangalore, India, won in the High-rise Buildings category. It is spread across 5.8 ha (14.5 acres) with nine towers architecturally nuanced to take advantage of its lakeside location. The apartment floors employ a wall and slab system. Five of the nine towers are twisted at the 13th level by 30 degrees—the slab there is designed as a post-tensioned voided transfer slab. Columns at the transfer level are flared to take care of the transfer of shear to the column. The floors above are on cantilevers extended 7 m (23 ft) beyond the columns at transfer level. The basements and the podium level are designed with a waffle slab system. Andy Fisher Workshop and Innotech Engineering Consult worked on this project.
Johnson County Gateway in Overland Park, Kansas, won the Infrastructure category. The project added much-needed lanes and reconfigured existing interchanges throughout the I-435/I-35/K-10 corridor. Two collector distributor roads were built on either side of I-435 to alleviate traffic weaving to exit onto city streets. Twenty-two bridges and two diverging diamond interchanges were constructed as part of this project. More than 458,733 m3 (600,000 cy) of pavement concrete were employed in this $288 million project.
Entries for the 2018 Excellence in Concrete Construction Awards are open until April 2. For more information, visit ACIExcellence.
