“The Fabric Formwork Book: Methods for Building New Architectural and Structural Forms in Concrete” is the first comprehensive monograph on the emerging technology of flexible molds for reinforced concrete architecture. 

Mark West’s 298-page book published by Routledge examines fabric-formed concrete techniques from technical, historical and theoretical aspects. The inventor of many fabric-formed concrete techniques for architecture and engineering structures, Mark West won a LafargeHolcim Awards Bronze in 2005 for his “Material Reduction: Efficient Fabric-Formed Concrete” project that enables both substantial materials and cost savings together with rich aesthetic possibilities.

The Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology (CAST), where the Material Reduction: Efficient Fabric-Formed Concrete project was developed is an architectural research laboratory that embraces both the poetic and technical dimensions of design. Following on from winning the Holcim Awards Bronze for North America in 2005, Mark West and his team continue to explore mold technology that uses flat fabric sheets stretched over simple rigid frames to cast beautiful, efficient, lightweight, precast concrete structural elements including trusses. Cast concrete trusses offer significant savings in materials, dead weight, and embodied energy.

Following five regional competitions, 15 Award-winning projects will now compete in the first global Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects. The global phase of the competition showcases the best entries from more than 1500 submissions from 118 countries, and encourages innovative, future-oriented and tangible approaches within the building and construction industry.

USD 220,000 in prize money was presented to the best entries from North America in the first Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects. The competition run by the Swiss-based Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction in collaboration with five of the world’s leading technical universities aims to promote sustainable approaches to the built environment.

The entry contributes a high degree of innovation in material research and testing, inventively challenging the construction industry to achieve increased levels of efficiency and environmentally sensitive techniques of production. The results provide convincing evidence of the as of yet untapped potential of concrete as a material force. To be commended are the substantial material savings yielded by allowing the cross-sectional area to vary according to minimal structural requirements.

This experiment undertaken in Canada offers an approach to saving concrete in a variable-section beam that results in creating significant reductions in material and dead weight. The project is ingenious in that it applies accumulated knowledge to future-oriented thinking. On the one hand, standard engineering principles are deployed as to the location of reinforcing bars either at the top or the the bottom of the beam.