Brief
Zaha Hadid Architects’ associate director Shajay Bhooshan discusses the Striatus bridge, a 3D-printed concrete footbridge that showcases the sustainable use of concrete. Learn how the bridge combines ancient wisdoms of masonry construction, modern technologies of design and engineering, and 3D concrete printing.
Insight
The Striatus bridge, a freestanding 3D-printed concrete footbridge, has been designed to demonstrate how 3D printing techniques can be used to build with less material, according to Shajay Bhooshan, an associate director at Zaha Hadid Architects.
The bridge was built to showcase the capabilities of unreinforced concrete and computational design and uses historic masonry construction techniques to distribute the load of the structure without the need for internal ancillary support, which means it is held together entirely through compression.
The bridge is dry assembled without any glues, binders or mortar, making it more easily disassembled and recycled. It uses neoprene pads to control friction and stress concentration and external ties to absorb thrust tension.
The lack of adhesives and mortar means the bridge has a lower environmental footprint, and since the blocks used to make the bridge are hollow, considerably less material was used. Striatus was built by Block Research Group at Swiss university ETH Zurich and the Computation and Design Group at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA CODE), in collaboration with concrete 3D printing specialists incremental3D.
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