AN EXTRAORDINARY GENERAL MEETING of the CONCRETE INSTITUTE was held at the Royal United Service Institution, Whitehall, London, S.W., on Thursday, October 6, 1910, at 8 p.m.
Publish Date – 1 November 1911
In the use of concrete, so far as it is connected with the erection of buildings and allied purposes, more than a merely superficial knowledge of the subject is required in order to ensure satisfactory results. Thomas Potter
I. The Tests Standing Committee of the Concrete Institute held their first meeting on January 26, 1911, and have held five subsequent meetings.
Membership etc.
The Concrete Institute had on December 31, 1910, 901 members and 14 Special Subscribers; the membership has increased therefore by 51 during the past year, and is still increasing.
The advantages of standardisation in respect to the preparation of drawings for reinforced concrete, either to contractors in the execution of the work or to architects and engineers to whom these drawings are submitted in the preliminary stages of any job, are considerable. Reinforced concrete is only one branch of general structural engineering and building construction, and it should come into proper relation with the other trades employed on building and engineering works. It ought, therefore, for this reason to conform as far as convenient to general practice in respect to the preparation of drawings, and as reinforced concrete is most extensively used in building, drawings should conform most closely to general architectural practice. The standards which will be found advisable for the preparation of drawings for reinforced concrete in architectural work will serve quite well for engineering work, and therefore more regard has beell paid to the building than to the engineering side in the remarks which follow.
A circular letter was issued at the beginning of 1909 by the Concrete Institute, asking for the results of experience and examination on the question of whether rusting of steel takes place when covered by concrete. The letter was sent to 1,000 engineers and others engaged in concrete construction, namely-to members of the Concrete Institute, 560; to municipal surveyors and engineers,96; to engineers of joint water boards and sewerage boards,25; to dock engineers, 38; to railway engineers, 94; to various contractors and others who use concrete, 187-total, 1,000. The letter is given in Appendix I.
The gradual development of the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers’ Swanscotnbe works since the conlmencement of their rotatory plant in 1899 has resulted in a very large increase in the capacity of the works and necessitated considerable enlargement of the wharves, more especially for the loading of cernent into steamers and sailing ships direct. C Percy Taylor
I suggest, without any intention of humour or hypercriticism and at the present stage in the study of design for concrete one can only venture to suggest, fearing to dogmatise that the simplest and directed royal road to ultimate artistic and architectural success in this material will be to eschew the process implied by the title of my paper. Beresford Pite
The importance of the general question of competitive designing is so great to all those who are in any way connected with the use of reinforced concrete, and particularly to those to whose interest it is that the material should be used to as full an extent as possible-I mean the specialist designers-that no apology is needed for dealing with it before this Institute. Mr Vawdrey
THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER of the CONCRETE INSTITUTE was held on Wednesday, June 7, 1911, in the Balmoral Room at the Trocadero Restaurant, Piccadilly Circus, London, W.
In dealing with the manufacture of Portland cement as we find it to-day, in such a short space of time as is allowed me for reading this paper, my remarks must necessarily be brief and practical to confine the subject, and so I propose at once to take more particularly the methods adopted in this country, although I must mention the progress that has been made in recent years in the industry as we have found it in Europe and the United States and Canada.
In accepting your invitation to read a paper on The Young Men's Christian Association Building, Manchester, I felt that it would be presumption on the part of a mere architect to attempt to explain the purely engineering side of the structure to an audience of experts. Alfred E Corbett