Reading Football Club - Madjeski Satdium

In the last 50 years, prestressed concrete, pretensioned bridge beams have developed from a few experimental applications to one of the key solutions to bridging problems in the short- to medium-span range, 1O-40m. This paper is written to chart that progress and to put in context the current and likely future developments in precast concrete bridges. H.P.J. Taylor

Opening the conference, Roger Courtney, Deputy Chairman of the BRE said that the term intelligent buildings ‘came with a lot of baggage’. For some, it was about developing technology to control building performance, and many took the view that there was not enough thought given at the design stage to the interaction of systems. For others it was all about information technology. Mr Courtney suggested that a better definition was ‘the creation of buildings people wanted to live and work in’, citing the BRE’s own projects: the Environment Building (Fig 1) and the BRE Office. There is also the Integer House, newly opened on the BRE site (see case study). Kathy Stansfield

The largest and best known applications for cold-formed components are for purlins and cladding. A more recent success has been the floordeck and composite slab market where a considerable market share has been won by metal floordecks against the precast concrete slab suppliers.