ENR Associate Technology, Equipment and Products Editor Jeff Yoders has been writing about design and construction innovations for 20 years. He is a five-time Jesse H. Neal award winner and multiple ASBPE winner for his tech coverage. Jeff previously wrote about construction technology for Structural Engineer, CE News and Building Design + Construction. He also wrote about materials prices, construction procurement and estimation for MetalMiner.com. He lives in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, where the pace of innovation never leaves him without a story to chase.
Engineering technology provider Bentley Systems promises that customers’ data will always be theirs, regardless of the ongoing industry-wide migration to the cloud and the rise of AI.
While improvements to the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Diego
have begun, local officials stress more money will be needed to stop the raw sewage overflow problem in the cross-border area.
As it restarts work on a 20-mile section of U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, the Biden administration says it is must use funds appropriated by Congress in 2019 for wall construction.
As manufacturing facilities for everything from electric vehicle components to the crystalline photovoltaic wafers in solar panels are funded by government incentive as well as private investment, design firms are being called on to redesign production processes dependent on the materials and regulations that long-favored overseas manufacturing.
A different prefabrication and modular construction sector came out of the pandemic. Ambitious startups such as Skender Manufacturing and Katerra folded in the last few years, while one major health care designer lamented an industrywide pullback that saw many of the suppliers they work with cut back on custom, by-project fabrication to standardize on products like headwalls and bathroom pods.
Demands from clients and labor shortages are forcing some contractors into other methods of creating building assemblies, driving new investments in prefabrication and modular construction techniques.
Structural materials have not changed all that much since reinforced concrete was introduced to construction in the late 19th century, but a fiber-reinforced, mineral composite system from a Florida company offers a new alternative.