Irene Josa is a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction at the University College London and a leading expert on the sustainability assessment of concrete structures.

Irene’s work is focused on sustainability assessment of construction materials, products and structures, both at the level of Life Cycle Assessment (environmental, economic and social), as well as integrated sustainability assessment and multi-criteria decision-making. Additionally, Irene works on the integration of social sustainability and equity principles in higher education and STEAM in particular.

She has worked on numerous research and industry projects, as well as volunteered in NGOs such as Engineers without borders and In2Science. She is a STEM Ambassador for STEM Learning UK and a nominee at the Women Innovators in Foundation Industries Awards of Innovate UK.

Within the fib, her work is principally focused within Commission 6 Prefabrication, where she is deputy chair and TG 6.3 Sustainability of structures with precast elements, where she is co-convener.

In our talk, we discuss the pathway towards making concrete more sustainable, how to consider social aspects in concrete structure design and the importance of multidisciplinarity in research.

Venue

This episode was recorded on the 19th of May, 2025.

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Ysabel Guil-Celada is a Project Manager and Senior Associate at the Arenas & Asociados bridge design consultancy company based in Madrid.

Ysabel boasts an extensive and impressive portfolio, having led the structural design and analyses of numerous bridge projects, including several landmark structures. These include, among others, the Santa Teresa Bridge over the River Pisuerga in Valladolid in Spain – a 90 m span composite steel-concrete bridge erected by flotation and uplifting methods; the Kvesheti – Kobi Road Arch Bridge, with a main span of 285 m in a high seismicity area; and the Almonte Viaduct, a concrete arch bridge with a 384 m main span, with a 350 km/h high-speed rail viaduct.

Beyond her work at Arenas & Asociados, Ysabel has teaching experience at the UAX University in Madrid and she has lectured at several international bridge conferences and symposia.

She is also dedicated to the search for gender equality in the construction industry – she encourages young students to enter the “STEM world” through her experience and is also actively involved in the Commission for Equality established at Arenas & Asociados.

She is also the winner of the 2023 fib AAYE award in the Design & Construction category.

In our talk, we discuss the process and experience of bridge design, the importance of mentoring the evolution of design aides and tools and the, sometimes challenging, relationship between an engineer’s professional and private life.

Venue

This episode was recorded on the 12th of July, 2024.

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Jean Michel Torrenti is a reseracher at the Université Gustave Eiffel, professor at Ecole des ponts and Director of Research at ESITC-Paris. Within the fib, he has been active for 17 years, reaching the position of Presidium member and Chairman of Commission 4 Concrete & Concrete Technology.

Jean Michel has held various positions at French engineering schools and research centres. This has allowed him carry out a wide range of activities in research, research management, consultancy, standardization and teaching.

Jean Michel’s work spans a large number of topics with his main focus being on the mechanical behavior and durability of concrete structures and especially time-dependent phenomena like creep and shrinkage.

In recent years, he has been actively involved in the preparation of the fib Model Code 2020 and the new Eurocode 2.

Jean Michel has also received awards such as the researcher prize awarded by the Fédération Nationale des Travaux Publics in 2005 and the award for his career during the ICCM2024 conference.

In this podcast, we talk about the fib, its functioning and the role of young members in it, as well as the evolution of the way research is done over the years, reconciliation of research and managerial duties, as well as technical topics such as creep and shrinkage.

Venue

This episode was recorded on the 11th of July, 2024.

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My guest on this episode is Maggie Planchat, CEO of fsp Architects. She got her diploma from MIT, worked for a contractor in the UK and then moved to Switzerland, where she is leading an architectural design team.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:
https://www.fsp-architekten.ch/

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 16th of July 2024, in Zürich, Switzerland.

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Jeannette Kuo is a founding partner of the architecture practice KARAMUK KUO based in Zurich. Established in 2010 with Ünal Karamuk, the work of the office focuses on the intersection of spatial concepts and constructive technologies, recognizing architecture as a social and material discipline.

The office works on projects of a range of scales, from schools and housing to complex cultural projects, and has been published in numerous international journals including Archithese, Werk, Bau + Wohnen, Metropolis, and Casabella. Recent projects include the International Sports Sciences Institute in Lausanne, the Augusta Raurica Archaeological Center, Weiden Secondary School, and Cham Apartments. This year they were recognized by Domus as one of the 50 best architectural firms of 2020.

Beyond her practice, Kuo regularly contributes to the architectural discourse through her academic commitments and writings, as well as participation in conferences and symposia. Her publication, “A-Typical Plan: Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office Building,” received the 2013 Most Beautiful Swiss Book award. She regularly serves on international competition juries and most recently was European jury president for the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction.

In 2006, Kuo was the recipient of the competitive Maybeck Teaching Fellowship at UC Berkeley as well as an award for her research project “(Infra)Structural Opportunism.”  Since then, she has also taught at MIT, and from 2011 to 2014 held a visiting professorship at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In addition, she has lectured and had been a guest critic at numerous institutions such as ETH Zurich, Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design, Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio, Pratt Institute, Hong Kong University, and the University of Toronto.

Kuo received her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from U.C. Berkeley, a Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard, and a Master of Advanced Studies from ETH Zurich.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
https://www.fib-international.org/
https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/jeannette-kuo/
https://www.karamukkuo.com/
https://casabellaweb.eu/

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 4th december 2021, in Zürich, Switzerland.

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Urs Meister, in collaboration with Johannes Käferstein, has been running the architectural practice Käferstein & Meister Architekten, based at 275 Limmatstrasse in Zurich's industrial district, since 1996 and is strongly rooted in the city and its building culture. The office team consists of an average of 10 employees. The firm is committed to high-quality, multi-layered architecture that is dedicated to the human being. In particular, there is an interest for an approach that focuses on the satisfaction of buildings and their robust materiality instead of an over-instrumented comfort.

Käferstein & Meister Architekten are active in the fields of residential and commercial construction and are involved in all project phases. Having a wealth of experience in dealing with existing structures, in "building on" and in densifying, particularly with regard to the preservation of historical monuments, is an important part of it. In recent years, new challenging building projects and urban planning studies have been added, in which this knowledge of the interplay between the built environment and the context is applied on a larger scale for public and institutional clients.

Both business owners are active at several schools of architecture in the European universities since the beginning of their professional career and regularly serve on juries of architectural competitions, advise clients and sit on cityscape commissions. Urs Meister has held a professorship at the University of Liechtenstein since 2002.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• https://www.uni.li/urs.meister?set_language=en
• https://www.kaefersteinmeister.ch/9296777
• https://www.google.com/search?q=sensory+homunculus&source=lmns&bih=843&biw=1598&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjMuqS80rn2AhWkgv0HHReiDe8Q_AUoAHoECAEQAA
• https://brazilianconcrete.wordpress.com/tag/joao-filgueiras-lima-lele/

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 5th March 2022, in Zürich, Switzerland.

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Since 2015, DI Sebastian Spaun has been managing director of the Association of the Austrian Cement Industry (VÖZ). Before that, he has already led the department on Environment & Technology of the VÖZ for 17 years. 

Other functions of him include being board member of the Austrian Society for Construction Technology (ÖBV) as well as supervisory board member of Austrian Cooperative Research (ACR), a network of private research institutes offering applied R&D for companies.

Having received a profound knowledge to understand ecological interrelation by studying “Land and Water Management and Engineering" at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, he is nowadays focussing his professional work on the decarbonisation of cement production, resource-efficient construction as well as the creation of long-lasting transportation infrastructure.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• Association of the Austrian Cement Industry (VÖZ) - https://www.zement.at/ 
• Planning guide for energy storage concrete/thermal component activation - https://www.zement.at/service/publikationen/energiespeicher-beton
• Addressed study about the CO2 uptake in cement-containing products by the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute - https://www.ivl.se/download/18.34244ba71728fcb3f3f8f9/1622457897161/B2309.pdf
• Study on the global carbon uptake by cement production by Xi et al. (2016) - https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2840
• Addressed prefabricated concrete ceiling system with integrated thermal component activation - https://www.innogration.de/ceiltec-deckensysteme/
• Photo credit: derfritz (on behalf of BDÖ)

VENUE

The podcast was recorded on the 24th of March at the office of the Association of the Austrian Cement Industry in Vienna, Austria.

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Professor Benjamin Kromoser is the head of the Institute of Green Civil Engineering at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria (short: BOKU Wien). He is a civil engineer and inventor with a close connection to craftsmanship. His research, teaching and practice is oriented towards the best possible use of natural resources in the construction sector.

In his early career, together with Prof. Johann Kollegger (University of Technology in Vienna) he developed a novel, resource-efficient concrete shell construction method, further known as Pneumatic Forming of Hardened Concrete (PFHC). Advantages of this method comprise the significant savings in formwork construction efforts and a substantial reduction in construction time in comparison to conventional building methods. Austrian railways (ÖBB) already successfully used this construction methods to build a concrete shell bridge with a span of 36m as deer pass over the two-track rail Koralmbahn.

Prof. Kromoser’s research and teaching at the BOKU Wien have a wide spectrum, including the automation and digitalisation of constructive production processes, economic and ecologic optimisation of structures as well as the sustainability assessment of buildings amongst others. He facilitates to use materials according to their properties and strives to minimise the environmental impact of buildings considering the whole life cycle. In concrete construction he is concerned with pushing sustainability forward, which reflects in his research on structural optimised concrete structures, high-performance materials in concrete construction and wood-concrete-composite systems to only name a few.

Amongst other awards, Prof. Benjamin Kromoser received the Dr. Ernst-Fehrer Preis at the University of Technology in Vienna in 2015 and the Achievement Award for Young Engineers of the fib in the category design and construction in 2019.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• Profile Prof. Benjamin Kromoser
• BOKU robot laboratory – automated construction 
• BOKU robot laboratory – construction process 
• Instagram account
• Concrete shell bridge

VENUE:

The podcast was recorded on the 18th of May 2022 at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria.

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Sony Devabhaktuni is assistant professor of design in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) where he joined the architecture faculty in January 2016. He has taught design studios and elective seminars in the undergraduate and graduate programs. He also teaches an introduction to architectural representation for 1st and 2nd year students from across the university as part of the Common Core program. His research uses drawing to describe how architecture is situated within the world–understood both as a set of ecological relations and a site for human exchange. Before arriving in Hong Kong, he taught and practiced in Switzerland and France. He is both a writer and an architect and is currently working on several publications that focus on the entanglement between politics, architecture and urbanism.

His research and teaching looks at collaborative processes in architectural design and at urban infrastructure. He is interested in architecture’s capacity to engage critically with political and economic concerns – both using tools such as drawing, and with methods borrowed from the social sciences. Ongoing projects include: research funded by the Hong Kong SAR government’s University Grants Committee on collaborations between dance and architecture ; HKU funded research on the planning and development of a new capital for the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh; and an ongoing study on the ‘curb-scale’ infrastructure of the Hong Kong street.

With John C.H. Lin, he is the co-author of the forthcoming As Found Houses (Applied Research + Design Publishers)(2020). The book documents self-built renovations to traditional house typologies in rural China. His writing on collaboration includes, with co-author Min Kyung Lee, the essay “Collaboration: Unresolved Forms of Working Together in Contemporary Architectural Practice” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White, eds)(2019). He is the co-editor, with Nasrin Seraji and Xiaoxuan Lu, of From Crisis to Crisis: Debates on why architecture criticism matters today (2019).

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• https://www.platformspace.net/home/traces-of-protest-and-curb-scale-infrastructures-in-hong-kong
• https://www.arch.hku.hk/staff/arch/devabhaktuni-sony/
• https://hub.hku.hk/cris/rp/rp02123

VENUE:
This episode was recorded on the 14th of may 2022, in Paris, France.

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Thomas Romm is an architect with his own office based in Vienna. He studied architecture at the TU Vienna as well as the TU Berlin and, since his diploma thesis on recycling-friendly residential buildings, he has dedicated his work to the topic of resources within the built environment, putting a strong focus on the environmental impact of planning and construction.

As an expert for circular construction he is involved in the development of large construction sites in the Viennese housing sector. Using Building Information Modelling as one of his tools, he is continuously working on the improvement of the eco-efficiency in mass flows. According to his opinion, current circular economy concentrates too much on deconstruction, whereas essential material flows can actually already be generated and channelled during the realisation of large construction projects.

In addition to his participation in numerous competitions, dismantling as well as construction projects, he also devotes himself to ambitious research projects: He is an initiator of BauKarussell, a cooperation network of socio-economic companies for dismantled building components for reuse.

Apart from his professional expertise, he is also teaching ecology for architects at the Academy of Fine Arts.

RELATED PODCASTS, SOURCES AND LINKS:

• Office of architect Thomas Romm – http://www.romm.at/en/home
• BauKarussell and Social Urban Mining – https://www.baukarussell.at/about-us/
• RCC reduced carbon concrete – https://nachhaltigwirtschaften.at/en/sdz/projects/reduced-carbon-concrete.php
• Seestadt Aspern as one of Europe’s largest urban development projects – https://www.aspern-seestadt.at/en 

VENUE

This episode was recorded on the 13th of February 2023 in Vienna, Austria.

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