Inaugural Research Incentive Award Update

The Research Incentive Award aims to support and promote high‐quality architectural research and scholarship activities in ARCC member schools. The program provides faculty in ARCC member schools with the resources needed to support and enhance their research and creative activities and to develop their research agendas.

The inaugural recipients of the Research Incentive Award were Shelby Doyle and Nick Senske of Iowa State University for their proposal “Polycasting: multi-material 3D printed formwork for reinforced concrete.”

Shelby Doyle and Nick Senske posit:

“The goal of this project is to design, construct, and test prototypes for a new generation of nonstandard concrete formworks that are structurally efficient, reduce material and labor costs, and expand the expressive design potential of concrete. The project explores dual-extrusion 3D printed formworks for casting concrete: simultaneously printing a combination of containment and integrated reinforcement.

Our research focuses on the following questions: 1. Can water-soluble formworks provide an alternative to, or augmentation of, traditional concrete fabrication by allowing for variable density forms with greater geometric flexibility (e.g. undercuts and non-planar openings)? and 2. Can dual-extrusion additive manufacturing improve the performance and economy of these nonstandard geometries through 3D printed embedded tensile reinforcement?”

Read the full report of their findings here.