Concrete - Building With Concrete

Building With Concrete

Concrete is one of the most durable building materials. It provides superior fire resistance, compared with wooden construction and can gain strength over time. Structures made of concrete can have a long service life. Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world with annual consumption estimated at between 21 and 31 billion tonnes.

Concrete is used more than any other man-made material in the world. As of 2006, about 7.5 billion cubic meters of concrete are made each year—more than one cubic meter for every person on Earth.

Concrete powers a US$35 billion industry, employing more than two million workers in the United States alone. More than 55,000 miles (89,000 km) of highways in the United States are paved with this material. Reinforced concrete, prestressed concrete and precast concrete are the most widely used types of concrete functional extensions in modern days.

Read more about this topic:  Concrete

Famous quotes containing the words building and/or concrete:

    People do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it: a mouse in a pitch barrel.
    Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
    Walter Pater (1839–1894)