Striatus, an arched 3D-printed concrete masonry bridge presented during the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, has been named finalist in the ‘Experimental’ category in Fast Company’s 2022 Innovation by Design Awards.

Now in its 11th year, the Innovation by Design Awards celebrates the designers and businesses solving the most crucial problems of today and anticipating the pressing issues of tomorrow. Striatus is also shortlisted for the British Construction Industry Awards 2022 (BCIA) and the iStructE Structural Awards 2022, organised by the Institution of Structural Engineers. The bridge’s digital concrete fabrication combines the time-honoured principles of traditional vaulted construction with advanced computational design, engineering and robotic manufacturing technologies. The result is a ‘super-lightweight’ bridge that eliminates waste by using material only where structurally necessary. The bridge, developed by the Block Research Group (BRG) at ETH Zurich and ZHA Computation and Design Group (ZHACODE), in collaboration with incremental3D (in3D) and made possible by Holcim, is easily maintained and demountable, and designed according to the principles of ‘reduce, re-use and recycle’.

With concrete’s global carbon footprint in mind, Striatus’ lean design approach has huge potential to do more with less, slashing the embodied carbon of bridges and other structures, including flooring systems. 3D-printing concrete can reduce the use of the material by up to 70 per cent.

Earlier this year, Striatus was unanimously chosen by judges as the inaugural winner of the AJ100 Innovation of the Year award. ‘This is refreshing and well-considered,’ said one judge. ‘Architects tend to think innovation means apps … what I like about this is that it takes a fully-integrated view which goes from materiality, to compression structures, to aesthetics and talks about a massive reduction in material cost all the way through.’ Other judges admired the holistic and rigorous approach taken by ZHA and the wider team, the bridge’s reinterpretation of a simple but highly efficient compression system and the project’s ‘ambition to reach beyond what it is now’.

Striatus was also selected Jury winner of an ‘Architizer A+ Award’ in the ‘Architecture + Concrete’ category and named winner of the ‘Green Design Awards’ organised by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design.Fast Company’s 2022 Innovation by Design Awards finalists in the ‘Experimental’ category