Digital fabrication has been termed the “third industrial revolution”, and is promising to revolutionize many disciplines, including most recently the construction sector. Both academia and industry see immense promise in cementitious materials, which lend themselves well to additive manufacturing techniques for digital fabrication in construction. With this recent trend and high interest in this new research field, the 1st RILEM International Conference on Concrete and Digital Fabrication (Digital Concrete 2018) was organized.
Since 2014, ETH Zurich has been host for the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) for Digital Fabrication in Architecture, which is highly interdisciplinary and unique worldwide. In 2018, this NCCR opened the “DFAB House”, which incorporates many digital fabrication principles for architecture. It is also responsible for the 600 m2 Robotic Fabrication Lab and the first robotically built roof in the world. Held in tandem with Rob|Arch 2018, the leading conference for robotics in architecture, RILEM deemed it the right time to combine forces at this new conference, which will be the first large conference to feature the work of the recently created RILEM Technical Committee on Digital Fabrication with Cement-based Materials, among other leaders in this new field worldwide.
These conference proceedings bring together papers that take into account the findings in this new area. Papers reflect the varying themes of the conference, including Materials, Processing, Structure, and Applications.