News Detail

ACI’s Big Picture

6/1/2023

This memo will be published at the same time I will start my first international trip as the ACI President. I will be visiting Morocco, Turkey, and Italy—listed as the “Mediterranean outreach” in my calendar. In Istanbul, I will attend the fib Symposium 2023, where among several meetings and presentations, we will have a technical session devoted to the important topic of code harmonization. With Bernie Pekor, ACI Director of International Business Development, we are planning other trips around the world to visit with ACI chapters and other sister organizations. However, I will never be able to emulate my predecessor, Past President Charles Nmai—the true ACI Ambassador.

Before continuing, I would like to reflect on the successful ACI Concrete Convention – Spring 2023 held in San Francisco, CA, USA, at the beginning of April. We had the largest attendance ever for a Spring convention. The ACI Board of Direction met and selected the next Executive Vice President, filling this leadership position critical to the future of the Institute. We are excited to welcome Frederick H. Grubbe, MBA, CAE, who is currently serving as President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Precast Concrete Association. In addition to more than 300 committee meetings and over 60 technical sessions, we held the ACI-JCI (Japan Concrete Institute) 6th Joint Seminar, which was attended by Minehiro Nishiyama, JCI President. For the first time ever, we had events sponsored and organized by ACI’s three Centers of Excellence: NEx, NEU, and PRO. We are setting a trend that will continue during future conventions to “walk the talk” that makes ACI “Always advancing.” The NEU full-day event was a cornerstone for ACI (kudos to Dean Frank, Executive Director, and his team) and a clear indication that sustainability is at the core of ACI’s agenda and, as importantly, is relevant to our members. Participation was so large that we reached capacity in the meeting room, and a monitor with speakers and additional chairs were placed in the corridor to accommodate the overflow. I had never seen so many young faces at a technical session before.

In my May memo, I recounted a turning point in my professional career. I also stated that I would continue to write about my ACI journey, with the goal of inspiring members to pursue their passion within the Institute. So, let’s continue: A second turning point in my career occurred during the spring of 1996 while I was on sabbatical in my native country of Italy. Given the needs of the building stock of Italy, I focused on structural strengthening of concrete and masonry structures, thereby developing my second technical passion—in-place load testing of structures. Because the “building codes” in Italy were silent on the acceptance of strengthening with composites and to demonstrate to both owners and building officials the suitability of a novel repair solution for a prestressed concrete roof damaged by fire (the first commercial application of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer for repair in Italy), we had to use an in-place load test that we called “cyclic load test.” This was uncharted territory for U.S. academia, because there was practically no record of research in the field of response to loading of existing buildings. In January of 1997, with the support of Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (engineer of record) and Structural Group (repair contractor), we conducted the first cyclic load test on an existing structure in the United States. This was to assess the capacity of a parking structure slab in Atlanta, GA, USA, using the new methodology and acceptance criteria to make evaluation more reliable, scientific, and effective, and with the potential of being more extensively used by the concrete repair industry.

Back to ACI—Following my proven pattern with ACI Committee 440, I joined ACI Committee 437, Strength Evaluation of Existing Concrete Structures, which I later chaired for 7 years. With the contribution of many other committee members and the research conducted by my university teams, a new standard was published by ACI 437, recognizing this methodology for in-place assessment and making it available to practitioners. As important, the cyclic load test standard was adopted by reference in ACI 562, “Code Requirements for Assessment, Repair, and Rehabilitation of Existing Concrete Structures and Commentary.”

Summer is an important season for all segments of the construction industry. Practitioners are busy designing, constructing, and repairing; academicians are focusing on research; and students are getting a taste of their future careers. During all this, let’s not lose focus on the big picture—we are building a safer, more resilient, and more sustainable world.

Antonio Nanni

ACI President