Though the building and construction sector may not be the first to come to mind, it is one of the largest contributors to climate change. As such it is an area key to reducing pollution, resource depletion and waste, by changing the way we design and build structures.
Today, using computational tools, we can design buildings that intelligently include structural performance in architectural geometry. This leads to beautiful, economical and optimized systems which use very little material.

Unfortunately, these structures have intricated and non-repetitive geometries. Making them difficult and expensive to build using our traditional methods that require months of milling or carpentry to make heavy, difficult to handle moulds that turn into waste. To unlock the full potential of these structures we need to come up with smart ways of building them. One solution is to use a knitted textile as mould for concrete. It is a lot lighter, does not need as much support, and it produces a lot less waste.
As of 2015, Mariana is a Ph.D. researcher at the Block Research Group and part of the NCCR Digital Fabrication. Her research focuses on the development of KnitCrete, a novel, material-saving, labor-reducing, cost-effective formwork system for casting of doubly curved geometries in concrete. The system uses a custom, 3d-Knitted, technical textile as a lightweight, stay-in-place shuttering, coated with a special cement paste to create a rigid mold.

Mariana Popescu successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on KnitCrete: Stay-in-place knitted fabric formwork for complex concrete structures on June 4, 2019. Additionally, her thesis committee, consisting of Prof. Dr. Chokri Cherif of TU Dresden, Prof. Dr. Jan Knippers of University of Stuttgart and Prof. Block, nominated her for an ETH Medal for outstanding thesis.

In 2019 Mariana has been named to MIT Technology Review’s prestigious annual list of Innovators Under 35 as a Pioneer. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx