Technion and Columbia engineers build concrete structures that unfold in 14 seconds

Engineers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Columbia University have developed a way to build reinforced concrete structures whose moulds deploy themselves. Instead of trucking large wooden or metal formwork to a site, assembling it by hand and tearing it down after the concrete sets, the new system arrives folded up and opens into its final shape as the concrete is poured. The study was published in Communications Engineering on 23 July 2026 and was later chosen as a research highlight by Nature Cities.

The work was led by Prof. Amir Gat and doctoral student Ezra Ben-Abu of the Technion's Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, with Dr. Anna Zigelman and Prof. Hod Lipson, a Technion graduate who chairs mechanical engineering at Columbia. Their formwork is made of multistable tubes, thin polymer shells that can snap between stable shapes, fitted in advance with the steel cables that will reinforce the concrete. Liquid concrete is pumped in through a single inlet, and its pressure pushes the tubes out into their planned geometry with no manual assembly. In a demonstration, a structure 2.36 metres tall with a base 2.4 metres across deployed completely in 14 seconds. The team also made rectangular, conical and spherical forms and proposed a modular approach for multi-storey buildings.

The polymer shell stays on as permanent formwork and turned out to make the concrete much stronger: columns with the shell carried roughly three times the load of identical columns without it, and they met the ASTM C39 standard for concrete. Formwork can account for up to three quarters of construction time and well over half of project costs. The researchers calculate that their formwork costs about $11 per cubic metre of concrete against roughly $193 for conventional wooden systems, and that producing it emits about half as much carbon.

The work is still a proof of concept, but the team sees uses in rapid construction of buildings and infrastructure, projects in remote places and emergency housing after disasters or wars. Columbia and the Technion have filed a joint US provisional patent. The research was supported by an Azrieli Fellowship.