NRMCA’s Lemay Presents on Resilience at Penn State Residential Conference

Lionel Lemay of NRMCA presented Concrete Building Systems: Disaster Resilient Solutions for Safer Communities at the first annual Residential Building Design and Construction Conference, February 20-21, in Bethlehem, PA. The conference was organized by the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center (PHRC) at Penn State University and provides a forum for researchers, design professionals, manufacturers, builders and code officials to present the latest advancements, innovations and projects related to residential buildings. The paper presented a four step process for resilient construction:

• Adopting a basic building code

• Promoting market driven resilience programs

• Adopting more robust resilience standards

• Building with more robust materials such as concrete

Lemay was also able to provide presenters with information on life cycle assessment research at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub to refute claims by some presenters that concrete is not a sustainable solution for residential construction.