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Simeon Wilkie, civil engineer and building materials scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, studies concrete, from what it’s made of to why and how it should be conserved.
“It’s quite easy to think of concrete as being this solid, impermeable mass,” said Wilkie. “But if you look at it underneath a really high-powered microscope, it's more like a really dense sponge.”
Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. In fact, after water, it is the world’s second most consumed material. While the Roman Empire used concrete to construct buildings, today’s concrete is different in many ways and is revealing new information about its properties.
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