The Steel Conference, AISC's Annual Gathering, Draws Thousands to Atlanta
At the NASCC: Steel Conference Exhibitors showed off product launches and their respective expertises.
The expo hall included the latest steel fabrication machines and gadgets, including automated welders. Photo © AISC
At the end of April, Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center was brimming with thousands of steel fabricators and filled with the raucous hum of industrial machinery. No, the conference center was not being demolished or rehabbed, but hosting NASCC: The Steel Conference, an annual gathering organized by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC).
Over the course of three days, attendees checked out the convention hall’s 350 exhibitor booths for the latest gadgets and materials, including truck-sized straddle carriers and plate-processing systems, multiton cast connections, and hyper-efficient thermal breaks. If the live demonstrations proved tiring, guests could sneak away to attend hundreds of technical sessions. The hour-long talks dived into the structural capacity of historic ferrous metals, hybrid steel-and-timber systems, novel steel floor plates, and much more.
The AISC is a nonprofit technical institute and trade association founded in 1921. A key mission of the organization is to develop standards and codes—be they seismic provisions, bolt specifications, and more—that guide the design and construction of steel buildings and bridges across the country. These resources are readily available to architects and engineers through membership. The organization recently expanded its capacity to provide guidance by launching Clark, an AI chatbot trained on the AISC’s extensive archive.
The show celebrated and explored the technical know-how of steel detailing and connections. Photo © AISC
Each day of the conference began with a keynote address. Caroline Bennett, a professor and chair of the University of Kansas’s Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, spoke to fracture considerations pertinent to a wide range of steel applications. University of Waterloo School of Architecture professor Terri Meyer Boake lectured on the aesthetic and technical appeal of structural steel, highlighting photographic surveys of significant projects, such as the Will Alsop–designed Sharp Centre in Toronto (2004) and the Royal Ontario Museum expansion designed by Studio Libeskind (2004), and her numerous written works on steel construction.
The Steel Conference will be held in Denver next year from April 14–16.
Terri Meyer Boake, a professor at the University of Waterloo and an author of multiple books on structural steel, led the second-day keynote address. Photo © AISC
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