France’s Bouygues Construction has opened Scale One, a 2,500-sq-m facility in Chilly-Mazarin, south of Paris, which tests new materials, equipment, construction methods and technologies under real-world conditions before their use on site.
It has areas for recreating construction and renovation sites, a concrete printing facility, a robotics training area and a ‘FabLab’ for prototyping equipment.
Drilling robots, concrete printers, a prefabricated concrete wall system for EPR nuclear plants and photovoltaic cladding are among the systems being tested now.
Scale One was a winner of the 2023 “Major Innovation Sites for French Industries 2030” award, organised by the French government and the Ile-de-France region.
The facility is open to the sector and offers support for consultancy, prototyping, evaluations and testing.
Pierre-Éric Saint-André, Bouygues Construction’s chief executive, said: “Accelerating the innovation process will speed up the transformation of our sector.
“Scale One allows us to create the conditions for testing solutions that the sector needs in real-world settings, ensuring their reliability at an earlier stage and rolling them out more widely
“Our clear ambition is to reduce the time between an idea and its effective implementation in the field.”
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