A paradigm shift to a holistic approach to build durable concrete structures

Substantive fund and manpower have devoted to traffic and urbanization construction in our country in recent 30 years. Most of them are concrete structures. Problems of structure's durability and expensive cost of repair or rehabilitation have been concerned by extensive publics. But current research work and experimental method basically derived from the reductionist approach with a complex structure or phenomenon. The knowledge from it is a serious deficiency and would not be helpful for improving durability of concrete. In fact, deterioration of concrete comes from its internal stress and cracks. The relationship between cracking and durability, the causes of cracking, evaluating method of cracking sensitivity and, prevention cracking of concrete are presented in this paper.