Specialized engineering contractors, technologies and services worldwide in the field of post- tensioning, stay cables and related construction engineering.
Founded in 1944, BBR VT International Ltd is the Technical Headquarters and Business Development Centre for the BBR Network franchise. This leading international group of specialized contractors, provides engineering systems for all types of structure and delivers innovation and technical excellence in the field of post-tensioning and stay cables. Through the decades, BBR has constantly updated itself to meet market requirements as it successfully traded on the international scene. Since 2007, as the largest franchise of its kind in the world, the BBR Network has grown both in terms of the number of territories covered, as well as post- tensioning and stay cable strand tonnage.
Bureau BBR, as the company was first known, was born of material shortages after the Second World War - and engineering innovation at its very best. The three founders - Max Birkenmaier, Antonio Brandestini and Mirko Robin Ros - explored the savings to be made by using pretensioned reinforcement for concrete support girders. The attraction was that pre- or post- tensioned concrete slabs would require less concrete than traditionally reinforced slabs, yet could perform the same structural function.
In the 1950s and 1960s, they ventured further - into the development of a complete range of prestressing and post-tensioning systems, ground anchors and stay cable anchorages, covering all structural engineering applications. Over the next years, BBR created three new world records in the stay cable arena. In the late 1950s, their parallel wire stay cables were used for the first time on a pedestrian bridge in Stuttgart, Germany. Then, a decade later, BBR strand stay cables were used for the roof of the new Olympic Stadium in Munich. BBR carbon stay cables had their first outing in 1994 during the construction of the Storchenbrücke viaduct in Winterthur, Switzerland.
While many cable suppliers built their first major cable supported structure in the late 1970s and early 1980s, BBR stay cable technology was deployed for the first time in the late 1950s and, since those days, it has been applied to over 400 major structures around the world – including the breathtaking Tatara Bridge in Japan which has the longest main span constructed in the 20th Century. The successful development of the BBR business has continued, with many of the world’s most striking structures featuring in their sizeable portfolio.
