CERL: A History of the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory 1968-1974

In the mid-1960s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined that to successfully meet the challenge of its huge and increasingly complex construction program a new research laboratory was required. This decision led to the creation of the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory CERL in 1968, and increased the Corps major laboratory inventory to five Waterways Experiment Station, Engineer Topographic Laboratories,Coastal Engineering Research Center, and Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. Each of these laboratories supported a different facet of the Corps mission , but none addressed that assigned to CERL. The Army went to the National Academy of Sciences and asked its Building Research Advisory Board BRAB to study the Corps construction program to discover what new ideas the Army should try to implement in order to fulfill its construction requirements. In two reports, issued in 1967 and 1968, BRAB arrived at some general conclusions which became the basis for the Armys proposal to Congress to set up a construction research facility . The 1967 report pointed out first of all that the Armys construction program was often based on technological processes and products that were the result of research sponsored by private industry or university research programs. The challenge to the Army was to get this advanced knowledge into the Corps military construction program so that the Army could take the greatest possible advantage of progress being made in the construction industry.