Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
A large crack formed in a window at the sinking and tilting Millennium Tower over the Labor Day weekend, prompting officials there to block off part of the sidewalk on Mission Street as a precaution, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit has learned. City inspectors issued a notice of violation on Tuesday, giving the Millennium management 72 hours to report back on the extent of the problem and the soundness of the building’s façade in light of the failure. — nbcbayarea.com
The latest safety concern over San Francisco's sinking Millennium Tower occurred Labor Day weekend when residents heard creaking sounds followed by a loud popping noise in the building. Soon after the incident a resident living on the 36th floor found a crack in his window. The high rise is... View full entry
In the past — or in schools with higher proportions of white students — a student acting out might garner an intervention by their principal, or a concerned teacher’s phone call to parents. But today, throughout the US, discipline in many schools has become a matter of law enforcement, rather than education. In New York, the majority of school guards — 5,000 School Safety Agents patrolling 2,300 public and private schools — are civilians employed by the School Safety Division of the NYPD. — urbanomnibus.net
Out of fearful reaction to school shootings and other safety concerns, many school environments look and feel like prison to the students attending. Through an extensive background on how school design has gotten to this point, "Where School Meets Prison" examines the impact prison-like design has... View full entry
Nearly two months after a brand-new South Florida bridge collapsed onto a busy roadway — killing six people — the Florida Department of Transportation is still refusing to release documents that could shed light on the tragic accident.
Now, the Miami Herald is taking the state to court. On Wednesday, the Herald filed suit against FDOT in Tallahassee's Leon County Circuit Court to compel the release of emails, meeting minutes and other records relating to the bridge's design and construction.
— miamiherald.com
Just days before the FIU bridge collapsed, cracks had been observed on the structure. A meeting was held by the university and the FDOT the morning of the collapse on whether these cracks were a safety risk. The Miami Herald requested records from that meeting and other documents, which have been... View full entry
NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre offered schools his organization’s “free” support and guidance to protect themselves, saying that communities “must come together to implement the very best strategy to harden their schools.” President Donald Trump echoed the sentiment Thursday saying, “We have to harden our sites” to protect schools from gun violence [...] it’s worth revisiting exactly what the NRA means when it calls for measures to “harden” a school. — motherjones.com
Here are a few architectural elements and design features the NRA recommends from its 2013 task force report for "hardening" schools. A big fenceNo treesNo parking lotsEntrapment areasNo windowsA door stopJoin the discussion asking: "Where are the designers, architects, and engineers in the... View full entry
In a December 2016 assessment of the issue obtained by NBC Bay Area, Palo Alto-based building consultants Allana Buick & Bers Inc. trace the odors to openings between the building’s façade, or curtain wall, and the core structure.
The consultants point to the “excessive” settlement as a likely source of the issue, adding, “This condition may be more widespread than these two test areas and may be present in the entire stack. We recommend further investigation of this issue.”
— NBC Bay Area
New fire hazards have been found in San Francisco's infamous Millennium Tower, making the luxury high-rise that has sunk 17 inches since 2009 even less safe than previously thought. According to a December 2016 assessment carried out by building consultants Allana Buick & Bers Inc., gaps... View full entry
The state government will audit the use and ban the supply of the potentially flammable building cladding that led to London's deadly Grenfell Tower inferno, in what it styles as Australia's toughest fire safety reforms. [...]
Better Regulation Minister Matt Kean said the government had undertaken an audit sample of about 180,000 residential and commercial towers constructed in NSW since the 1980s.
About 1000 of those buildings "may have [unsafe] cladding", the Minister said.
— The Sydney Morning Herald
"The [New South Wales] state government said it would introduce reform that would identify buildings encased in unsafe cladding," the Sydney Morning Herald reports, "require them to be inspected and force building owners to foot the bill for replacements and ban the sale and supply of unsafe... View full entry
Eighty-two buildings have failed a new fire safety test set up in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, ministers say.
The test examines the safety of building cladding and insulation in combination.
It comes as an independent review of building regulations and fire safety has also been announced by the government.
It will look at current building regulations and fire safety, focusing on high-rise residential buildings.
— BBC
"The new fire safety test is the first of a wave of more comprehensive assessments, which come after previous tests were carried out on hundreds of cladding samples in recent months - many of these failed standards for flammability," the BBC reports and outlines key examination goals of the... View full entry
The New York Construction Alliance is urging City Council to consider mandatory drug and alcohol testing on all New York City construction sites. NYCA president Kenneth Thomas recently made the following statement:“New York Construction Alliance (NYCA) is committed to worksite safety and our... View full entry
Sentinel Peak Resources, which took over the roughly 1.1-acre site in December, now believes that affordable housing is the “best beneficial use” for the land [...] Neighborhood leaders said they were interested in closing and re-purposing the site, but are awaiting more details. They stressed that regardless of any plans, they still want the city to pursue their concerns about violations at the site, which Sentinel Peak Resources has so far brushed off. — Los Angeles Times
According to the L.A. Times, “No official plan has been drafted and details are scant, but [L.A. City Council President Herb] Wesson said he was ‘unbelievably excited’ about the idea, arguing it could pave the way to convert other local drilling sites.”But converting the site — which is... View full entry
A mass shooting scenario changes the function of every object in the built environment. [...]
The buildings themselves, the fabric of the city, ends up not mattering so much. In fact, sometimes it becomes a kind of enemy. [...]
Americans aren’t going to rebuild their cities to accommodate the possibility of violence. The people who protect the people in those cities will just have to learn to see them differently.
— wired.com
Related on Archinect:Guns in the Studio: Texas' new campus carry law prompted Architecture Dean Fritz Steiner to resign. He joins us to discuss the law's effect on architecture education, on Archinect Sessions #55The Architecture of Loss: How to Redesign After a School ShootingHow Jeanne Gang... View full entry
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Tuesday he seriously considered ordering a shutdown of the entire Washington Metro subway system last week and may still do that if local officials don't follow Transportation Department safety directives.
"We have the ability to withhold (federal) funds from Metro. We have the ability to shut Metro down, and we're not afraid to use the authority we have," Foxx said told reporters. "This is serious business."
— AP
"Local officials have yet to identify the root cause of incidents involving electrical arcing, smoke and fire, and so have no plan for how to fix the problem, he said."For more on the dilapidated state of American infrastructure:U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx on the troubled... View full entry
Eleven people died while working on Olympic facilities or Games-related projects between January 2013 and March 2016, according to a report released Monday by Rio de Janeiro's Regional Labor and Employment Office.
The report, released by Elaine Castilho, the auditor for the Rio Olympic Games works, also notes that no workers died in the preparations for the 2012 Summer Games in London.
— ESPN
Related stories in the Archinect news:With the Rio Olympics opening in less than four months, sports federation concerned over problem with venuesBrazil's economy is a mess and its President is facing impeachment. Can Rio make it to the Olympics?"7,000 construction workers will die in Qatar before... View full entry
The Landmarks Preservation Commission is set to consider a proposed $190 million renovation to the Ford Foundation...Although many aspects of the building have long been outdated...it is health and safety, not aesthetics or technology, that initially drove the foundation’s plans. The city has given Ford until 2019 to bring the building up to code for fire safety and handicapped accessibility... — Curbed
“...But since they had to scratch the building’s surfaces, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker and his staff decided to go further, upgrading not just by adding sprinklers to the ceilings and greater access to the atrium, but new security, new lighting and mechanicals, and a new spatial... View full entry
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. On April 26, 1986, technicians conducting a test inadvertently caused reactor number four to explode...
Reuters reports that a huge recently-completed enclosure called the New Safe Confinement—the world's largest land-based moving structure—will be “pulled slowly over the site later this year to create a steel-clad casement to block radiation and allow the remains of the reactor to be dismantled safely.”
— The Atlantic
Although it sounds like an early aughts indie band name, the New Safe Confinement structure over Chernobyl's reactor number four is finally complete, constructed at an estimated cost of €1.5 billion. Meanwhile, neighboring city and officially uninhabitable Pripyat has become a hauntingly... View full entry
As cranes have grown in height and girth, the controls to operate them have intensified in number and complexity...the crane units in use these days have libraries of intricate manuals, packed with details...some operators may not have time to fully understand or read completely. Same goes for the maintenance team. When something does go wrong with such large machines...the 'mess and carnage' gets magnified. — Popular Mechanics
Crane safety experts give their thoughts on the leading causes of crane collapses, and why safety regulation is more complex than it seems.Previous news about collapses:Crane collapses in Manhattan, one dead and two seriously injuredMore than 50 dead after crane collapses on Mecca's Grand Mosque... View full entry