Placing the steel stringer in the concrete wall for a cantilievered steel stair...there will be a planter below the stair, adjacent to the spa.

I wish that the joints of the boards would have been aligned with the adjacent wall (it was shown on the drawings). We will tell concrete guy to line up boards on the front of the wall...either way, we are planning to sandblast the wall to expose a certain amount of the aggregate

Steven, your pics made me miss working on "real" projects. Residential is fun and all, but sometimes I long for more intense coordination.

mdler yours is looking cool - keep posting, please!

nice pics all

great looking at them and making me hungry to return to work. Most of my other projects are about 10 months from reaching the building site.

almost done!

flickr set from october 06 through today.

AP I love the finished product, it really turned out well

thanks techno. there are plenty of things that didn't turn out as well as they should have, but overall it was successful. i'm definitely happy to see it [almost] complete before i move away in a few weeks. you never forget your first time.

more pics of my Beverly Hills house

http://www.flickr.com/gp/7444093@N05/F8c0t7

...YES


In commeration of vado's original thread post ("HOLE"), I captured this image at the site last week.

Recent "sleuth" threads have proven to be fun... anyone care to venture a guess as to what this picture is and where the site may be located? (Hint: consider lateral forces...)

thats's your first...well then an even high commendation AP

DCA looks like a hole to me! No really I'm guessing its for a foundation for a column - a mighty shallow one albeit

AP, I hope it all got done before you left? Looks excellent. Quite a good project to have under your (always cool) belt(s).

DCA, I'm stumped. Does the "no" mean not to pour concrete in this one? perhaps it's being filled with Jello?

hrmm... That's a really good thought, liberty bell. I initially thought that the "no" meant "don't walk here," but your theory totally makes sense. Well, not the Jello part, but that would be funny.

I'll give away the answer to my question... Yes, techno, this is a pile cap under a column. I don't know how large your column foundations typically are, but this is actually a pretty big one - the gray trash can is only a few feet away, yet the size of the pile cap makes it look tiny.

lb's theory about no concrete totally makes sense; one of the piles under the pile cap was driven out-of-tolerance (in the wrong place), and we were waiting for our structural engineer to either give the "ok" or issue a fix for the problem. The actual fix involved making the pile cap larger at the problem pile.

DCA I don't why i expected such a large footing to be deeper....i guess because i couldn't find anything in the picture to scale it with.

On another note...I didn't even see the "no" sign...

update from the construction of an alternative school and school board central office on which i've been working.

the central office building so far:





the alternative school:













central space




typical classroom

juan cut his finger a little today..

had we had a CM on the jobsite, those board-form lines would have lined up...

mdler....is that on Abbot Kinney?

guess not...the proportions are different...

sorry for not resizing...

In Beverly Hills

We are gonna sandblast the hell out of the concrete, so you wont really see the mistakes...

I love when you look at the photos you just took at a job site and you find something beautiful. It didn't look like this in person, but the light is captivating in the image...



I love fireproofing...

i am so jealous of all of you... =\

liberty bell, awesome! great job on that remodel!

mdler, very nice. love the stair detail and the board formed concrete.

ap, nice!

whattodo, yeah, those images are great.

good stuff all around!

i look forward to be able to add new pics to this thread. I feel so happy to be returning to work after so long

two updates for my recreation center...

from 5/01/07:

craning the steel trusses into place over the gymnasium


setting the trusses


a steel beam waiting for its column and embed


and from about an hour ago 5/10/07:

steel columns at the entry have finally been erected


metal deck going in over the gym


more steel on the second floor

hmm... not sure why the metal deck pic didn't work...

here it is...

STOP!!!!

architphil, the project as shown in that last image is perfect. Beautiful. The concrete is concrete, the steel is steel, the wood is wood, the light is light.....just stop construction and call it done.

Construction is always more beautiful than finished buildings. With very rare exceptions.

WOW. STUNNING.

i love that last image phil...reminds me of those b&w slides of gothic cathedrals with their celestial lighting

while I was back at the office, my partner was convincing one of our clients to buy one of these...which he did

are you sleeping with that client mdler? And if not you should really think hard about that!! DB9... there isn't much better than that well perhaps a db4

Rutger I have to admit that i am a fan of your work. It is brilliantly sedated. Looking forward to seeing what else you pull from your sleeve

I'll keep this project brief short and simple.

Type: Adaptive Reuse (original construction date was 1942)
Location: Nashville, TN in an 'up-and-coming' (read: gentrified) area
Function: Furniture showroom
Size: Approximately 9.600 square feet

The space served as an abadoned offices on the upper level and a junkyard on the lower level. Here are two obligatory before images of the upper and lower levels, respectively:



We couldn't measure the lower level space because it was packed with junk. Literally, packed. We took some overall dimensions and peaced out. At that point, we knew we were removing it all.



Fast forward four months. We essentially demolished the interior of the structure retaining only the exterior shell. A huge, unexpected chunk of the budget went to restructuring the entire space. There were half-rotted 2x4's holding up the roof in some areas. The new space is divided into three main spaces: office area, showroom space, and material library. Please enjoy this little stroll with me.

First, you walk in through the main entrance and will be surrounded by the Eames furniture collection. You then walk through this catwalk to get to the mezzanine. The space below will be team spaces for the designers to collaborate with their client. We will have an Eames chair suspended from the ceiling in between these two boarded windows.



This picture is taken while standing on the mezzanine. We removed some drywall and discovered a random, floating door (please note the green door on the left hand side). On the far right, you can see a 6" metal stud wall. OSB will cover the interior and exterior face of those studs with a long, narrow punched opening on the left hand side. The other side of that feature wall are the stairs down to the showroom space. The back opening is rad. It's the complete skyline of Nashville.



Now you walk down those stairs and enter the main showroom space. This is taken while looking back at the mezzanine.



This is the original firedoor to the right of the showroom space that will remain.



Once you go through the firedoor, the material library will be on your left. This is a two story volume, although we have opted to keep the former floor beams in place because it adds so much more rawness. The back window in the space is boarded up but you will be getting plenty of natural light once the glass is placed.



We have some fun ideas for the interior. We have a suspended cable system that will hold 3 form panels to create movable walls for certain spaces. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the client doesn't VE those items out at the last minute.

Amen.

Recent developments since I've been away. This is the hospital therapy unit that i did the sketch designs for (it has been horribly taken over by consultants that i can refer to only as hacks)


it's about time

starting to look like a building!

good, quiet (as in, not too visually noisy) work:

rafael moneo
rcr aranda pigem vilalta arquitectes
caruso st john


visually noisy but fun work:

mecanoo

sorry, that was supposed to be on the architect crush thread. [delete!]

haha--- i was coming to check and see if Mr. Ward had posted some cool jobsite pics :) damn.

i did! i did! look above.

Ancient Rome? Ancient Athens? Michigan Avenue? YES
Coring Debris...this reminds me of another thread...

Nice post, Poczatek.

n_ I've been out of town so I missed your project - nice! Hope to see more of it soon! Love the floating green door.

techno, good luck un-hack'ing your design. Perhaps by "hacking" it yourself you can dilute the changes made by the "hacks"?

Steve, please tell me the entire school building will remain black....

More on my townhouse (vado and I debated yesterday whether I can call it that) soon, site meeting Monday morning.

reminds me off $800 drill coring bits good for 6 or so cores

while i'd like to say that it's a 'stealth' project, the black is just the dampproofing applied to the block. it will be covered with brick and look much more....pedestrian?

besides, lb, black isn't reflective and would increase the heat gain!

new pix soon > brick's already well underway.

original on flickr

Finally stitched the panorama from pictures made last month.

Architechnophilia, thanks for your compliment, much appreciated.
Too bad your design got hacked, are you gonna pull a Howard Roark?
;-)

rutger I also agree with architechno - I love how simple and clean your work is.

They painted the green door! They painted the green door!

I was so upset when I saw that the painters had painted over the entire door and exposed brick around it. We had noted on all of our drawings to leave as is but they 'must have looked over it' according to the contractor.

Sad face.

update:


alt sch beyond board building, view from southeast/entry drive


alt school from southwest corner


alt school from northeast, beginning the brick (sorry, lb.)


alt school entry


southeast corner


southeasat corner


brick install at wdw: we had a discussion about this in the office. the window sitting out from the wall before the brick install looked pretty great, w/much more impact than after the brick is installed and flattens everything out. we're going to work on a detail for future jobs that makes use of this observation.


courtyard/'outdoor classroom' between bldgs


alt school roof


board building from courtyard side (north), first level only built so far


board building from roof of alt sch, looking to southeast

Well hell. n_, that's terrible news.

You can't even have them remove the paint because that wouldn't get back the patina of age on the existing paint.

<angry generalization> Why are contractors so ignorant and flippant about the information we SPECIFICALLY put on our drawings?!? <end angry generalization>

Crap. They owe you a HUGE favor on another portion of the project now.

Leave the brick off - I'm loving that black blocks...very sexy. What is it? Why do i feel so clueless

well we all know that buildings look better under construction...

the black stuff is a skin of damp-proofing that's slathered on the block before the installation of the rigid insulation and the brick.

you can also see the brick ties sticking out like little feelers - and they also look cool.