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Although concrete is common building material that's readily available and easy to use, the environmental impact it generates is a costly one, specifically with regards to how it is manufactured. Estimates indicate that every pound of cement produces one pound of CO2 emissions, for example, a fact... View full entry
Construction and design behemoth Skanska USA has opted to create a full line of "Personal Protective Equipment" (PPE) designed to meet the particular needs of a rising cohort of women in the construction workforce. The equipment is being developed for these workers in order to "ensure their safety... View full entry
Construction software company HoloBuilder Inc. has announced a partnership with Boston Dynamics, maker of mobile robots, to develop SpotWalk, which the firm claims is a first-of-its-kind robotic document capture app for construction sites.
...the robot [can] walk around job sites autonomously and capture 360-degree images that record construction progress, thus creating digital, recordable data of the project over time.
— Construction Dive
According to Construction Dive, Hensel Phelps tested the new technology on a recent project and found its application to be efficient and time-saving. A spokesperson for the contractor said that the robot "removes a time-consuming step while providing accurate construction photos with a high... View full entry
How can we make stronger building materials? An experiment conducted by Rice University's Brown School of Engineering explores this limit by manipulating materials like plastic, metal, and concrete to match the strength of diamonds. 3D printed blocks made at Rice University. Image... View full entry
According to a recent press release, Apple has broken ground on its new $1 billion, 3-million-square-foot campus. The campus will initially house 5,000 employees, with the capacity to grow to 15,000, and is expected to open in 2022. Apple's growth in Austin is part of the company's nation... View full entry
Authorities in southern California have said two residents were convicted of more than 200 felony counts each after falsifying documents and conducting fraudulent construction projects on hundreds of homes.
...47-year-old Wilfrido Rodriguez of Downey and 45-year-old Ruben Gutierrez of Huntington Beach were convicted Wednesday after a civil engineering firm called into question the structural integrity of hundreds of homes.
— The San Diego Union-Tribune
According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, "Authorities say Palos Verdes Engineering Company contacted police suspecting two former employees were responsible for projects across 56 cities in Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties." Driver's license photos of Ruben... View full entry
The budget committee of Germany’s lower house of parliament yesterday approved additional funding for Berlin’s planned Museum of the 20th Century, designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, after estimates for the construction costs spiralled to €364m from €200m. — The Art Newspaper
According to The Art Newspaper, the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed museum in Berlin's central Kulturforum arts district is needed because "the Neue Nationalgalerie can only display about a quarter of Berlin’s vast stores of 20th-century art at any given time." Current situation at the planned... View full entry
A Vinci-led consortium [...] completed civil engineering works on the high-spec building that will house the world’s largest fusion machine, called a “tokamak”, which scientists hope will start replicating the sun’s energy by the middle of the next decade. [...]
The 73-metre-high, 120-metre-wide structure required highly specific concretes. Teams developed about 10 formulations to shield staff and the environment from fusion-generated radiation.
— Global Construction Review
Building a tokamak machine to exploit fusion energy similar to our sun is no simple engineering feat: the building will house reactions that happen at extremely high temperatures, around 150 million degrees Celsius, fusing hydrogen nuclei when they reach the plasma state, thus releasing... View full entry
An underground car park that was under construction in southwest China collapsed, killing eight people and injuring two others, official media said Tuesday.
State broadcaster CCTV said the 10 people were trapped in the rubble when the collapse occurred Monday afternoon in Guizhou province's Guiyang city.
— ABC News
Three workers were able to escape the scene. The 10 trapped workers were rescued early on Tuesday local time, reports ABC. View full entry
The cracks discovered beneath the rooftop park were classic brittle fractures. The tapered 4-inch-thick steel beams—2.5 feet wide and 60 feet long, with a horizontal flange on the bottom—undergirded the 5.4-acre park on the building’s fourth level, and buttressed the roof of the bus deck on the second level. By themselves, the cracks formed a point of weakness with potentially hazardous consequences. But they also suggested the possibility of a larger crisis. — Popular Mechanics
Popular Mechanics offer a detailed recap of the events following the discovery of two cracked structural steel beams in the brand new $2.2 billion, Pelli Clarke Pelli-designed Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco in 2018. View full entry
The push for cleaner construction methods to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution on building sites has increased in recent years due to the worsening climate crisis. Nations across the globe have expressed their intent in finding better solutions for addressing the negative impacts... View full entry
Armed with €10m in EU funding, a consortium of 21 European companies and organisations has formed to try and make timber the material of choice for multi-storey buildings instead of steel and concrete.
Their aim over the next four years is to remove barriers to timber construction by developing standard, industrialised timber building systems, while documenting the environmental, economic and social benefits.
— Global Construction Review
The multinational, pan European innovation project, called Build-in-Wood, aims to "make wood the common choice of material for construction of multi-story buildings," reports Global Construction Review. "We’re not trying to create the world’s tallest wood building," project coordinator Niels... View full entry
"Construction spending in the commercial category, which encompasses retail space among other segments, is down nearly 12% on a year-over-year basis. Spending related to lodging, including new hotel construction, was down 0.7% for the month and is up less than 4% year over year. Spending in the power segment also decreased in August and is down 3.5% compared to the same time last year." — Building Design + Construction
A recent report from the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) looking at construction activity year-over-year shows a slight increase in construction spending for the year ending in August 2019. Total construction spending rose 0.3-percent relative to the same point in 2018, resulting in... View full entry
That’s what I’m trying to do with Tools & Tiaras: Have girls start envisioning that it’s normal for a woman to be an ironworker, to be my sister, to be working with me. Our stories are not told; no woman really knows: “Wow, she looks like me. She’s only four feet eleven and seven eighths and she’s doing plumbing? I can do it.” Society needs to change the way we portray what is women’s work and what tradespeople look like. — Urban Omnibus
Judaline Cassidy, a New York-based plumber and the founder/director of the nonprofit Tools & Tiaras Inc, explains her struggles to break into the overwhelmingly male-dominated construction industry (only 3.4 percent of construction trades workers are women), the progress that has been made in... View full entry
A large dirt pit has emerged at the back of The Burbank Studios lot, as work begins for a Frank Gehry-designed office complex which will be occupied by Warner Bros. [...]
Two mid-rise buildings -standing seven and nine stories in height- will overlook the 134 Freeway, providing 800,000 square feet of office space.
— Urbanize Los Angeles
Called Second Century Project, the large-scale office development in Burbank, California first appeared on Archinect in April this year. The complex of buildings, designed to appear as "icebergs floating along the freeway," is scheduled to be fully functional in 2023 to coincide with Warner... View full entry
