A Sustainable Workforce Starts With You
One of the coolest things afoot in Silicon Valley is the new Google headquarters building, if you can call it a building; it's more a living environment. The company has announced it is venturing into robotics, and the new headquarters will use robots, no, “Crabots” to be able to reconfigure the spaces overnight once the original buildings are complete. [node:read-more:link]
We hear that question a lot on the Internet these days, but my question refers to the picture of a class of students who attend the Career Pathways Institute in Grand Island, Nebraska finishing concrete for a townhouse project for Ryan Bartels Construction Company.
The story chronicles the way that one of those students, Caleb Wardyn, a senior at Central Catholic high school found a part-time job with Bartels. It also talks about how Bartels, a staunch supporter of the CPI construction pathway, brought Caleb and 11 other students who are in the construction pathway at CPI to work on a project where they get “hands-on” experience while they are still in school. [node:read-more:link]
Ever stop and wonder who builds those tall towers around the world? Sure, we hear about the engineers or the “starchitects” but we seldom hear about the skilled work force that makes the designs a reality for the rest of us. We have followed the series of articles by Tom Curwen in the LA Times about the new Wilshire Grand Center in downtown LA. Curwen has written an article that is particularly interesting to me, and I thought that you might learn something from it as well. [node:read-more:link]
Known for his unusually creative designs that have been built at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Frank Gehry’s latest design, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, is about to open at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Some critics have already said that the crumpled paper bag design will become a landmark that will rival the Sydney Opera House. [node:read-more:link]
Archimedes once said, “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.” In the world of new things, the saying might be, “Give me a large enough 3d printer and I can print a city.”
Not quite yet, but in the quest for bigger 3D printing, the Chinese company Winsun that last year claimed to have printed ten houses in 24 hours, recently printed a five-story apartment building and a 11,000 square foot mansion. Granted, they were printed in pieces and then assembled on site with appropriate reinforcing and foundations. However, this represents a step forward in the 3D manufacturing of housing in a part of the world that is sorely in need of low cost housing for a burgeoning population.
According to an article published on CNET, the 3D printing process for construction can drastically reduce production costs by 50-70%, reduce construction waste by 30-60%, and reduce labor costs by 50-80%. [node:read-more:link]
What goes into the structural design of the skyscrapers being built around the world today? A better question might be, “Who designs the structure of those skyscrapers to withstand the heat, winds, earthquakes and hurricanes that pummel those towers we live and work in every day?” The answer is that there are some really talented engineers who study, design, test and retest the possible solutions to meet those challenges. [node:read-more:link]
Most of us drive by skyscrapers in major cities without ever thinking about how they stand up. In Los Angeles and most other major cities, they have to stand up to the politics, the winds, the storms, the earthquakes, and an occasional change of developer, owner and/or General Contractor, especially in landmark $1 billion projects. On the new Wilshire Grand Center in LA, almost all of those factors came into play over the years before construction even began. What started with a handshake in true Texas style between two USC graduates is now becoming the tallest tower west of the Mississippi River, but that journey has been quite turbulent at times. [node:read-more:link]
The main stream media isn’t well known for covering construction stories, especially in depth, but Thomas Curwen and his colleagues at the LA Times did an outstanding report on the construction of what will be the tallest building west of the Mississippi in the Wilshire Grand Center construction. The five part series written by Curwen augmented by photos from his associates focuses the complexity and challenges during the planning and construction of a major project on a downtown constricted site that are usually not talked about openly in the press or outside of the owner, designers and construction teams. [node:read-more:link]
According to an article in DeZeen Magazine, the ten tallest skyscrapers under construction for completion of core and shell in 2015 are located across the globe, but only one of them is in the US – 432 Park Avenue in New York City, which will be “the tallest all-residential building in the world.”
Others of note are the Vostok Tower in Russia, the Shanghai Tower in China, Capital Market Authority Tower in Saudi Arabia, and the Marina 101 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Read the full article to check out the stats, the designers and the engineering marvels that are being used to achieve new heights. [node:read-more:link]
The Second Avenue subway line currently under construction in New York City is one of the largest infrastructure projects under way in the United States.
According to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) information,
The Second Avenue Subway will be New York City’s first major expansion of the subway system in over 50 years. When fully completed, the line will stretch 8.5 miles along the length of Manhattan's East Side, from 125th Street in Harlem to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan. In addition, a track connection to the existing 63rd Street and Broadway Lines, will allow a second subway line to provide direct service from East Harlem and the Upper East Side to West Midtown via the Broadway express tracks. [node:read-more:link]
