The need to preserve the tent-like concrete roof of London's former Commonwealth Institute as the rest of the 52-year-old building was razed turned an adaptive-reuse project into a structural balancing act. With internal demolition temporarily undermining all but one roof support, the thin-shell, hyperbolic-paraboloid cover stands, thanks to an elaborate system of aids.Work on the future home of
Rendering Courtesy of NBBJ Amazon's "Rufus" headquarters project commands three city blocks in downtown Seattle and features three interconnected glass-and-steel domes. Related Links: Industry Catches a Ride on Seattle's Big Tech Wave Annual IT Report for Designers and Planners Projects Lower IT Spend After five years of slow or no growth across many construction sectors, the technology industry's demand for new building stands out. While most markets are only gradually digging their way toward recovery, office starts in many regions are taking off, thanks in part to tech firms seeking more space for operations such as administration and data storage.Much
Related Links: Megaproject Starts Propel $16.7B of Work in Calif., Hawaii Wolffkran Plans Towering U.S. Comeback, Including at 181 Fremont In earthquake-prone San Francisco, crews are digging the city's deepest foundation piles for an 802-ft-tall office-residential tower that is on course to be the city's second-tallest structure, if only temporarily. The 55-story 181 Fremont tower, sited on land reclaimed from the San Francisco Bay after the 1906 earthquake, will be founded on 42 piers that plunge an average of 255 ft—with the deepest down 264 ft—to bedrock.Because of the tight site, which is less than 140 ft square and bordered
Related Links: Construction Industry Needs to Coordinate Its Work Force Solutions You Actually Found Some Skilled LaborNow What? Faced with what could be an unprecedented labor shortage as the economy picks up, construction professionals are uniting to rebuild the pipeline of young workers that once flowed into the industry from vocational and technical programs across the U.S."Somewhere in recent decades, our country made a collective decision that everyone should attend college. The robust workforce and technical education programs that once existed in our high schools disappeared in favor of college-track programs," says Brian Turmail, executive director of public affairs for
Photo by AP/Wideworld Only charred steel and scaffolding remain after a San Francisco construction-site fire. Photo by AP/Wideworld Related Links: California Crews Scramble To Repair Busy Route After Fire Sandy Blamed for Boardwalk Fire at the New Jersey Shore A five-alarm fire at a construction site in San Francisco pulled in over 150 firefighters on March 11. The crews battled flames spewing from a 172-unit apartment complex owned by BRE Properties and successfully prevented the fire from jumping to other construction projects in the growing Mission Bay area of the city.Though, immediately afterward, the site remained too dangerous for investigators
Photo Courtesy of National Corvette Museum Crews formulate a plan to recover eight classic American sports cars that fell into a massive sinkhole that opened up on Feb. 12 under the showroom floor at the Corvette Museum. Related Links: Drones Inspect Sinkhole at National Corvette Museum Time Lapse Video of Corvette Museum Skydome Work The Corvette Museum, where eight collector cars were swallowed suddenly by a sinkhole, now has another large hole—this time in the side of the atrium housing the cars, so a crane can go in and retrieve the vehicles.Construction, engineering and geological experts have been at the
Photo by Atlantic Archives Project team erected the Savannah, Ga., building atop an existing underground parking garage. Related Links: 2013's Best of the Best Projects Winners Modern Office Rises Over Historic Savannah Initiated by the General Services Administration's need for new space for the Office of the United States Attorney, Southern District, the biggest challenge facing the contractors erecting Savannah's Cay Building was to overcome the downtown site's development history.Prior to this project, the owners of the site, John Cay and Whitaker Street Associates, had granted the city of Savannah the right to construct and operate a 1,000-space, below-ground parking
Related Links: Racking Up Big Points for Prefab FMI Says Modular Construction Set to Grow In the late 1960s, Texas general contractor H.B. Zachry Co. built a 500-room, 21-story Hilton hotel in downtown San Antonio for the city's HemisFair global exposition, and ended up creating a benchmark in modular construction.To get the Hilton Palacio del Rio Hotel built by HemisFair's April 1968 start, the contractor—now called Zachry Construction Corp.—built the rooms eight miles off site and placed them in the hotel's steel skeleton. The completed room units included plumbing fixtures, lighting, beds, TVs and even ashtrays. A crane hoisted the
Related Links: The Spanish Conductor Orchestrating Hochtief's Makeover Elbphilharmonie Website Video: Hamburg's White Elephant With shimmering facades and roofs soaring 110 meters above the River Elbe, Hamburg's philharmonic concert center will create a maritime landmark for the city's old-harbor redevelopment when it opens in late 2016. By then, the Elbphilharmonie project will be some six years late and, at $695-million, more than double the original cost.The north German city's officials and the project team agree that hasty procurement led to debilitating hostility between the main parties. Converting the construction contract to design-build project delivery a few months ago put the