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
Related Links: Green Light for Proposed Record-Tall Modular Building at Atlantic Yards Two New York City licensed trade groups have sued the city's Dept. of Buildings (DOB) over the agency's approval of work on prefabricated building units for Atlantic Yards' B2, a 32-story modular residential tower under way in Brooklyn.The groups—the Mechanical Contractors Association of New York and the Plumbing Foundation City of New York (PFCNY)—charge that off-site work done in a factory without supervision of DOB-licensed master plumbers and fire-suppression contractors violates core Construction Code requirements. The suit, filed on July 8 in the state Supreme Court, New York
Construction workers in Rio are busy building thirty-one 17-story towers for the 2016 Olympic Games, and the crews are employing a special strategy to deal with the tight schedule.
Photo courtesy of Karl Tuplin/BAS Responsive to moving ice, hydraulic legs on skis allow the modules for the British Antarctic Survey's latest Halley station to be raised and towed across the Brunt Ice Shelf. Related Links: Discovering Antarctica Website Halley Research Station Website Building the British Antarctic Survey's newly commissioned research station in one of the remotest, coldest spots on earth was every bit as tough as it sounds.A short, nine-week construction season, bitter weather and tortuous supply lines were always on the daily management agenda. An unwelcome surprise arrived when cracks appeared in the first module of the Halley
Photo by Bruce Damonte In plant, workers connected most two-sided assemblies using wrong bolts. Related Links: Reshaping of Barclays Center Made Possible by Collaboration, Digital Tools Arena Subcontractor's 'Untimely' Default Delays Enclosure Concern for public safety at Brooklyn's Barclays Center—after the discovery that mostly under-strength bolts were used in the facade's prefabricated facade assemblies—was allayed soon after the error's discovery last August, says the curtain wall inspector. Even so, this week, the arena's curtain-wall fabricator is finishing up a fix that replaced 1,768 of the 23,351 bolts."There is a tremendous amount of redundancy," says Israel Berger, CEO of the New
Courtesy of Synergy Thrislington A 200-member team broke the speed record in India by assembling the components of a steel-framed building in two days, working around the clock. Courtesy of Synergy Thrislington At the site, workers erected prefabricated floor subassemblies and other factory-built components. The builder claims that nearly 80% of the work was done in the factory. Related Links: Instacon Time-Lapse Construction Video Synergy Thrislington In just 48 hours, workers assembled the prefabricated structural-steel subassemblies and other components—without any interior finishes—of a 10-story building in the industrial town of Mohali in northwestern India. The still-unfinished building holds the nation’s
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