As the efforts to rebuild Haiti after its devastating January 12 earthquake inch along, a medical clinic is headed to the island nation that can be set up quickly and opened straight away. Rebuilding Haiti. Editor’s Note: The original story did not credit Stack Design Build as a designer of the project. Also, Containers to Clinics has modified the number of units it plans to produce; it hopes to roll out 50 in the next 10 years, not 50,000 in the next 15 years as initially stated.
McGraw-Hill Construction announced today that Architectural Record is now available as an iPhone and iPad app through a partnership with the online magazine distributor Zinio. "Architectural Record's audience is digitally savvy and architects are using iPhones and iPads," said Robert Ivy, FAIA, vice president and editorial director of McGraw-Hill Construction and editor-in-chief of Architectural Record. "We are proud to become the first business-to-business magazine to be available on the iPad," he said. "We are excited to be able to offer these new formats, an important step in our continued commitment to applying the latest digital innovations for our customers."
When a 7.0 magnitude earthquake jolted Haiti in January, Shigeru Ban’s knee-jerk reaction was to get on a plane and go help. A veteran relief worker, the Japanese architect has built shelters at disaster sites around the globe. Web site.
Not much rankles like large-scale urban development. Take, for instance, some of the more extreme claims regarding the plan for a sports arena at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards: ill-conceived, a waste of taxpayer money, a circumvention of the democratic process. But would anyone go so far as to indict it, or any other development, as a cause of death? Photos courtesy Oren Safdie (Above) A scene from The Bilbao Effect, a new play by Oren Safdie (top) that will be shown this Wednesday at the Center for Architecture. That’s the central accusation in Los Angeles writer Oren Safdie’s play, The Bilbao
Replicable test case in Colorado nears completion on time and within its $64-million budget The progressive aspect of the job—and a big departure for DOE—is that it was divided into three parallel design packages: site, shell and interiors. Similar to fast-tracking, the approach allowed the project to be done a couple of years faster than a design-bid-build approach. But because DOE is not set up for fast-tracking, the DB team still had to respond to contract milestones at the end of schematic design, design development and construction documentation. However, the milestones did not coordinate with the way the team was
Building teams can collaborate without complex multiparty contracts, say IPD skeptics More than five years into a collaborative building-production movement called integrated project delivery, warnings abound: Don’t try this with strangers. New risks replace old ones. Beware of waivers of claims. Get ready to open your books. Expect lengthy contract negotiations. Prepare to share any profits. Understand that multiparty contracts have not been tested in court. The advice is not just from lawyers and skeptics. Even IPD zealots admit IPD may change the designers’ standard of care. They acknowledge there are no insurance products covering multiparty contracts. They caution that
Building teams can collaborate without complex multiparty contracts, say IPD skeptics Other highly desirable elements of IPD are mutual respect and trust among participants, collaborative innovation, intensified early planning, open communication within the team, use of building information modeling (BIM) by multiple parties, collocation of teams, transparent financials and use of lean principles of design, construction and operations. The report is available as a free download at www.aia.org/ipdcasestudies. Five different “flavors” of the model contracts also present a problem. Lawyer Will Lichtig, a shareholder with McDonough, Holland & Allen, Sacramento, wrote the first one, in 2005, as general counsel for
Building teams can collaborate without complex multiparty contracts, say IPD skeptics Under most multiparty contracts, the architect and contractor are paid on the basis of cost, plus some or all of their overhead and an agreed-upon profit, a percentage of which is at risk. The owner funds a contingency. If it is preserved, savings are shared with the team. If there is a cost overrun and the contingency is exhausted, team members fund it out of their collective profits up to limits set in the agreement. “We are asking the parties to strip profit out of their costs and tell
Replicable test case in Colorado nears completion on time and within its $64-million budget While some are testing the waters of integrated project delivery, a group within the U.S. Dept. of Energy is tilling greener pastures by devising a new design-build project-delivery model for fast-tracked, net-zero-energy buildings, public and private. DOE calls the process progressive, performance-based design-build (DB). Haselden Construction, DOE’s DB contractor for the first application of the model—the $64-million Research Support Facility of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo.—calls it design-build “on steroids.” The 222,000-sq-ft RSF is the largest known net-zero-energy building in North America,