Construction Informer

Construction firms may often overlook the valuable assets they have in their people and their skills. Not so over at EllisDon, Inc. The company is creating new and unique opportunities that leverage its people and skills investments. Geoff Smith, president and CEO of EllisDon agreed to answer some questions about this new venture.
Q: After years [...]

People may have to stop referencing the Three Little Pigs story while extolling the virtues of one building material over another. It appears that straw may be just as resilient as brick.
Darcey Donovan, a civil engineer, and the Reno alumna of the University of Nevada, built a straw house that survived the 82-ton force of [...]

Some estimate there are more than 2.5 million eye injuries each year in the U.S. The Texas Ophthalmological Association (TOA) claims a large number of those might be avoided if people would just wear eye protection, like ANSI-rated eyewear.
When you consider how small the eye is, compared to the rest of your body, and how [...]

As natural disasters that affect buildings continue to escalate, the insurers of those buildings are obviously looking for ways to minimize risk. According to The Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a nonprofit funded by insurers, one way to accomplish that may be to increase the payments a state can receive in the aftermath [...]

A couple of enterprising fellows have come up with a scheme to put all that space around roadways to use creating energy. Called a GreenRoadway, the vacant land and median areas are loaded up with wind turbines and solar panels. The wind turbines portrayed look kind of like stacks of disks rather than great big [...]

In a nation with relatively free speech there are always those who get off the politically-correct thought patterns and suggest the prevailing thought might be due for some scrutiny. These voices are necessary because so often group think is nothing more than repetitive sound bites that large numbers of people simply assume to be true. [...]

I have only recently begun to re-explore social and business networking Web sites and it seems they have come a long way from just a few years ago. There are now widget-types of tools you use that will do things like automatically include your latest blog posts and the books you are reading.
I use LinkedIn [...]

I like it when a manufacturer thinks about ways to make the installation of its product easier. Just as long as the method is a good one and I’m not going to have to go back later and work on the thing again. I only like to install stuff one time.
Schlage has a new deadbolt [...]

If you forced the center of a 10 foot piece of concrete to bend by three percent, and it didn’t break, the bow in it would be three-and-a-half inches lower than the ends. (Photo by Nicole Casal Moore)
It should break, or at least severely crack. But a new kind of self healing concrete will take [...]

Since Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) is a process that requires collaboration, the typical ways construction contracts are crafted don’t fit it very well. According to the IPD symposium report by the California Council of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) most construction contracts
“create incentives for individual firms to protect their own interests at the expense [...]