Construction Informer

Once again building with cans has taken to the limelight. The 2008 winners of the annual Canstruction Competition have been announced and this year animal themes seemed to dominate.

The winner, called “An unBEARable Truth,”was built by the New York architectural firm Butler Rogers Baskett. This showed two stranded polar bears trying to share one piece of floating ice. The jury thought it provided a good metaphor for global warming. Indeed. Like all entries it was completely made of cans.

Dubbed “the most unique food drive in the world, Canstruction challenges engineering and architecture firms to build structures completely out of full cans of food. Since its inception more than 10 million pounds of food have been donated to fight hunger. There are now more than 135 individual competitions that take place.

Here is a link where you can see all the current and past winners.

It’s always interesting to see a new survey about green building. Even if you don’t pay attention to who was in the survey, or what the survey was measuring about green building, just the idea that someone bothered to poll some people and find out what they thought about things is pretty cool.

Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis LLP, the Constructive Technology Group, Inc., and Green Building Insider completed a green building survey in December 2008 and just released the results after doing telephone followups with respondents during January.

Topping the list of findings was that huge numbers of design pros, contractors, subcontractors, construction and planning managers, consultants and owners agree that it is worth the time and effort to build green. A little more than 93 percent agreed with that statement, although that number is about 3 percent lower than the responses from a survey in 2007.

The surprising thing that came out of the survey was that fewer people thought LEED certification was worth obtaining. In 2007 there were 77.4 percent of respondents saying LEED was worthwhile, while in 2008 that number dropped to 66.4 percent.

The survey authors suggested a few reasons why LEED may have drawn a lower percentage;

• Difficult financial times may have been making people more sensitive to costs
• Other certification schemes could be pulling people away from LEED
• Carbon footprints and greenhouse gases were not included in LEED at the time of the survey

Re-pointing a brick or masonry building is a major dust producing process that requires a lot of effort in keeping workers and passersby protected. The silicone dust from these activities has been linked to lung damage and so worker protection is a given. So often the quantity of dust produced during repointing is the result of the tool used to remove the old grout. Rotary angle grinders with diamond blades are the norm for this operation.

A recently developed tool though offers to cut the dust. Called the Arbortech AS160 Brick and Mortar Saw this tool actually doesn’t saw but rather hammers and cuts at the same time. What’s also neat is it can cut a lot deeper than most rotary solutions. This tool was also recently awarded a NOVA Award by the Construction Innovation Forum.

In keeping with the spirit of “green” the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) announced that this year’s submissions for the organization’s National Green Building Awards must be in electronic form – submitted by mail on compact disc. The entry postmark deadline is Jan. 31, 2009. There will be an award dinner during NAHB’s National Green Building Conference on May 8th in Dallas. The categories are:

• Advocate of the Year
• Green Project of the Year
• Green Development of the Year
• HBA Green Building Program of the year
• Local Government Award

Projects have to have been started after June 2007 and substantially complete by December 2008. All single family homes have to be scored using the NAHB Model Green Home Building Guidelines or the National Green Building Standard. You can use a scoring tool here that generates and saves the checklist to a disc.

Ontario Eyes Mandatory Workers’ Comp: Claiming companies that don’t pay workers compensation insurance premiums have an unfair advantage in the marketplace, the Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario is seeking to put a stop to that. The governmental body is introducing legislation that will make having workers compensation mandatory for those in the construction sector. The agency also says that by expanding the pool of participants the costs to all participants will go down. It is expected that 90,000 workers would be picked up on coverage.

Buildings on the Moon May Go Waterless: Take some lunar soil and add some sulphur and you are ready to pour, er, plop, some concrete down in the form of a building. A University of Alabama professor says the mixing of those two components means concrete could be made without water. Since any water that may be on the moon is in extremely limited supply, and moon dust is not, this makes for some wonderful building opportunities. 

Speaking of Concrete: The material is used the world over and is more and more popular for its formability and strength. But, because it is porous it allows moisture inside where it can corrode reinforcing steel and woven wire mesh. Now, researchers say you can use sodium acetate to make the concrete less permeable. But, where do you get sodium acetate? Why from potato chips of course. It is used to flavor them. This could give the meaning of “lunch break” a whole new slant.

Houses Built from Waste: A UK researcher is writing a recipe for a new material for building homes. This one uses recycled glass, metal slag, sewage sludge, incinerator ash, and pulverized fuel ash to make – you guessed it – building blocks. By binding the components together with bitumen the resulting bloc is six times stronger than a cement block, requires less energy to make, and is made of 100 percent waste material. I can see the instructions now: Combine ingredients in mixing bowl, form into a block and place in very hot oven for awhile. Makes 1 block. This could be on the market in the next five years. Of course great plans like these need great followups. Next they’re going to try blocks made with the help of used vegetable oil, and tentatively have thought about calling them – Vegeblocks.

What will they think of next?