How Teaching Ex-Cons How To Lay Brick Can Help Rebuild Their Lives

Seven or eight years ago, Stephen Shelton started worrying about the future.

It wasn’t just his own Pittsburgh-based construction company, but his entire industry.

Shelton had spent decades working in various trades — often as an electrician and brickmason — but as he looked around at fellow craftsmen, he realized many were getting old. Where was the next generation?

This story is part of Essential Pittsburgh, an ongoing series exploring how Pittsburgh lives, and how it's evolving.
It annoyed Shelton that high schools had ditched their trade programs. He hadn’t loved traditional schoolwork and had always been drawn to the wood and metal shops.

And Pittsburgh, where he lived, was a city built by tradesmen.

“You look at some of these cathedrals and these stone buildings and think, ‘Everything in this city’s made of masonry,’” said Shelton, sitting in his third floor office in the old Westinghouse building in Homewood.

“Back in the day when all of these buildings were brand new, these were the dudes that came over, they came over from Italy, from Poland, from Ireland. Those guys carried themselves with dignity. They were proud of being a tradesman.”


Johnathon Price, 28, of McKees Rocks crouches beside a practice wall inside the third floor of the old Westinghouse building in Homewood on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016. Price is one of a few dozen adult students learning masonry at the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh.
CREDIT MEGAN HARRIS / 90.5 WESA
Today, kids like him don’t have a chance to learn the same trades in school.

“God created everybody to do something, and that means he created people to be carpenters, tile setters, plumbers, you name it,” he said. “But if you’ve never given the opportunity to do what it is God created you to do, you’re going to do something, even if it’s stupid.”

And doing something stupid can lead to prison time. Shelton made a simple plan: Get young men and women off the streets, teach them how to lay brick and get them jobs.

Steve Shelton, Trade Institute of Pittsburgh Executive Director
Hosanna House community center in Wilkinsburg offered Shelton a 1,000-square-foot former boiler room, so he bought some bricks and mortar and found a group of students. In 2009, the first iteration of the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh opened its doors.

Brick by brick

The Trade Institute has been through a few evolutions since it opened, but the same basic model still holds today: Over 10 weeks, the school teaches the basics of masonry — mixing mortar, simple bricklaying, and later, more complex patterns and cement blocking. Students advance at their own pace, and since the program offers rolling admissions, they are all working at different levels.

In August, Brandon Chandler, a 32-year-old from Coraopolis, was in his eighth week of the program. Only a few months earlier, he’d been released from federal prison after finishing up a seven-and-a-half year term on drug charges. Chandler was determined to chart a new course and found his way to the Trade Institute, which moved to Home wood in 2015.

He’d passed the first few skills tests and advanced to more complicated brickwork.

“What I’m building right now is a wall with an arc in it, with two pillars on the side,” he said.


Brandon Chandler, 32, commutes from Robinson shortly after 5 a.m. every day to make it to the gym Downtown, then over to Home wood where he practices masonry at the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh. One of his final projects was a decorative arch requiring "a little skill and a lot of patience," he said.
CREDIT MEGAN HARRIS / 90.5 WESA
Nearby, a photo lay pinned of a former student standing next to a finished arch. He looked at his own unfinished rendering.

  “I put some soldiers in there — when the bricks go straight up and down, it’s called a soldier — and when there are ... three bricks stacked on top of each other next to (the soldiers), we call that a basket weave.”

Chandler eased his trowel across an ash-stained brick, pressing the gloppy, gray mud — a cheap, mortar-like blend of lime and sand — into its jagged edges.

“This is buttering the brick,” he said. “You want to spread it evenly so when you put it up it will make a nice bond.”

He set the brick on the wall and eyed it.

Courtney McFeaters, 38, edges a brick along a guideline on a practice wall Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016, inside the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh, which offers trade skills training to men and women looking for new opportunities after incarceration.
CREDIT MEGAN HARRIS / 90.5 WESA
  “Right now, this brick isn’t all the way even,” he said. “I see it sunk a little bit, so I’m going to pick it back up. I didn’t even have enough mud in there to keep it even with the brick.”

Twenty feet away, Courtney McFeaters slowly lined another course of brick on a practice wall. The 38-year-old, who had recently served a sentence for identify theft and credit-card fraud, was in her second week of the program, but said she was picking it up quickly.

“The hands-on part of it is what I like,” she said. “I like to build something and look at it and be like, ‘Hey, I did that. That’s my work.’ That’s what excites me about it, and the job opportunities that come out of it. They’re always going to need masons; they’re always going to need bricklayers. It’s like an industry that will never die.”

Inside T3, the first mass timber building in the US

Dive Brief:

• With a planned opening for later this month, the seven-story, 220,000-square-foot T3 (Timber, Technology, Transit) Office Building in Minneapolis will be the largest contemporary wood building in the U.S., according to Architect Magazine. Most of the wood is from Pacific Northwest trees killed by the mountain pine beetle. Minnesota's building code classifies the wood as Type IV Heavy Timber.
• The building features a grid-based framing system using a combination of spruce-pine-fir nail-laminated timber (NLT) panels, spruce glulam and concrete. Crews framed 180,000 square feet in a little more than nine weeks, translating to 30,000-square-foot of floor space installed each week. The lightness of the almost all-wood building has reduced the seismic load significantly.
• Its architect, Michael Green Architecture, left much of the interior wood exposed, which saved money on finishes, while using indirect lighting for illumination after dark to highlight the use of wood as a structural material. The building will also feature a ground-floor space for public use.

Dive Insight:

Wood buildings are popping up all over the place, and plans for future structures run the gamut from doable to conceptual. Currently, the tallest wood building in the world is the $39-million, 18-story Brock Commons residence hall at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Cananda, which is scheduled to open in September 2017. The tower will be able to accommodate 400 students.

Meanwhile, Perkins+Will has proposed an 80-story all-wood tower along the Chicago River. River Beech Tower would feature a center atrium and an aluminum veneer over a lattice of wood beams. If built, it would be the tallest wood building in the world.

In the relatively new space of all-wood buildings, there are many candidates for the title of tallest wood tower waiting in the wings, but building codes and fire safety are an ongoing concern. While not part of the cross-laminated timber (CLT) or NLT discussion, but still dealing with wood, Sandy Springs, GA, recently changed its building codes to eliminate wood as an option for multifamily structures more than three stories high and larger than 100,000 square feet.

While city officials said the motive was safety, Justin Mihalik, president of the American Institute of Architects New Jersey chapter, told Construction Divelast month that the necessary fire ratings can be attained using most any material. "If it's tested and meets requirements," he said, "wood is safe."

Behold the Brick Khalifa: The World’s Tallest LEGO Building

This week, we were reminded yet again of the possibilities offered by the famous plastic bricks: A LEGO version of the world’s tallest building has been unveiled. The LEGO Burj Khalifa was built by a team of experts at LEGOLAND Dubai, which is slated to open this Halloween. The model celebrates the crown jewel of Dubai’s skyline and is sure to provide Dubai natives with the uncanny thrill of recognition only architectural models can offer.

At 56 feet (17 meters), the Brick Khalifa is claimed to be the tallest building in the world made out of LEGO. The mammoth model contains 439,000 LEGO pieces and weighs in at 1 ton. Construction took over 5,000 hours.

Like the real Burj Khalifa, the LEGO version features LED lights and is surrounded by water features, which can be used to put on elaborate light and fountain shows.

Readers unable to make it to LEGOLAND Dubai who nevertheless think the Burj Khalifa looks pretty in plastic should check out the LEGO Architecture Burj Khalifa set, which can be built at home. This 15-inch model may lack the grandeur of the Dubai version, but it is elegant in its own right and makes a great gift

 

Singapore puts drone plans in motion-

Singapore is looking to expand its use of drones to support public services, for instance, to help monitor dengue-ht areas and construction sites.

The Ministry of Transport announced on Tuesday that it had awarded a main contract for the deployment of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, to three key vendors, from which government agencies would then approach to deploy the technology. This "master contract" arrangement would allow for economies of scale, said the ministry, adding that more public agencies were expected to conduct pilots using drones to support their daily operations.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore would administer the two-year master contract, which would end October 31, 2018.

Aetos Security Management and Avetics Global had been selected to offer both tethered and non-tethered drone services, while CWT Aerospace Services would deploy non-tethered drone services, said the transport ministry, which had called for the tender in April.

It described a non-tethered UAS as a drone that could take flight without any attached cables, while a tethered system would require the use of cables attached to the device. Tethered systems would have access to power supply and be able to send and receive data.

The Transport Ministry in February had unveiled plans for more than 25 use cases in which the public sector could tap drones. Singapore's Maritime and Port Authority, for instance, could deploy UAS from its patrol boats to respond to marine incidents including oil spill surveillance and support for search and rescue operations. Codenamed Water Spider, the drone in such use cases would improve operational efficiency during such emergency situations and complement traditional use of helicopter flights and satellite images.

The National Environment Agency also would use drones to support dengue control initiatives, such as monitoring roof gutters to ensure these were not clogged. In addition, a UAS could be used to deposit bacillus thuringiensis israelensis larvicide into roof gutters and exterminate mosquito larvae.

According to the Transport Ministry, the Land Transport Authority would expand ongoing trials at 10 work sites involved in the construction of Singapore's subway Thomson-East Coast Line, including Upper Thomson, Orchard, Marina Bay, and Havelock. The pilots were expected to run for up to a year.

Here, the drones could be deployed to study construction work, such as excavation and onsite traffic flow.

The Future of the Field: From trade school to the job site, the impact of technical education

Paul Tse, 30, isn’t afraid to admit that he wasn’t the best student in high school — he even told Congress. In May, Tse testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education as part of a push by the Associated Builders and Contractors to bolster spending for the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Training Act, which aims to improve technical training opportunities.

In his statement, Tse, who emigrated with his family from Hong Kong to Montgomery County, MD, in 1996, explained that enrolling in the HVAC program at the Thomas Edison High School of Technology, in Silver Spring, MD, gave him necessary direction. “Spending my mornings in a typical classroom and afternoons at Edison, I was introduced into the world of construction and the skilled trades,” he told Congress.

A few weeks before he graduated, Tse was offered a job as an apprentice with local contractor Shapiro & Duncan Mechanical Contractors, in Rockville, MD, attending the Air Conditioner Contractors of America apprenticeship program in the evenings. “Even before my peers packed up their cars and headed out for freshman move-in day, I accepted a [position] and got right to work,” he said in his statement.

We talked with Tse, today a project manager with Shapiro & Duncan, about how he’s forging a path in the industry, the role of technical education today and what it was like to share his story with Congress.

As your friends were heading off to two- and four-year colleges, what did you think of your decision to pursue a trade?

TSE: It was nerve-wracking. Everybody was going to go tour different colleges and talking about their campuses and so on. I had nothing to show for it. To me, I was taking a big risk. I wasn't sure what the road ahead was going to be like. Nobody had told me whether it was going to be easy or if it was going to be hard, or if I was going to have a decent-paying job. All those things were unknown to me.

What did your instructors say about the decision to go into the apprenticeship program?

TSE: My teachers were positive. They were all tradesmen who had retired or stopped working in the trade to become teachers. They were all like: "You can definitely get out of here and be able to find a job right away. That’s a skill set that's going to stick with you for the rest of your life."

What are some of the biggest takeaways from your four-year apprenticeship?

TSE: Showing up on time and being prepared for whatever you're doing that day, as well as your craftsmanship — putting pride in your work. Not only does that show to your mentors and your superiors but, at the end of the day, it also shows to your customer, which will reflect on how you do with your supervisors and your mentors. Also, being prepared to learn every single day. You have no idea what you're going to encounter on your next project or even the following day on the same project.

Can you describe the experience of testifying in front of Congress on the importance of technical training?

TSE: It was very scary. The opportunity came up randomly through the ABC. It was a normal day of work for me and then I got a phone call, which became a phone interview, which eventually evolved into going in front of the panel to testify. They were looking for a success story [for technical training programs].

 

Did you realize you were a “success story” before they told you?

TSE: Not really. I just think I'm a normal American who immigrated to the States and this is, to me, the American Dream. Starting out with next to nothing and getting that education you're looking for, getting out of your education without accruing debt and then having a normal life.

After the testimony, did you find that your position on the role of technical training and mentoring changed?

TSE: It did, a little bit. After everybody told me how they felt about my testimony, I was a little shocked because I didn't think I was doing anything special. I thought this was a normal path, and that's when I started hearing that a lot of these other people still have a bad taste in their mouth of looking at construction workers as blue collar, inappropriate, disrespectful, uneducated. But that’s not the reality. The path of going down a four-year technical program in lieu of a four-year or two-year college should be open to everyone, not just people who couldn't make it in school.

What kind of mentoring opportunities have been available to you?

TSE: I would consider myself extremely lucky in terms of having mentors in this trade. A couple of incredible individuals at Shapiro & Duncan have taught me from 75% to 80% of what I know today. They took my hand and showed me how to do the things in the field. And then whatever I did by hand during the day, I went into school at night [as a part of the apprenticeship program] to get a more technical explanation, which reinforced my background of this trade.

I was never the best student in high school, and going into the classroom made me cringe a little bit. But in this case, it was encouraging. It was different than my high school career because whatever I learned during the day by hand, I was getting the explanation that night. It was like two pieces of a puzzle and a light bulb coming on.

What do you think the industry could be doing better in terms of bring up younger people through the ranks?

TSE: Awareness and advertisement. Being able to explain to kids that being a construction worker [is a positive], that's step one. Step two would be having school systems be more open to having contractors go to their school to show kids that there are apprenticeship programs that they can go into and they're not going to owe anybody a dime and are getting a skill set that they can take anywhere.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

TSE: My hope is that I will still be here at Shapiro & Duncan, and for the most part doing something similar but maybe at a higher level, like looking at multiple projects at a time as a senior project manager or some type of project executive. But maybe 10 years is too soon. Maybe I need more time.

How do you move a 140-year-old synagogue? Very carefully

It wasn't a fast or long ride, but it was a significant one.

A sophisticated system of hydraulics and steady wheels going about 1 mph moved the 140-year-old former Adas Israel Synagogue about 30 feet from its Third and G streets NW location on Thursday. The relocation clears the way for the continued construction of Capitol Crossing, Property Group Partners' $1.3 billion, 2.2 million-square-foot development atop I-395

This is the second time the building — currently home to the Albert and Lillian Small Jewish Museum — has been relocated. In 1969, after Metro purchased the entire block near Judiciary Square, a group of Jewish historians petitioned to save it. An act of Congress cleared the way, and the synagogue was then moved from Sixth and G streets NW to Third and G.

“It’s not every day you see a building as historically significant and important to the region as this one relocated for a second time,” Bob Braunohler, Property Group Partners regional vice president, said in a statement. “We are pleased to support this effort that gives the synagogue a bigger and better location that will benefit future generations of Washingtonians.”

There is a third move in the building's future. In about 2 1/2 years, the synagogue will be relocated to Third and F streets NW, atop a Capitol Crossing parking garage. There, it will be part of a new, larger museum complex. Until then, the building will be closed to the public as it rests on a steel platform.

"This is an exciting day for the Jewish community and for Washington in general," Renaissance Centro founder Albert "Sonny" Small Jr., whose parents' names adorn the museum, said at the move. Small's grandfather, also named Albert Small, was important in the fight to save and move the building 46 years ago.

Thursday's move cost about $500,000, Property Group Partners said.

The synagogue was built in 1876 by German immigrants. Original construction cost: $4,000. In 1908, the first Adas Israel congregation moved out and the building became a series of storefronts.

How to Keep Buildings From Killing Hundreds of Millions of Birds a Year

ARCHITECTS’ GROWING AFFINITY for glassy buildings has given the world better views, more natural light, sexier skylines—and a lot of dead birds. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates about 750 million birds perish annually flying into glass façades, which can be hard to distinguish from open airspace. The problem is so bad in some places that skyscraper owners hire workers to remove expired birds from the bottoms of their buildings.

Guy Maxwell, a partner at New York-based Ennead Architects, is on a mission to mitigate this fowl holocaust. A bird lover his entire life, he first became aware of architecture’s deadly impact on avifauna 15 years ago, shortly after the completion of his firm’s Rose Center for Earth and Space at NYC’s American Museum of Natural History. The enormous glass cube afforded unimpeded views of the spherical Hayden Planetarium within, but was a deadly invisible barrier to birds. Maxwell has been working to protect feathered species ever since.

Working with him is an informal circle of anti-collision advocates that includes members of the American Bird Conservancy, New York City Audubon, New Jersey Audubon, and the Bird Safe Glass Foundation. (“It really takes a gang of merry pranksters to pull this off,” says Maxwell.) Together, they’ve made progress on bird-safe research, bird-safe building regulations, bird-safe glass, and bird-safety awareness, spurring changes that have already had a large, ahem, impact.

Among their recent accomplishments is the American Bird Conservancy’s creation of two avian research facilities—one at the Powdermill Nature Reserve, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, the other inside a modified shipping container at the Bronx Zoo. (The Bronx tunnel’s design was overseen, in part, by Maxwell and his colleagues at Ennead’s research-intensive division, Ennead Lab.) Spearheaded by American Bird Conservancy Bird Collisions Campaign Manager Christine Sheppard, these testing tunnels are the only ones of their kind in the US, and allow researchers to investigate which glass treatments and lighting conditions birds will fly toward or avoid. They’ve learned, for instance, that birds won’t try to fly through vertical line patterns that are less than four inches apart, and that line patterns tend to be more effective at preventing collisions than dotted ones.

Using this knowledge, Maxwell, Sheppard, and their confederates have consulted with glass manufacturers like Viracon, Guardian, Bendheim, and Arnold Glas to help produce products like ceramic frit patterns and UV coatings—treatments that are visible to birds and can alert them to the presence of dangerous physical barriers.

The group’s biggest policy achievement came in 2011, when it partnered with the US Green Building Council to launch a LEED pilot credit #55 for incorporating “bird collision deterrence” into new buildings. The goal: Make buildings as visible to birds as possible, through glass technologies, exterior building treatments like screens and louvers, and decreased night lighting levels. Maxwell says it has since become LEED’s most popular pilot credit. Other victories include legislation (initiated by Golden Gate Audubon) in San Francisco, Oakland, and other Bay Area cities establishing citywide bird safe building standards. Mandatory and voluntary ordinances have been passed in New York, Minnesota, and Toronto, as well.

Much of the team’s research is embodied in Ennead’s Bridge for Laboratory Sciences at Vassar College. The bridge-like classroom-cum-laboratory is a case study in bird-safe architecture. Vertical metal sunscreens cover its long, curving façade. Its windows are coated in Arnold Glas’s Ornilux, a UV coating visible only to birds, and various hues of ceramic fritting (the range of colors ensures that the lines are visible to birds from a variety of species).

The concept of bird safety is changing architecture, Maxwell says. Exceptional bird-friendly designs have been completed across the country, from the fritted glass windows of Weiss Manfredi Architects’ Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, to AJC Architects’ Tracy Aviary Visitor Center in Salt Lake City, which is fronted by fractured metal screens that keep birds from flying into its windows. “There’s generally an awareness of this problem now,” says Maxwell. “You see architects considering this when before they had no idea it was even a problem.” The public is becoming more aware of the problem, too. New York City Audubon has even created an online portal, called D-Bird, where people can report building-related bird mortalities.

Meanwhile, Maxwell and his band of bird advocates are seeking funding to ramp up their research and advocacy. They would like to build several more labs along the east coast, fight for more bird-safety legislation, and see bird-friendliness become an automatic consideration for architects.

“I’m amazed that there are still many people who don’t realize the enormity of the problem,” Maxwell says.

How Do You Imagine The Skyscraper Of The Future?

How Do You Imagine The Skyscraper Of The Future?

Since 2006 eVolo Magazine invites architects and designers around the world to imagine the skyscraper of the future. The annual Skyscraper Competition explores new possibilities of building high through the use of novel technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations. The competition challenges preconceived ideas, and as such, the results are received with a mix sentiment of excitement and mis belief. Many believe that these projects belong to science fiction, that would never be built, and let alone solve any of our current architectural and urban problems. eVolo Magazine seeks to enter the ranks of inspiring publications like Lacerba in Italy and Le Figaro in France which published conceptual projects by Futurists like Arne Hosek, Piero Portaluppi, and Sergei Lopati whose “out of this world” projects of the 1900’s became a reality 100 years later.  

It is eVolo Magazine’s mission to keep promoting the most audacious architectural and urban concepts. They can only hope to see your most innovative ideas built in the years to come while transforming our cities and improving our way of life. 

The early registration to the 2017 Skyscraper Competition closes on November 15, 2016. The final registration deadline is January 24, 2017. 

How do you imagine the skyscraper of the future?

Times Squares Skyscraper - Honorable Mention 2015 Skyscraper Competition. Blake Freitas, Grace Chen, Alexi Kararavokiris

Drone Surveys Improve Automated Road Construction

Drone Surveys Improve Automated Road Construction

Automated machine guidance (AMG) links construction equipment with on board computers that use data from 3-D models and GPS to guide operations. The Oregon Department of Transportation is exploring surveying with unmanned aircraft for construction projects using  an Aibotix Aibot X6 Hexacopter. The hexacopter can fly programmed flight paths autonomously and carry 4.4 pounds of cameras and sensors.

Ron Singh, chief of surveys at ODOT, is using the drone to generate 3-D maps from orthorectified imagery that accounts for topographical variations in the surface of the Earth and the tilt of the drone. Specifically, they produce digital terrain models via structure-from-motion technologies that estimate 3-D structures from multiple, overlapping 2-D images.

“From my perspective, a drone is like a tripod for surveying, only you can place it 200 feet in the air over a particular spot,” Singh said.

Singh brings a unique drone usage skill set and is known to have a very progressive approach towards AMG and drone use. Singh says AMG technology is dramatically improving construction projects in Oregon. “One contractor, K&E Excavating, has invested heavily in AMG,” Singh said. “In 2010, they were only getting a few projects from ODOT, but now they’re getting almost every project there is because they can get their bids lower. They’re coming up with bids lower than our engineers’ estimates.”

How does he do it? Read more on how he's using unmanned systems in Charles Choi's article "Drone Surveys Improve Automated Road Construction" published in Inside Unmanned Systems.com.

Harvard Program Pushes Sustainable Infrastructure in Urban Planning

Four years after helping launch the Envision infrastructure sustainability rating tool (ENR June 17, 2015), a Harvard University graduate school of design program has published a guidebook for municipalities in how to  take an integrated approach to designing and building sustainable infrastructure in concert with urban planning and International Planing.

While Envision allows public-sector infrastructure owners to measure long-term sustainability of single projects such as bridges, tunnels, water or energy systems, the new guidebook, entitled “Planning Sustainable Cities: An Infrastructure Based Approach,” provides tools for knitting those individual projects into a seamless and sustainable network.

Released last week by the university's Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure, the book focuses on infrastructure system performance and how to leverage synergies among buildings and other assets to minimize demands on infrastructure.

By minimizing demand on resources, an integrated infrastructure system is less expensive because it requires construction of fewer treatment plants, for example. A  green infrastructure approach also reduces the need for sewers since it decreases storm water runoff.

The Harvard guidebook which includes several essays written by prominent construction industry professionals was edited and directed by Spiro N. Pollalis, a university professor of design and technology who runs the Zofnass Program. “A sustainable city should have a sustainable infrastructure,” Pollalis says, “and sustainable infrastructure should go hand-in-hand with the planning of the city.”

Pollalis also said urban planners shouldn’t “make decisions based on a single infrastructure project or a single infrastructure system, but look at multiple objectives at the same time.”

Erin Mosley, a contributor to the book and a vice president and deputy director of innovation and technology at CH2M Hill, said at a Nov. 3 and 4 conference at the school to launch the guidebook that it doesn't just provide suggestions and methodologies to officials, it also offers them the “confidence” to sell these ideas to constituents. “They can then refer back to Harvard University and the Zofnass Program when they are recommending this,” she said. “There’s a credibility to it. It helps create the conversation and the space for the conversation.”

Terry Bennett Autodesk senior industry strategist for civil infrastructure, said the guide helps urban planners look beyond their own training and experiences to think about alternative solutions. “It’s not a set of prescriptions about how to do it but it asks you questions that allow you to think differently about the approach,” Bennett said. “‘Should we consider this? And if we want to consider this what would be the next level? So it helps guide you through questions to ask to get the answers you need to do things differently.”

Bennett said when a new piece of infrastructure is being built, planners should think about how it will be repurposed at the end of its lifecycle, pointing to projects such as New York City’s High Line, which was erected on abandoned rail lines or the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C   that would be built atop four piers left behind when the bridge was replaced.

“If you start understanding how long the life expectancy is and plan for what you want it to become after that you can plan some of the capabilities in so it’s easily repurposed without a whole new effort,” Bennett said. “It’s those types of thought processes that the book helps walk you through.”

Envisioning the future

Founded in 2007, the Zofnass Program played a key role in developing Envision in tandem with three engineering associations: The American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Public Works Association and the American Council of Engineering Cos. Envision—which is managed and quasi-commercialized by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure—moved project sustainability beyond buildings when it launched in 2012.

The tool rates infrastructure projects in five categories: quality of life, leadership, natural world, resource allocation and climate and risk. Sixty possible credits are awarded to projects based on resource use, operation resilience, ecosystem restoration, life-cycle costs and return on investment. The program offers four project ratings: bronze, silver, gold and platinum.

Pollalis said 5,000 people worldwide now are credentialed in the Envision approach while 24 projects have achieved Envision certification in the U.S., with 19 more in the process. He also said Envision is being used on projects in Italy, Germany, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The 356-page guidebook is an extension of the Envision rating tool but also takes the rating system to a new level, said Paul Zofnass, a design sector management consultant who founded the Harvard program in 2007. He said the book offers the first comprehensive approach to measuring sustainability as it applies to an entire city.

“It needs to be because building a city is just not one building,” he said. “It’s a community of living people and it’s going to have a big impact on the environment around it.”

Common ground

The Harvard conference, which had about 450 people registrants, included panel discussions on sustainability in key infrastructure sectors and how to make the “business case” for sustainable infrastructure.

To that point, Pollalis argued that sustainable projects are usually less expensive when lifecycle costs are considered. “Some sustainability elements are expensive but most are not,” he said.

The conference also explored how information technology and big data should be used to improve each infrastructure sector. Mosley said her conversations with clients about digital infrastructure start broadly before she asks them what piece of infrastructure they need to fix most.

“You need to have the vision but then you start with one particular place that is your biggest pain point and you can grow it from there,” Mosley said. “But you don’t want to start with a pain point without a vision. That’s where the planning guidelines come in; you understand how that piece can fit into the whole picture and you are able to move more fluidly between things.”

How a 31-year-old general contractor built a multimillion-dollar company in 2 years

Josh Downing always wanted to start his own construction company — but with a young family to think about, an entrepreneurial career didn't seem like it was in the cards.

The 31-year-old's dream became reality in 2014, he tells CNBC, when he stumbled upon Thumbtack, a platform that connects customers with professionals for any job they need done, from photography to strength training.

While still working full-time at a Construction development company, Downing signed up as a general contracting "pro" on Thumbtack.
"I got lucky out of the gate and landed a $6,000 kitchen remodel in April 2014," he says. "It was a small job, but a $7 risk [the cost to submit a quote to the customer] turned into an $800 profit. The rest is history."

Once he saw how quickly he could lock down gigs, Downing thought there was an opportunity to build his own company using the platform without incurring too much risk.


His thought was solidified when he secured a $900,000 project, he explains: "I was thinking, if I could get a quarter to a half million dollars a year from this website, that's all I need. I never would've thought that I'd be able to generate millions of dollars from this website, let alone one lead that turned into a $900,000 custom home build on the beach."

In September 2014, Downing launched his own construction business, Direct Movement Group. Two months after that, he left his previous position to focus on DMG full-time.

While Downing got lucky initially, his continued success hasn't been a cake walk. "In anything that you're going to be successful in, it's going to take time," he says. "I put in the time and effort, and now it's really starting to pay off."

The Jacksonville-based company, which now employs 24 subcontractors and recently launched a new division in Orlando, earned $2.3 million in sales in 2015. Downing projects $5 million in sales for 2016. While he gets most of his leads from Thumbtack, he uses other lead generation websites such as HomeAdvisor.

The key to succeeding in his business boils down to highlighting what work you've done in the past, Downing explains: "People want to know what you did last, when you did it, and where it was. Provide validation that the work you've done is high-end."

As for succeeding in the entrepreneurial world, Downing has two pieces of advice. One, "you should be taking someone to lunch every day." The more people who know you and what you're doing, the more opportunities you'll create, he says.

Secondly, "figure out what it is that you love, and try to form a business around it. You'll put so much into it that it'll be hard to fail."

Tesla announces plans to build second gigafactory in Europe

Dive Brief:

Tesla has announced plans to build a second gigafactory in Europe that will manufacture both electric vehicles and batteries, according to Business Insider.
Tesla founder Elon Musk said the company will start looking for sites in 2017 but will first focus on the production of its new vehicle, the Model 3.
The company's gigafactory in Nevada, which should be operating at full capacity by 2020 and will only produce batteries for vehicles and the company's Powerwall systems, has a been a boon for the local area and state.

Dive Insight:

Musk also hinted that "Gigafactory 2" would be the first of more vehicle-battery facilities in Europe. However, for now, most development attention is devoted to getting "Gigafactory 1" fully operational so that it can become what officials said will be one of the biggest producers of lithium-ion batteries in the world.

Tesla's $5 billion Reno, NV, gigafactory is nearing completion, with delivery of its first cars scheduled for 2017. Tesla, which is acting as its own contractor on the gigafactory, has also made a point of incorporating the latest green technology into the project and said the completed building will be net-zero. Tesla competitor Faraday Future recently awarded AECOM a $500 million contract for the construction of its $1 billion North Las Vegas, NV, factory.

Tesla is credited with bringing Faraday to the area as well as other businesses like data company giant Switch. Northern Nevada has enjoyed low unemployment because of this influx, and plants and distribution centers have made up about 70% of all area commercial real estate transactions in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to Collier's International. New business has brought in so many new employees that both Reno and Las Vegas officials said they will need 40,000 extra housing units by 2020 in order to accommodate the expected 11,000 new workers coming into the state.

Builders battle extreme weather with next-level construction tech

Aerage temperature: 11 degrees below zero. Typical wind speed: 140 kilometers per hour. No roads in or out. Active permafrost that’s either frozen solid or defrosted into mud 3-feet-deep, and polar bears — the earth’s largest land predator — roaming the tundra. It’s Iqaluit, Nunavut on Baffin Island, Canada, and for Edmonton-based Stantec, it’s just another place to build a state-of-the-art international airport.

The History Channel was recently on site shooting for a show about "impossible engineering projects," according to Stantec lead architect Noel Best. "There are only three Sealift Ocean transports that bring material in when the bay is free of ice between August and September, and you can’t build directly on the permafrost or your project will sink during the brief summer thaw," he said.

To complete the impossible build at Iqaluit, Stantec employed a combination of old and new technologies to model building performance, mitigate exposure to extreme climate and optimize the foundation and building envelope that came directly in contact with an unforgiving natural environment.

Stantec isn't alone in the construction industry effort to create more resilient buildings and complete large and complex projects in extreme weather conditions. As international delegates gathered at the COP22 climate summit in Morocco this week to further solutions to climate change, AEC firms are on the front lines of climate resiliency and are leveraging construction technologies to reduce the impact of increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

Water world

Mark Hoekzema, chief meteorologist and director of meteorological operations at Germantown, MD-based Earth Networks — which provides global weather forecasting services to corporate clients for operational strategy and business continuity — said the last 30 years have seen a rise in significant weather events. "For instance, in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic there has been a 74% increase in rainfall for events categorized as very heavy, and elsewhere the numbers and statistics likewise show that there is something dramatic going on related to climate," he said.

"There is something dramatic going on related to climate"

While Hoekzema acknowledged the worth of COP22 and other conversations focused on climate change mitigation, he stressed the critical role of the construction and engineering sector to safeguard people and property from extreme weather events. "It’s unknown how much humans can do to slow climate change, and we need to prepare for things like sea level rise as much as we are trying to figure out how to stop them," he said.

Los Gatos, CA-based Arx Pax co-founder and CEO Greg Henderson is focused on that task, funneling monetization from the company’s hover-board engine technology into building system technology for developing floodplain real estate by floating super structures on a network of post-tensioned concrete pontoons.

In fact, the Arx Pax SAFE Building System doesn’t merely anticipate flood conditions, it aims to introduce them preemptively via canals, boxed culverts or containment foundations to maximize base isolation and create projects resistant and resilient to both extreme flood and seismic events.

Precast pontoons the size of shipping containers provide a broad, stable base for construction, Henderson said, offering developers a foundation that can handle massive loads while allowing for significant horizontal displacement. When it comes to construction limitations, Henderson pointed to the MS Allure of the Seas cruise ship as an analogy, a 236-foot-tall, 16-story, mixed-use, high-density real estate development that weighs 100,000 tons and sits on a 4-and-half acre site floating in water just 30 feet deep.

By comparison, the SAFE foundation system is designed to float residential, institutional and commercial projects in 3 feet of water, drawing notice from AEC players including Doug Robertson, president of structural engineering firm Daedalus, who said designers and builders in seismically active, flood-prone and coastal areas need to take notice of the technology as a "foundation alternative to ensure long-term sustainability."

Pushing the building envelope

Foundational and building envelope technologies and systems figure significantly into projects confronted with extreme construction environments or designed for extreme climate event resiliency. At the Iqaluit airport build out, Stantec was charged with using windows for over 20% of the building façade to maximize the meager natural light in the Arctic Circle.

"Getting the daylight deep into the building was one of the critical design drivers," Best said. "We did a lot of computer modeling on daylight data to achieve the amount of windows mandated by the client."

Despite the preponderance of glass, thermal issues faced by Stantec on the project involved dissipating building heat rather than retaining it. With the 32,808-square-foot building sitting directly on grade, thermal siphons were required to keep the building heat from melting the permafrost and sinking the entire project into the ground. Below a layer of insulation, 5 miles of piping filled with CO2 capture heat and transfer it to above-ground, 6-foot-high vertical radiators where it condenses back into liquid.

Construction projects even in normal environments may have to eventually retrofit to account for the effects of extreme climate on the building envelope. "We’re already seeing a ton of cladding retrofit and anticipate using more systems like THERM as well as aerial drone imaging for envelope thermal modeling," said Matthew Smith, head of the resilience group at Toronto, Canada-based structural engineering firm Entuitive. "Given higher temperatures, more frequent rain and snow, how all of these glass curtain walls will perform is suspect, and being able to model that performance will be huge."

Wind tunnel and water tank modeling

Based in Gelph, Ontario, engineering and scientific consulting firm RDWI has learning labs in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia where firms like Entutive and Stantec are utilizing water tank and wind tunnel test beds to model extreme wind conditions for optimizing lateral building loads or — in the case of the Iqaluit airport project — minimizing snow accumulation that can drift on and adjacent to the roof.

"Being able to model that performance will be huge"

By immersing a scale model of the airport into a water tank and introducing sand and current, the Stantec team was able to determine the need to add snow scoops on the roof to force wind eddies that push snow drifting several meters away from — instead of flush against — the airport’s leeward façade. "It’s very simple technology, but very graphic and visual," Best said.

Smith said contemporary design aesthetics, particularly for urban residential high-rises, are forcing engineering teams to take a closer look at lateral loads in anticipation of both seismic activity and higher winds associated with extreme weather. Wind tunnel testing on scale models has enabled the team in many cases to move from prescriptive to performance-based design models by inputting test data into ETABS and Perform 3D modeling software.  

"A lot of the high-rise engineering in Toronto, New York and London is being driven by wind performance for super tall, super slender towers with small bases," Smith said. "So we really have to model performance under movement."

While much of the technology being applied to extreme climate construction is intended to optimize building performance, contractors and engineers are also relying on systems and equipment simply to keep projects moving in adverse environments in places as germane as Rochelle, IL, where Miami, FL-based Dominion Builders was forced to excavate through 4 feet of snow and frozen ground to keep construction of a 177,000-square-foot hydroponic green house on schedule.

"The build started in October, but by the time design was complete, we were in January with temperatures hitting minus 30 degrees," said Dominion Director of Operations Marc Finch. "We used a network of glycol heaters covered with blankets to thaw 45,000 square feet of ground at a time, and then excavated with a back hoe."

Stantec relied extensively on Autodesk BIM 360 to optimize project team logistics at the Iqaluit airport and keep a consistent and reliable flow of materials that Best described as critical given the geographic isolation of the project. "If you are missing a section of pipe, you can’t go down to the local hardware store," he said. "The planning and coordination of electrical and mechanical through BIM allowed us close coordination in advance so the contactor could do detailed take-offs and avoid cost overruns from having to fly materials to the job site."

Continuity has also become a primary driver of sustainable and resilient design and construction overall, particularly after the devastation of Super Storm Sandy put major corporations on the East Coast either out of business or out of operation for long periods of time. The 2012 storm caused $71.4 billion in U.S. damages, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"One of the things that came out of Sandy wreaking havoc on the Northeast was an increased attention on businesses to add extreme weather forecasting and consideration into business continuity plans," said Hoekzema, who added that construction teams are also increasingly looking into "now-casting" for real-time weather information, particularly as it relates to lighting probability at high-rise job sites. 

According to Smith, the resiliency conversation in building design has shifted from determining whether or not a property can sustain an event like Sandy to how quickly the building — particularly hospitals and essential service buildings, but also office and commercial properties — can be back up and running. "So it is designing with that in mind, to help asset owners reduce the risk of their tenants going out of business," Smith said.

The World's $49 Trillion Infrastructure Problem May Not Get Solved Anytime Soon

An abundance of global savings. Trillions of dollars of negative-yielding bonds. And a bevy of institutional investors hungry for positive, long-dated yields to match their liabilities.

Conditions are ripe for an avalanche of private-sector capital to flow into unlisted infrastructure, turning an industry facing an estimated $49 trillion shortfall into an asset class which, its sponsors say, offers strong cash flows, uncorrelated returns and positive real yields.

58 percent of active investors surveyed in the second quarter of the year by data provider Preqin will invest more than $100 million in unlisted funds over the next 12 months compared to 42 percent who said that in the corresponding period last year, underscoring the increasing allure of alternative assets amid ultra-low yields from more conventional capital-market instruments.

But don't believe the hype: unlisted infrastructure investments fail to deliver bang for the buck — and the asset class remains handicapped by a dearth of investor-friendly investment vehicles.

That's the conclusion of a research report from Deutsche Bank AG this week, which makes for grim reading for governments around the world.

"The supposedly attractive risk-return profile of infrastructure projects for private investors is illusory," the Deutsche Bank analysts, led by John Tierney, wrote on Wednesday. "Simple as it sounds, bringing private capital to bear on the public infrastructure problem is an idea whose time has yet to come."

A lack of well-designed or revenue-generating projects accounts for the funding gap, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. A less well-understood part of the problem is the risk-return profile of infrastructure investments for private investors — which is also what's keeping these investors away.

The Deutsche analysts argue that returns on such projects are usually meager after taking into account mark-to-market and regulatory risks, the net effect of which crimps the allure of the asset class as a whole.

Specifically, they say the oft-touted low-volatility characteristics of unlisted infrastructure investments are overstated. "Studies of infrastructure returns are based on cash flows and appraised values since there are no markets for most infrastructure," the analysts write.

"If more money flows in, regulators may require more rigorous appraisal methods, leading to more volatility, lower Sharpe ratios and higher correlations," he said, citing the common measure for risk-adjusted returns

In effect, efforts to encourage and systematize investment in the sector are themselves laden with risks. 

"As more pension fund and life insurance money moves into public infrastructure, regulators could easily step in and mandate more robust appraisal methods, which could make current infrastructure returns less attractive on a risk-adjusted basis."

Regulatory risks that might reduce the allure of a project's economic value and inflation-hedging potential mean investors might not be adequately compensated for credit risk, they conclude.

The report is the latest in recent weeks from Deutsche Bank analysts pushing back against growing calls for governments in advanced economies to launch public works, citing, in part, the potential monetary offset.

The report this week serves as a shot across the bows for governments seeking to diversify their exposures into longer-dated assets, with the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the world’s biggest, expressing its wish this year to invest in unlisted infrastructure investments in the teeth of finance-ministry resistance, with officials citing the asset class's lack of performance data and track record.

There is a case for the bulls: Preqin data shows the asset class has posted steady returns in recent years, while in Australia it outperformed during the 2007-2009 downturn.

But advocates that talk up unlisted infrastructure — for diversification, and its potential in helping pension funds find long-dated assets to match ballooning liabilities — concede there is a big problem.

Ashby Monk, executive director of the Global Projects Center at Stanford University and senior advisor to the University of California endowment, reckons the investment-conundrum lies more with market-structure challenges than the underlying risk-return profiles of projects.

Institutional investors are typically unhappy with the large fees incurred to middle-men, such as private-equity funds, he says. "It's ultimately the high fees that prevent mainstream investors from deploying capital into this space," he said in response to e-mailed questions. "Even 1 percent per year over 20 years is devastating to the net-present-value of an investment. Also, the fee structures push investors into risky, levered deals to generate carry."

Still, efforts to better align the economic value of unlisted infrastructure assets with the underlying investment product are gathering pace.

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How a Georgetown Law Professor Became a Cult Construction Blogger

Wallace Mlyniec, the Lupo-Ricci Professor of Clinical Legal Studies at Georgetown Law School, has devoted his career to defending the rights of young people accused of crimes. He led Georgetown’s Juvenile Justice Clinic for four decades, receiving prestigious awards for his work.

But there’s another side to 71-year-old Mlyniec: He is fascinated by everything to do with buildings. Over the years, as he mentored future attorneys, Mlyniec (pronounced “Milenick”) accrued a vast knowledge of architecture, construction, and Washington lore on the side.

He shares this knowledge in “Construction Notes,” updates about buildings-in-progress that have become cult reading material. The typical note might run eight or 10 pages. It starts with a status report on a construction project on or near the Georgetown Law campus and warnings about noise or other disruptions. Then it plunges into the mechanics of a building technique or a colorful episode in D.C. history. There are lots of links and images and usually a short bibliography at the end. Sometimes research assistants help Mlyniec compile the information.

Between Georgetown students, staff, and Mlyniec’s personal friends, close to 3,000 people receive Construction Notes by email (they’re also posted online). Each one has a title and a theme. Not tempted by “Swamps and Sewers?” Try “Caissons and Slurry Walls.” Then chase it with “Caissons and Slurry Walls II.”

Although his writing is full of technical arcana, Mlyniec doesn’t get bogged down in that. He ranges across centuries and continents in his descriptions of how pile drivers work or why builders celebrate “topping off” a new structure (answer: the tradition comes from ancient tree-topping ceremonies to appease the gods).

“He has this uncanny knack for pursuing a question in a way that is just so interesting,” says Judith Areen, a Georgetown Law professor and the school’s former dean. “I can still remember one of his early notes on concrete. Who ever thought about concrete? He went back to how it was developed in ancient times.”

Mlyniec, who lives on Capitol Hill, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He remembers taking the L downtown as a boy to look at buildings. (“If you grow up in Chicago, you can’t ignore the architecture around you.”) He went to college at Northwestern and watched as workers filled in a lake for a campus expansion. But he put that interest on hold as he embarked on law school at Georgetown and then an academic career.

In 1973, Georgetown Law hired him as its first-ever clinical instructor. Two years earlier, the small school had moved into a building, McDonough Hall, off New Jersey Avenue NW, in a neighborhood east of downtown that all but the Salvation Army and flophouse hotels deserted. (The Georgetown Law Center is separate from the undergraduate campus, and not in Georgetown at all.)

The school grew, and before long, McDonough was overcrowded. Mlyniec joined the committee to plan for a larger campus. His interest in buildings was renewed.

At first, he channeled it into professional validation. This was the era when the legal establishment sniffed at clinical law as intellectually unserious, hippie do-gooderism. Clinical faculty were working in spillover space off-campus. Mlyniec realized they needed to be on campus to win respect. “The law school would not accept clinical faculty unless they could see us,” he says. (By 1989, his clinic had settled into an expanded McDonough Hall.)

Mlyniec had a big hand in the campus that grew around him, becoming the law school’s point person for architects and construction managers. “I think in another life, he would have become an architect,” Areen says. He started writing Construction Notes in 2002, chronicling the build-out of the school’s international law and sports centers.

Originally, the idea was simply to alert people to inconveniences during construction. There was going to be noise early in the morning, and students and professors would be annoyed. “In order to keep a lid on the complaints, I thought this was a good idea,” he recalls.

So he started writing. “Everything just exploded after that,” he says. “I couldn’t put my pen down.”

As the notes became more ambitious, people from as far afield as Indiana and California asked to be added to his mailing list. In 2006, a small press managed by one of Mlyniec’s friends published a collection of the notes as a book. Mlyniec describes this period as probably the happiest years of his life.

Building the two campus centers was a major enterprise. But those structures seem like baubles compared to Capitol Crossing, the current $1.3 billion project to erect a seven-acre deck over a sunken stretch of I-395 between 2nd and 3rd Streets NW, from Massachusetts Avenue to E Street, reconnecting the divided East End neighborhood.

Years ago, craving a hands-on role with a major infrastructure project, Mlyniec tried unsuccessfully to embed himself with the team building the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Then Capitol Crossing came along—a perfect fit. Mlyniec is Georgetown Law’s liaison with the developers and the city on the megaproject, which won’t be finished until at least 2021.

He has written more than 20 notes on Capitol Crossing, touching on the geology of the Atlantic Coastal Plain; the life of 19th-century Washington politico Alexander “Boss” Shepherd; the invention of the steam-driven steel hammer; and much more.

One note explains that the I-395 ditch next to campus is a remnant of the postwar Center Leg Freeway, which displaced 1,600 residents but was abandoned partway through. Another retraces the journey made by the steel girders that will support the Capitol Crossing deck: from a mill in North Carolina, to a flatbed truck, to a crane, and finally onto columns over the roadway.

Carole Wedge, president of Shepley Bulfinch, the Boston architecture firm that designed Georgetown’s international law and sports centers, says she always learns new things from the notes. When they worked together, Wedge was so impressed by Mlyniec (“his inquisitiveness is really quite remarkable”) that she hired him as a consultant, and he advised on the design of a law school building at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

If you visit Mlyniec on the Georgetown Law campus, he’ll take you to the top of Gewirz Residence Hall, where you can look down on Capitol Crossing. It’s an incredible vista of labor: cranes, backhoes, stacks of lumber and pipes, and workers in fluorescent vests crawling over the site like ants. Not everyone geeks out to this stuff the way Mlyniec does. But his writing unlocks what is easy to forget as we go about our daily routines—that modern city building is pretty awe-inspiring.

“Unless you practice construction or real estate law, you will probably never have a chance to view a project as massive as this so close up,” Mlyniec told readers in a 2015 note, “Pile Driving and Lagging Boards.” “I encourage you to take a few minutes … to step outside and watch the work. This combination of human labor, machinery, and technology shows us the immense capacity of the human imagination.”