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.”

Concrete conundrum: Understanding the building material's environmental impact

Concrete has always been in indicator of "civilization." Since its invention in the 19th century, humans have used concrete not only to tame nature but, in many cases, to pave right over it. As a result, the hard-wearing material can be found nearly everywhere there are people.

In many instances, the applications entail serious volumes of the material. Builders of the new $5.4 billion Panama Canal expansion, completed just this summer, erected two concrete plants on either side of the project just to meet the estimated 5.7 million cubic yards necessary for a new, wider shipping lane — about 1.3 million more cubic yards than contractors used when constructing the original canal. However, China is the country that has taken a serious liking to concrete. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, China used as much concrete between 2011 and 2013 as America did throughout the entire 20th Century.

Environmentalists, however, have been speaking out against the concrete industry with complaints that concrete, among other things, contributes to the heat island effect and results in increased water runoff during storms, leading to soil erosion and flooding. The biggest beef with concrete, though, is the massive amount of CO2 emissions created during production.

Experts share their opinions of whether the long-term impact of concrete should be a concern, and what's next for the standby building material.

Inside the material — and its impact

Cement — one of concrete's four ingredients along with water, sand and aggregate — is most responsible for the material's environmental impact. Cement makes up approximately 10% of an average concrete mix, but 80% of the environmental impact comes from cement production, according to Jeremy Gregory, executive director of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cement's primary ingredient is limestone, which needs to be heated to an extremely high temperature during the cement production process.

"The rule of thumb is that there is 1 kilogram of CO2 associated with making 1 kilogram of cement," Gregory said. "But the damage doesn't stop at CO2 emissions." Half of the environmental story comes from CO2 emissions, but the other half concerns the energy it takes to get to the necessary high temperatures, he noted.

And there are ways to make those numbers more environmentally friendly. Heather J. Brown, director and professor of the School of Concrete and Construction Management at Middle Tennessee State University, said some producers are attempting to offset cement's high electric and coal-fired consumption with other, bio-based sources. "Globally, plants are using anywhere from 5% to 20% alternative fuels, which is a step in the right direction," she said.

New methods to reduce CO2 emissions

Calera, a company that has figured out how to collect 50% of the CO2 emissions from the cement-production process and use it to produce a new type of cement, is among the innovators in the effort to improve the material's environmental impact. "The conversation should be that for every ton of cement produced, there is a ton of CO2 produced, which can then be processed for 2 tons of Calera cement per day," Brown said.

"Construction and demolition waste in the U.S. is approximately 135 million tons annually"

To reduce both CO2 emissions and energy use, Gregory said more cement manufacturers are using waste products rather than coal to power the process. In addition, some manufacturers are replacing some of the limestone in the cement mix with supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), like the fly ash produced from burning coal and unheated limestone. "Anything you can do to reduce the amount of heated limestone in the production of cement" will reduce CO2 emissions, he said. Process improvements, though, aren't taking place just on the cement side.

"There's a similar effort to try to make (concrete) with less cement," Gregory said. Here, SCMs also pop up in the conversation. The same alternative materials that can supplement limestone in the production of cement can also be used in concrete to reduce the amount of cement required in that mix as well, but these methods are not without their challenges.

Because these mixes sometimes take longer to set and can affect strength and durability, competing interests must be weighed when deciding whether to use them. "How long are you willing to wait until concrete is hard enough to use it in whatever fashion you're interested in using it in?" Gregory said.

Another concern with these new mixes is that, unlike traditional concrete and cement, they haven't been in use long enough to establish their long-term strength and durability. A known issue with using SCMs is that, in combination with certain types of aggregate, there is an alkali-silica reaction (ASR) that can eat away at the concrete, causing it to break down and crumble over time.

Additional considerations for the material

So what about the other issues with concrete, such as the heat island effect or concrete as a solid waste? Critics say the heat capacity and thermal conductivity of materials like concrete and asphalt allow for the absorption of more solar heat, leading to higher temperatures — which is not necessarily a positive in cities where the climate is already warm to begin with.

"Even materials that have a high production burden can have a low environmental impact"

Brown and Gregory also said concrete plays a critical role in protecting people and property during natural disasters. Concrete's durability and strength has the potential to reduce loss of life and limit the need for repairs post-event. Gregory said it takes a little more money to ensure that a building can withstand all types of natural disasters over the course of its life, but there are fewer costs in the long run in the way of rebuilding.

What's next for concrete?

Times are changing, and the industry is making efforts to reduce dependency on traditional cement, Brown said. For example, she said the new World Trade Center used 72% non-cement products during construction, which saved 1.77 million gallons of gasoline for cement production and delivery.

While Gregory acknowledges that there is room for improvement in the concrete and cement production processes, when it comes to sustainability, he said materials like concrete need to be judged on their performance over the entire building lifecycle. "Even materials that have a high production burden can have a low environmental impact if they enable energy efficiency and durability," he said.