Sustainable development is slowly becoming an important factor in the property development world, and whether we are prepared to accept it or not, sooner or later, one of the determining factors of whether a project goes forward or not will be the issue of sustainability.
The Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction promotes sustainable responses to the technological, environmental, socioeconomic and cultural issues affecting building and construction.
Activities including Holcim Awards competitions, Holcim Forum symposiums, seed funding for building initiatives and grants for research projects encourage innovative approaches to sustainable construction.
Continue reading ‘Chongming Island’
Not content with building the largest building in the World, Russia has unveiled plans for an even more ambitious project in the black Sea.
Clearly, the Russians have decided that Dubai cannot have all the glory and are determined to show they can go one better than the World project.
Federation Island will be built in the shape of the Russian Federation and will attempt to re-create the country’s geographical features, including rivers and mountains.
The plan is to complete construction before the 2014 winter Olympics. Eventually, the accommodation available will include a wide variety of structures including luxury villas, beach houses, apartments, shops and offices. Plus, we assume, a few hotels. There are plans for dunes, grassland, small forests and of course, Oceanside properties.
Federation island has been designed by Dutch architect, Erick van Egeraat and will be overseen by M-Industries of St. Petersburg. The construction will be undertaken by Witteveen & Bos and the initial dredging by Van Oord Dredging and Marine. The Abu Dhabi company, Allied Business Consultants is investing somewhere in the region of $6.2 billion, although they might find working with Russian labor a little different to their previous experiences.
Sochi itself is a well established resort city with a humid subtropical climate - almost unheard of for Russia. It’s fair to say the infra structure is not quite up to Olympic requirements and the Russian government is scrambling to bring them up to date with an investment of over $1 billion on the electrical system alone
Construction on The Trump Soho Hotel-Condo was stopped last week after a fatal accident. A wooden scaffold workers were standing on to set concrete collapsed, causing a worker to fall 42 floors to his death, while another was lucky enough to be caught by the safety netting.
The company in charge of construction is Bovis Lend Lease, the project management arm of British building firm Bovis. This is not the first time Bovis have run into difficulties with accusations that the building is in fact illegal and should never have got planning permission in the first place. They have also run foul of the NY building code in the past on this site, and a stop work order was immediately issued along with at least four violations including:
- Failure to safeguard the public and property.
- Failure to maintain adequate housekeeping.
- Failure to provide a fire escape hatch.
- Failure to provide adequate fire extinguishers.
Continue reading ‘Trump Soho Stop Work Order’
People all around the world have a fascination with the building construction process. Just visit almost any new building site and there will invariably be groups of people (usually men, it must be said) watching the progress of a particular building.
This blog is dedicated to that same fascination. We watch construction projects globally.
Another recent phenomonon since the advent of readily available digital video cameras, is the appearance of time lapse video watching the construction progress. This is a selection of time lapse videos taken from YouTube showing the development of a variety of buildings, mostly skyscrapers. The bigger they are, the stronger the fascination. the Japanese seem to be leading the world in this at the moment and some of these videos were started many years ago but it is spreading.
Continue reading ‘Watching Buildings go up’
Dredging in progress
Nakheel, the UAE government owned developer announced this Thursday that they have finished work on the 17-mile long breakwater that will protect The World development.
The World is a man-made archipelago of 300 islands off the coast of Dubai. The final stone brought the total amount of stone laid up to 34 million tonnes. The Islands themselves are spread over an area 4.3 long by 5.6 miles wide.
The director of the project, Hamza Mustafa said the land reclamation required dredging 320 million cubic meters of sand from the sea bed and the creation of the breakwater.
The Dredging process
The next phase of the project will be to hand over the individual Islands to developers for the construction and infrastructure to be built.
Whilst the newspapers are predicting doom, gloom and a continued downturn for U.K. property, plans for several up-market high rise condominium buildings in major British cities seem to be progressing nicely.
King Edward Tower, Liverpool
Continue reading ‘Britain Gets Taller’
Construction continues at a furious pace on the Burj Dubai skyscraper. The latest update on the 27th December states that the current floor having been completed is 158, making the tower 598.5 meters tall thus far. After the next 30 meters have been finished, the Burj will be the world’s tallest structure.
Continue reading ‘Burj Dubai Update January 2008′
