Construction site -- it's a jungle out there!

[John Angulat]

...but what's scary about the tower cranes?
scott

Hi Scott,
Good pics by the way. I'm quite enjoying this.
There are a number of missing warning/postings required, the most serious is the crane's Load Rating.
There is no fixed ladder for the crane operator to use while ascending the crane. The operator is forced to use the cross bracing (big no-no). I'll give them credit for having safety lines, but they're not secured to the mast sections at proper intervals.
In the last picture one of the three visible mast section bolts looks too short and there appears to be no locking mechanism on the nuts (lock washer, pin, backing nut, etc.), although they may be using DTI's on the bolt head (can't see).

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

We're doing a little better on our own site

Here's the tower crane base (one of two, going over a five-story building, and one going over the other) from the new building on our campus:

The upright structure seems to be about twice the size of the higher, but smaller cranes at the apartment construction site. You can see the enclosed climbing ladder in ours, but it think there is also one in the apartment crane. It is visible in the center picture in my earlier post, but it fills the interior of the crane's upright, so it is harder to pick out.

The wood rails on our scaffolding are just as shabby. There are metal railings at two heights in addition.

scott

more at my construction diary gallery

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

A few more from today

First the OSHA-exposure de jour. This is a tower of end of the building conference rooms, currently open, lacking any glass, and apparently used as loading docks on each floor:

and next, some virtual I-beams. These square boxes of rebar span 35 m, unsupported at the center as they form the ceiling of a large auditorium. They have dozens of cables forming a suspension bridge inside each one. Their task is to support two more floors of building above the auditorium.

and finally, don't these remind you of a closet full of wire hangers, except that they are 3/8" thick?

scott

 

[Chris Kettle]

Well, yes. We clearly don't rinse our concrete forms as well as your folks do (those are what are in the foreground in the picture above), and our scaffolding does give me pause. I tend to shoot from the solid concrete floor, not from the rickety boards just outside the walls. But we use the same basic tools. Here's a forest of yellow poles to support pouring a floor above a two-story open area:

and we squirt concrete up to modest heights using the same boom truck. It is also called an Elefant, a name I prefer to The Putzmeister. I think they are all German-made.

Our labor situation involves importing workers for different trades from different countries. Currently the concrete workers are Chinese, and I am told that the Romanians do drywall. The integrating trades, ducting, electrical, etc. seem to be Israeli. We don't have a strong OSHA, and every few years something falls down, killing people, causing cries for reform, and sometimes proving that our building inspectors can be made to overlook things for surprisingly little money. Third world, ... I guess so. But here's a German construction project that I passed by a few weeks back. Not entirely different:

scott

Scott,

Cool photos. It looks like one giant meccano set :-D

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

Concrete spreaders

I have wondered what it's like shooting concrete out of a fire hose, so I went up yesterday to one of the last parts of our building that is still being pouted:

It is one heavy firehose. This is from a Putzmeister, which is bigger than the Elefant. It has a boom which stretches over what looks like about 100 meters, braced on the edge of the building wall. Most of our Chinese concrete spreaders have moved on to other jobs or gone home, leaving one guy, in the center of the group shot below. He seems to have learned Hebrew. The rest of the crew are local.

scott

 

[Mark Hampton]

I have wondered what it's like shooting concrete out of a fire hose, so I went up yesterday to one of the last parts of our building that is still being pouted:

It is one heavy firehose. This is from a Putzmeister, which is bigger than the Elefant. It has a boom which stretches over what looks like about 100 meters, braced on the edge of the building wall. Most of our Chinese concrete spreaders have moved on to other jobs or gone home, leaving one guy, in the center of the group shot below. He seems to have learned Hebrew. The rest of the crew are local.

scott

Scott,

I worked pouring concrete in a past life, Holding the hose is a complete nightmare, after a pour the size of the one above if the concrete has been coming in steady for a few hours your dead on your feet. That been said hand batching is worse....

Mike Wesley has made some intreasting work in realtion to construction and time and photography...

I made some images of concrete core samples I had taken to check the integrity of a slab - I will dig some of the 5/4 work up - they ended up being used in another way...

cheers

 

[Bob Rogers]

This is a great thread. I love buildings and architecture. Scott and Ken have shown how visually interesting large construction projects can be. I particularly like Ken's picture of the building with the wavy balconies because I saw it not too long after he made his image.

Here is a construction site on a much smaller scale. In this case the object is to make the construction as close to invisible as possible. The photograph is from 2003, nearing the end of the "heavy" portion of the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robbie House. The neat and tidy shrink-wrapped pallets of custom fired brick seem so at home with this icon of American art. And just a touch of the tacky 1960's apartment building on the adjacent lot. I considered cutting it out.

Bob Rogers
Brick
​

 

[Mark Hampton]

core sample - this is made from drilling a 12 inch core through the concrete slab approx 1.5 feet thick - the purpose was to check the slabs integrity - when looking at the cores I became fascinated by the underside of the slab.. a negative landscape of a hidden surface...

thanks for looking

 

[Sandrine Bascouert]

It looks like a polaroid. Is it where you took your inspiration for your future experiments with selected DOF, black and white and close ups?

 

[Mark Hampton]

It looks like a polaroid. Is it where you took your inspiration for your future experiments with selected DOF, black and white and close ups?

Sandrine,

its type 55 - looking back over my older work - I seemed to be interested in the slice of focus... on separating elements.. I may have been looking at Rachel Whiteread works or the Boyle Famliy when thinking about this one - but it ended up more personal...

its strange how things develop into there ownness

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

Finishing up the virtual I-beams

Back in post #33, there was a floor with three horizontal boxes containing groups of wire cables that formed a sort of virtual set of I-beams, needed to support two floors of our building above a full width open area that is for an auditorium. In post #36, those I-beams were being filled with concrete as the floor which is the auditorium's ceiling was completed. I stopped in yesterday to see how the cables are tightened up to hold the weight of the almost completed building that is now above them. Here's what the three sets of cable ends look like from afar:

Each wire has been individually tensioned in some sort of device (now gone) and the tension is held with a small chamfered nut around it, so that the concrete beam is now bowed slightly up:

and the final step is to squirt more concrete into the interior of the tubes that carry each bundle of wires, using the small holes that you see below, establishing their positions permanently:

Pretty scary! I guess the excess wire will get trimmed and everything covered with concrete and standard Jerusalem white stone soon.

scott

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

spikes and whiskers

The major concrete swathes have now been poured for our building, but many small areas remain.
The sight that interests me most is the spikiness of the steel wire whiskers that protrude from every
unfinished corner and even from parts that seem to be finished. Here's an example:

scott

 

[Bob Rogers]

There are eight large cranes on this construction site in Washington DC, including one with an articulated arm. More cranes than any other site in the USA, and maybe more than any site in the world today.

An abstraction of a jungle in steel.

Eight Cranes
Bob Rogers
​

The previous evening I took a photo of the same site from the other side. The lighting was much better, but I could not get far enough away to get the crane arms in the photo.

Eight Cranes #2
Bob Rogers​

 

[James Cook]

The previous evening I took a photo of the same site from the other side. The lighting was much better, but I could not get far enough away to get the crane arms in the photo.

Eight Cranes #2
Bob Rogers​

I don't think there's any need to get all the crane arms in the photo. You have one in its entirety in the center to tell the viewer what one looks like. The rest contribute to making us recognize there are many without see their entire structure. In fact, I think it's much stronger to tighten up, crop the distracting car tops from the bottom and perhaps correct the perspective a bit. It adds up to a more abstract and dramatic view - in my opinion.

The lampost in the bottom is a fun contrast, like but not like the others.

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

I like the contrast between all the cranes and the old fashioned lampposts. Can you work in a traffic light or two as well? Also, the cranes have to be at different heights so that their arms can swing under each other. Is there a point of view from which the heights of the tops would be nicely resolved? Which one of the cranes has the articulated arm and what does it do that is different? Is that a way to allow two cranes to pass each other when they are set so close?

scott