Chinese – SpecNews

Prefabricated Architecture and Product Design

In a recent article posted on Core77, Gordon Stott argues for a transition in design thinking around fabricated architecture.
The Unity Home design was developed in collaboration with the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and is reportedly outfitted with the largest collection of Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certified building products in a residential project.
Prefabricated modular methods of construction also bring additive manufacturing techniques, including 3D-printing, into play.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s recent report, Delivering the circular economy: A toolkit for policymakers, looked at issues of prefabrication and construction in a policy context.
The focus of off-site construction has been to replicate standard building processes, rather than taking advantage of the potential opportunity in aiming to replicate a product manufacturing mindset.

One man pulled alive from landslide in China’s Shenzhen

A half-buried truck is seen at an industrial estate hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, December 23, 2015.
Damaged vehicles and containers are seen at an industrial estate hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, December 23, 2015.
Rescuers walk along tyre tracks at the site of a landslide which hit an industrial park on Sunday in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, December 22, 2015.
On Tuesday, police raided offices of the company that was managing the dump site, Shenzhen Yixianglong Investment Development.
Rescue workers work on a damaged building during search and rescue operations at an industrial estate hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, December 23, 2015.

Looking back on a lamentable lack of future-proofing in construction of Forth Road Bridge (From Herald Scotland)

It would appear the 1964 Forth Road Bridge was not, if its whole integrity depends on such individual small components.
THE Forth Bridge, opened in 1890, was deliberately over-engineered after the Tay Bridge disaster in 1879.
THERE are two clear and important messages to emerge from the current Forth Road Bridge fiasco (“Share your car or work from home, bridge drivers urged”, The Herald, December 7, and Letters, December 7, 8 & 9).
Perhaps the hard-hats currently poking at the underside of the Forth Road Bridge might learn a lot by way of similar investigations underneath Stevens’s efforts at Hyndford, and others like it.
This was the case in free university tuition (paid for by scrapping more than 140,000 further education college places) and is now the case in scrapping bridge tolls at a time when all budgets were under pressure.

Chinese contractor begins work on $137m new town in Panama

Photo: The ground-breaking ceremony, attended by the president of Panama (China Construction America)
The contractor, which is the American subsidiary of China State Construction Engineering Corporation, was awarded the scheme on 4 August.
The police intervened to keep the demonstrators from disrupting the ground-breaking ceremony.
The ground-breaking ceremony was attended by Juan Carlos Varela, the president of Panama.
The scheme will also host a campus for the University of Panama for West Panama.

Party with the Eameses! Inside the modernist masters’ riotous home

As Charles Eames used to tell his staff: “Take your pleasure seriously.”
The Eameses playful mischief is still evident in their home studio, the smaller pavilion that stands across a small courtyard from the house.
New employees of the Eames Office would be set the daunting challenge of rearranging the keys to make a new tune.
As the British brutalist architect Peter Smithson, an Eames-admiring contemporary, put it: “They made it respectable to like pretty things”.
A replica features in the exhibition, providing an appropriately anarchic plinkety-plonk soundtrack to the riot of ideas.

Chinese cash could fund Scottish construction

CHINESE investors could be attracted to plough hundreds of millions of pounds into key Scottish infrastructure projects – such as road upgrading and connecting offshore wind farms to the grid – on the back of moves to encourage foreign involvement in the HS2 high speed rail project.
Earlier this year it was revealed that Scotland is becoming a hotspot for Chinese property investors looking for an alternative to London with Edinburgh in particular attracting interest.
Michael Watson, an infrastructure and projects lawyer at Pinsent Masons, said the visit could also have a knock-on impact north of the Border but only if Scotland is able to present an attractive investment proposition for the Chinese.
Chancellor George Osborne this week travelled to China to try and attract investors there to bid for seven contracts worth £11.8 billion in total covering the first phase of HS2, between London and Birmingham.
The key is to have projects which are visible, well developed and ready to be invested in, because we are competing in an extremely competitive global market and the Chinese and other overseas investors have a wealth of options on where to put their money.”
Watson said projects of sufficient scale which could interest Chinese investors include the A9 Perth to Inverness dualling project and rail electrification programmes.

Instagram users offer a preview of LA’s Broad Museum

It will house over 200,000 pieces of postwar and contemporary art from the collections of Eli and Edythe Broad, who also backed the Zaha Hadid-designed Edythe and Eli Broad Art Museum in Michigan, which opened in 2012.
Instagram users and officials from the Broad have been posting images of the building, including glimpses of the interior, as it readies to open.
The images offer a preview of the structure designed by the New York architecture firm, well ahead of the publication of official photography.
Frank Gehry’s new headquarters for Facebook debuted on Instagram, with visitors posting images during the building’s preview before pictures were issued for publication.
The building will also become the new home for the Broad Foundation, which is currently based in Santa Monica.