University – SpecNews

Teaching Students the Value of BIM > ENGINEERING.com

The event was designed to enhance the students’ understanding of various BIM concepts and scenarios.
Recently, 24 university students from three different universities in Singapore, Australia and Columbia had the opportunity to take part in a five-day 5D BIM Immersion and Competition.
The immersion featured a number of hands-on training sessions on 4D and 5D BIM concepts using a variety of software such as ARCHICAD and Synchro.
For more information on the 5D BIM Immersion and Competition, visit the GRAPHISOFT website.
Students in the southern hemisphere have been busy learning what building information modeling (BIM) is all about.

London Met’ Protests Intensify

The protesters are campaigning against the sale of London Metropolitan University’s Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design which, is expected to gain the London University a minimum of £50m.
It followed a night of visual protests, which saw hundreds of students standing as silhouettes in the university windows as sunlight left London.
With the university seeming under increasing fire in recent years, the board of Directors has decided that a single, Holloway Campus in 2017 is a decision that best suits the university, however, many students of London Met staunchly oppose that opinion.
“We believe this will benefit our students, who will enjoy an enhanced student experience, and our staff, who will have more opportunities to collaborate”
The student protests have been led by protest group Occupy The Cass, and Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller, who is a visiting professor at the Cass, has been seen on Twitter showing his support for the cause.

Urban jungle: wooden high-rises change city skylines as builders ditch concrete

Mass timber could prove to be a viable alternative to concrete and steel for mid-to-high rise buildings.
We don’t see mass timber replacing those, it just becomes another option when certain parameters and goals apply to a project.”
Called mass timber, the material is an umbrella term for large, solid chunks of panelized wood.
Out of the mass timber initiative, CLT might prove to change the construction paradigm.
Two urban building projects, in New York City and Portland, Oregon, will be changing their city’s skylines with an environmentally sustainable, cost-competitive building material.

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.

Guided Tours To Challenge Views

But while some view buildings like the Southbank Centre and University of East Anglia (UEA) as examples of daring and dramatic design others argue they are an austere and bleak eyesore.
The vast Park Hill estate of flats in Sheffield is also being shown to the public as part of the Brutal Utopias tours starting on 25 September.
And while structures built from slabs of concrete may not be everyone’s cup of tea, the National Trust is keen to convince detractors they are much more than blots on the landscape.
The “teaching wall” is a building close to half a kilometre long made of unbroken concrete housing different schools of the university.
There are also the iconic accommodation blocks known as the “ziggurats” – stepped terraces of concrete and glass that hug the landscape.

Balfour to build £350m Manchester campus Ι Construction Enquirer

Balfour Beatty is being lined-up to build a new £350m engineering campus at the University of Manchester
The Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD) will be one of the largest, single construction projects ever undertaken by a higher education institution in the United Kingdom.
Balfour Beatty is one of the framework partners alongside Laing O’Rourke and Sir Robert McAlpine.
The MECD project is being delivered through the University’s Construction Partnering Framework which was established in June to deliver up to £1bn of work over the next eight years.
To share your stories email Grant Prior or Aaron Morby… always off the record
Architects Mecanoo have been appointed to the project which is set to open in 2020 and will be located opposite the new National Graphene Institute on Booth Street East.

Drone Oversight Is Coming to Construction Sites

For some construction workers, any thoughts of slacking off could soon seem rather quaint.
Monitoring activity across a large, complex construction site is particularly difficult because there are so many moving parts, and because the jobs being performed change frequently.
Once per day, several drones automatically patrol the Sacramento work site, collecting video footage.
The software developed by the University of Illinois team can show how different subcontracting teams are working together.
At the Sacramento project, video is being captured by a drone-operating company called ImageInFlight.