ConstructConnect Blog

Mass timber construction has garnered a great deal of attention recently, especially when it comes to constructing tall buildings. Over the past decade, tall wood buildings have popped in Europe, Australia and Canada. Initially, these tall wood buildings were topping out at around 10 stories. This is changing rapidly as a race to build the tallest has recently emerged with taller structures being proposed and announced.

The construction industry is responsible for more fatal occupational injuries than any other industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2014 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, there 899 fatal injuries occurred in construction work. That’s one out of every five worker deaths.

The adoption and use of Building Information Modeling (BIM), the digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility that creates a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility to form a reliable basis for decisions from conception to the end of its lifecycle, has skyrocketed over the past few years. Some of the benefits of BIM include faster delivery time, improved collaboration among stakeholders, reduced costs for construction and facility operations and a reduction in change orders.

As we rapidly approach the end of the year, it’s time to release ConstructConnect’s list of the “Top 5 Coolest Buildings of 2016.” In order to be eligible, the building has to have been completed, topped out or opened within the calendar year and has some aspect that makes the building cool. The competition was stiff with lots of great projects to choose from, so narrowing it down to just five wasn’t easy. So without further ado, and in no particular order, here are our “Top 5.”

Whether you have a construction fleet of five or 500, the key to keeping your company’s vehicles and heavy equipment operational is implementing an effective preventive maintenance program. The average cost for a piece of heavy equipment is over $20,000. Depending on how much heavy equipment your company owns, a large percentage of your company’s assets could be in construction vehicles and heavy equipment. Regardless of whether you outsource your construction equipment maintenance or do it in-house, a proper preventive maintenance program can extend the useful life of your equipment, prevent costly repairs and reduce downtime due to equipment being out of service.

For most of us, when we think of road and bridge construction it’s usually when we are being delayed by a work zone or when we resign ourselves to driving through the smaller potholes to avoid being swallowed up by the bigger potholes. When we do think about road and bridge construction, the terms “new innovations” and “cutting edge technology” probably never cross our minds.

By now, most people are familiar with the concepts of virtual reality, and maybe to a lesser extent, augmented reality. When you think of examples virtual reality you probably think of either movies, like The Lawnmower Man or The Matrix trilogy, or video games especially with the release of so many VR headsets hitting the market in the past year such as the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Gear VR and PlayStation VR, just to name a few.

When it comes to construction safety, does your company take a reactive or proactive approach? For most companies, their safety programs probably contain a combination of the two approaches. Proactive in some ways, but reactive on other aspects of safety.

According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats (CTBUH), the authority on skyscrapers, we are entering the era of "megatall" buildings. Megatall buildings are those taller than 1,968 feet. Currently, there are only three such structures: Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 2,717 ft., is the world’s tallest building and was completed in 2010, the Shanghai Tower completed in 2015 in Shanghai, China stands at 2,073 ft. and the Makkah Royal Clock Tower at 1,972 ft. in Mecca, Saudi Arabia was finished in 2012.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released their 2015 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) and the construction industry once again topped the list with 937 worker deaths. This is about a 4% increase in occupational fatalities over the 899 reported for 2014. This is the largest number of construction worker deaths since 2008.