Construction National blog: 18/06/2012
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I have, over the years, spent rather more time in health service buildings than I would have liked. That has to be true of most of us, although sometimes my inside knowledge of hospital layouts and even procedures (the bureaucratic kind, not surgical) has struck even me as being sad. Most of the hospitals and health centres I have spent time in have been dilapidated and not fit for a modern service, usually in a run-down wing at the back of a largely-refurbished hospital, tucked away from public gaze.
We are, according to the NHS, embarked on the "biggest healthcare building programme ever seen in the UK", and largely most health centres and hospital premises are being gradually brought into the 21st century. Major campaigns were fought to retain local facilities at the expense of centralised specialist units, but on the whole the progress achieved has outweighed the loss of local amenity. There have been exceptions, of course: the closure of the A&E unit at my nearest hospital has meant extra work for a far older – and frankly uninspiring – unit at the hospital in the next town, which is itself Victorian in origin.
Construction National blog: 06/06/2012
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Sustainable construction as a principle has come a long way since it was first mooted as a way of keeping stock of the environmental impact of a building. Then, the issues were the amount of recycled material used, the ability to recycle the materials once the building came to the end of its life and the amount of energy used both to construct and to run the building. Developments have come to include 'whole-life sustainability' and 'embedded carbon'.
Recently, however, the concept of sustainability has developed further to encompass social and economic sustainability. This latter has been the necessary result of needing to retain sustainable development as a priority in the face of new economic prosperity and the accompanying philosophical attacks on environmentalism from green sceptics – they know who they are. Social sustainability owes its existence to a more grown-up approach to the environment.
Construction National blog: 25/05/2012
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The main construction news of the week happened on 24 May, when Education Secretary Michael Gove announced that 261 schools would receive funding for rebuilding programmes under the Priority Schools Building Programme, out of 587 that applied. A total of £2bn has been allocated to the scheme over the next five years. It replaces the last government's Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, which aimed to rebuild or replace every secondary school in England. That would have cost £55bn.
Naturally, as with every competitive arrangement of this nature there were some who were delighted, but more who were outraged. The leader of Sandwell Council in the West Midlands was scathing about the fact that only three of its 17 applications had been successful, describing the scheme as "...a half-hearted botch job which will impact on young kids in a deprived area."
Construction National blog: 15/05/2012
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While researching an article for the paper version of a sister magazine of this title, Ecclesiastical and Heritage World, I came across the story of St Andrew's Church in Boxford, Berkshire. Its main claim to fame is that it contains what is thought to be the oldest working Saxon shuttered window in the country. Equally interesting to me is the fact that, when its tower fell down in 1657 it fell into the garden of "a prominent local Quaker named Oliver Sanson, who was in the middle of an on-going feud with the rector, Jacob Anderton, over the payment of tithes," according to David Nash Ford's Royal Berkshire History.
Mr Sanson refused to let the church have the pieces of masonry back, so new material had to be used, making the tower distinct from the rest of the church, which was medieval (except for the Saxon bit).
Construction National blog: 03/05/2012
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The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has been busy over the past few weeks. On 24 it published new quantity surveying and construction standards – the Black Book – together with New Rules of Measurement. The institution described it as: "One of the most significant launches by RICS in the past 30 years."
The new standards reflect the way the industry is changing and has changed over the past decade. A construction site is not – and doesn't look – the same place as it did a decade or so ago. Gone are the huddles of men pouring over flapping pieces of paper, their cigarettes glowing in the biting wind.
Now the men – and women – in charge on site all have separate access to documentation via tablet or smartphone (even a laptop is passé) and the entire site is a no-smoking area. BIM is the new way of integrated working.