NIBS’ new CEO to steer future of U.S. built environment

Recently appointed new president and CEO AC Powell, JD, CPS, will guide the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) by creating building industry, and public and private sector connections to lead the nation’s built environment future.

Seattle zoo’s enclosure lights create ideal Komodo habitat

Woodland Park Zoo Seattle, Washington, has found a solution to heat and humidity loss in the Komodo Dragons enclosure with the use of special energy-efficient daylights, without having to build a new enclosure.

Boston firm’s green finishes, materials, and fixtures achieve sustainability goals

Architecture firm Dyer Brown has renewed Sappi North America’s Boston, Massachusetts, headquarters by using environmentally friendly finishes, materials, and fixtures to meet sustainability and employee health goals.

Alibaba HQ design acknowledges ‘the only constant is change’

The design for Alibaba’s Shanghai headquarters by the U.S. firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) reveals a distinctive, modular layout reliant on expansive column-free, long-span spaces and a variety of enclosed areas to accommodate a diversity of workstation layouts to suit expanding, contracting and overlapping teams.

Read about archaic concrete flooring systems in Construction Specifier’s e-book

The Construction Specifier’s e-book on maintaining resilient flooring systems contains an article on maintaining and restoring archaic concrete flooring systems.

Calculating and templating a masonry opening

At some point, masonry contractors may need to incorporate a jack arch into their work. To calculate the cuts for a custom jack arch, a mason will need to create a cutting template. Three integral pieces of information are necessary to begin the process. First, one must know the width of the rough opening. Second, one must know how many courses vertically the arch will extend, and hence, the width of the jack arch at the extrados (top of the arch) as per the skewback. The jack arch will have full-width units at the extrados and a mason will cut these to a thinner width at the intrados (bottom of the arch or lintel location).

Construction-related failures in plumbing pipe

Metal corrosion is an ever-present problem in the plumbing industry. Common piping materials such as copper, steel, and cast-iron are readily oxidized and thus undergo aqueous corrosion at a rate dependent on the corrosivity of the service environment.