A Building Is A By-Product
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“The easiest and quickest path into the esteem of traditional military authorities is by the appeal to the eye, rather than to the mind. The `polish and pipeclay’ school is not yet extinct, and it is easier for the mediocre intelligence to become an authority on buttons, than on tactics”. |
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| Captain Sir Basil Liddel Hart Thoughts on War 1944 | |
After a number of visits to our site this week I’m starting to feel that this quote applies equally to construction, it is far easier to attempt to win a Considerate Constructors award to make your bosses happy than it is to understand what exactly is going on on your site. I’ve said it to a couple of you over the phone, but for the wider audience; I am beginning to truly understand why construction isn’t really profitable.
We poured our first slab and put up the final tower crane this week, which has really changed the face of the site, the first of the core walls has been poured also. The remainder has been much the same as the previous few weeks, pile cap after pile cap, I estimate that we have poured about 25 pile caps so far, approximately 30% of the total.
The main core pile cap on the highest (17 storey) block was due to be poured on Friday however this was postponed due to in complete detailing by the structure designers. What I haven’t managed to find out yet is why we got to 18 hours from pouring before the issue became obvious to the site team of the main contractor. In short the groundwork and RC sub-contractor had done the take off for the core, found that some walls hadn’t been detailed and raised an RFI, this was transmitted via a complicated info management system that doesn’t seem to keep the site staff informed. An incomplete answer was received from the consultants, at this point I believe a notebook, a to-do list and a willingness to be engaged in actual engineering would have been useful. In short the sub-contractor was unwilling (and rightly so) to proceed with incomplete details and when we (I) managed to get the structural engineer who happened to be visiting that day to commit his answer to paper with a signature it was too late and the steel required wasn’t on site. My knee jerk reaction to this is that communication is the key problem I’m witnessing currently, there are plenty of meetings that go on but getting the information out of those meetings if you weren’t there originally is very difficult.
Cell Core laid in advance of steel fixing on the B Block main core
AER 1 is coming along and I think I have an option for TMR 1 but thoughts on a thesis are non-existent.
Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog 
🙂
Amazing that you got the guy to agree anything on site as by doing so he was breaking the golden rule – never agree to anything on site! May be noteworthy to suggest before actioning anything agreed on site, you await confirmation in writing from the office. That way you avoid potentially nugatory work when he changes his mind on return to the office (having realised there were other influencing factors that he’d forgotten about in the face of contractor pressure).
Rich
Well how unusual….and we were worried that all the piling would have been completed and that the buildings would have been out of the ground.
All the very best.
Neil