Jim Kollaer's blog

The Construction Citizen team wishes everyone a very Safe and Merry Christmas! [node:read-more:link]

Bid rigging is a treacherous game played by owners, contractors and subs in every market in the US. It becomes a really big deal when it is uncovered in a highly competitive (cutthroat) market like New York City, and it can take a variety of forms as illustrated in indictments in a recent case in the city. [node:read-more:link]

More women are forging construction careers: 939,000 of them to be precise. Currently this accounts for 9.1% of the construction industry, by 2020 that number is expected to rise to 25%. [node:read-more:link]

“Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should." Those were the words of one of the senior members of my design jury in architecture school after I had presented what I thought was a leading-edge free form building that solved, or so I thought, the problem we had been assigned in class. [node:read-more:link]

The discovery of the original cracks in two girders spanning Freemont Street caused the facility to be shut down until the safety of the enormous facility could be guaranteed. The team immediately moved to shore up the failing girders on the Freemont span and did the same on the parallel First Street span that has a similar design, even though no problems have been noted there. [node:read-more:link]

This post by Lior Zitzman originally appeared on the Big Rentz blog. We thought that it presents some good background for the ways that drones are being used in the industry and that you might be able to use it in your decision making for ways to integrate drones into your business. [node:read-more:link]

“One of the most impactful things we’ve learned is the need to collaborate with other areas of our industry in workforce development. We didn’t bring this situation about by ourselves, and we won’t resolve it by ourselves. Certainly, we are each responsible for our own firm’s performance and practices, but we are measured collectively as an industry by those deciding whether or not to enter our workforce.” [node:read-more:link]

Marek stated that making the e-verify system mandatory would likely drive a large number of existing construction workers out of the industry because many of them are not working legally or are working with falsified documents. [node:read-more:link]

The recently completed Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco now named the Salesforce Transit Center, has been closed after the discovery of two separate cracks in structural beams in the $2.3 billion, 1500-foot-long facility designed to replace the old Transbay Transit Center that was closed in 2010. [node:read-more:link]

At the recent Apex Awards black tie dinner hosted by the AGC Houston Chapter, one of my architecture school classmates, Pete Dawson, AIA, was awarded the 2018 Master Builder Award for his work in the creation of a number of new and renovated facilities for Texas Children’s Hospital and Methodist Hospital. [node:read-more:link]