Monday, December 5, 2016

How Teaching Ex-Cons How To Lay Brick Can Help Rebuild Their Lives

Seven or eight years ago, Stephen Shelton started worrying about the future.


It wasn’t just his own Pittsburgh-based construction company, but his entire industry.

Shelton had spent decades working in various trades — often as an electrician and brickmason — but as he looked around at fellow craftsmen, he realized many were getting old. Where was the next generation?


This story is part of Essential Pittsburgh, an ongoing series exploring how Pittsburgh lives, and how it's evolving.
It annoyed Shelton that high schools had ditched their trade programs. He hadn’t loved traditional schoolwork and had always been drawn to the wood and metal shops.

And Pittsburgh, where he lived, was a city built by tradesmen.

“You look at some of these cathedrals and these stone buildings and think, ‘Everything in this city’s made of masonry,’” said Shelton, sitting in his third floor office in the old Westinghouse building in Homewood.

“Back in the day when all of these buildings were brand new, these were the dudes that came over, they came over from Italy, from Poland, from Ireland. Those guys carried themselves with dignity. They were proud of being a tradesman.”


Johnathon Price, 28, of McKees Rocks crouches beside a practice wall inside the third floor of the old Westinghouse building in Homewood on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016. Price is one of a few dozen adult students learning masonry at the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh.
CREDIT MEGAN HARRIS / 90.5 WESA
Today, kids like him don’t have a chance to learn the same trades in school.

“God created everybody to do something, and that means he created people to be carpenters, tile setters, plumbers, you name it,” he said. “But if you’ve never given the opportunity to do what it is God created you to do, you’re going to do something, even if it’s stupid.”

And doing something stupid can lead to prison time. Shelton made a simple plan: Get young men and women off the streets, teach them how to lay brick and get them jobs.


Steve Shelton, Trade Institute of Pittsburgh Executive Director
Hosanna House community center in Wilkinsburg offered Shelton a 1,000-square-foot former boiler room, so he bought some bricks and mortar and found a group of students. In 2009, the first iteration of the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh opened its doors.

Brick by brick


The Trade Institute has been through a few evolutions since it opened, but the same basic model still holds today: Over 10 weeks, the school teaches the basics of masonry — mixing mortar, simple bricklaying, and later, more complex patterns and cement blocking. Students advance at their own pace, and since the program offers rolling admissions, they are all working at different levels.

In August, Brandon Chandler, a 32-year-old from Coraopolis, was in his eighth week of the program. Only a few months earlier, he’d been released from federal prison after finishing up a seven-and-a-half year term on drug charges. Chandler was determined to chart a new course and found his way to the Trade Institute, which moved to Home wood in 2015.

He’d passed the first few skills tests and advanced to more complicated brickwork.

“What I’m building right now is a wall with an arc in it, with two pillars on the side,” he said.


Brandon Chandler, 32, commutes from Robinson shortly after 5 a.m. every day to make it to the gym Downtown, then over to Home wood where he practices masonry at the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh. One of his final projects was a decorative arch requiring "a little skill and a lot of patience," he said.
CREDIT MEGAN HARRIS / 90.5 WESA
Nearby, a photo lay pinned of a former student standing next to a finished arch. He looked at his own unfinished rendering.

  “I put some soldiers in there — when the bricks go straight up and down, it’s called a soldier — and when there are ... three bricks stacked on top of each other next to (the soldiers), we call that a basket weave.”

Chandler eased his trowel across an ash-stained brick, pressing the gloppy, gray mud — a cheap, mortar-like blend of lime and sand — into its jagged edges.

“This is buttering the brick,” he said. “You want to spread it evenly so when you put it up it will make a nice bond.”


He set the brick on the wall and eyed it.



Courtney McFeaters, 38, edges a brick along a guideline on a practice wall Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016, inside the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh, which offers trade skills training to men and women looking for new opportunities after incarceration.
CREDIT MEGAN HARRIS / 90.5 WESA
  “Right now, this brick isn’t all the way even,” he said. “I see it sunk a little bit, so I’m going to pick it back up. I didn’t even have enough mud in there to keep it even with the brick.”

Twenty feet away, Courtney McFeaters slowly lined another course of brick on a practice wall. The 38-year-old, who had recently served a sentence for identify theft and credit-card fraud, was in her second week of the program, but said she was picking it up quickly.

“The hands-on part of it is what I like,” she said. “I like to build something and look at it and be like, ‘Hey, I did that. That’s my work.’ That’s what excites me about it, and the job opportunities that come out of it. They’re always going to need masons; they’re always going to need bricklayers. It’s like an industry that will never die.”

Inside T3, the first mass timber building in the US

Dive Brief:


  • With a planned opening for later this month, the seven-story, 220,000-square-foot T3 (Timber, Technology, Transit) Office Building in Minneapolis will be the largest contemporary wood building in the U.S., according to Architect Magazine. Most of the wood is from Pacific Northwest trees killed by the mountain pine beetle. Minnesota's building code classifies the wood as Type IV Heavy Timber.
  • The building features a grid-based framing system using a combination of spruce-pine-fir nail-laminated timber (NLT) panels, spruce glulam and concrete. Crews framed 180,000 square feet in a little more than nine weeks, translating to 30,000-square-foot of floor space installed each week. The lightness of the almost all-wood building has reduced the seismic load significantly.
  • Its architect, Michael Green Architecture, left much of the interior wood exposed, which saved money on finishes, while using indirect lighting for illumination after dark to highlight the use of wood as a structural material. The building will also feature a ground-floor space for public use.

Dive Insight:

Wood buildings are popping up all over the place, and plans for future structures run the gamut from doable to conceptual. Currently, the tallest wood building in the world is the $39-million, 18-story Brock Commons residence hall at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Cananda, which is scheduled to open in September 2017. The tower will be able to accommodate 400 students.
Meanwhile, Perkins+Will has proposed an 80-story all-wood tower along the Chicago River. River Beech Tower would feature a center atrium and an aluminum veneer over a lattice of wood beams. If built, it would be the tallest wood building in the world.
In the relatively new space of all-wood buildings, there are many candidates for the title of tallest wood tower waiting in the wings, but building codes and fire safety are an ongoing concern. While not part of the cross-laminated timber (CLT) or NLT discussion, but still dealing with wood, Sandy Springs, GA, recently changed its building codes to eliminate wood as an option for multifamily structures more than three stories high and larger than 100,000 square feet.
While city officials said the motive was safety, Justin Mihalik, president of the American Institute of Architects New Jersey chapter, told Construction Divelast month that the necessary fire ratings can be attained using most any material. "If it's tested and meets requirements," he said, "wood is safe."

Friday, December 2, 2016

Behold the Brick Khalifa: The World’s Tallest LEGO Building

This week, we were reminded yet again of the possibilities offered by the famous plastic bricks: A LEGO version of the world’s tallest building has been unveiled. The LEGO Burj Khalifa was built by a team of experts at LEGOLAND Dubai, which is slated to open this Halloween. The model celebrates the crown jewel of Dubai’s skyline and is sure to provide Dubai natives with the uncanny thrill of recognition only architectural models can offer.


At 56 feet (17 meters), the Brick Khalifa is claimed to be the tallest building in the world made out of LEGO. The mammoth model contains 439,000 LEGO pieces and weighs in at 1 ton. Construction took over 5,000 hours.

Like the real Burj Khalifa, the LEGO version features LED lights and is surrounded by water features, which can be used to put on elaborate light and fountain shows.
Readers unable to make it to LEGOLAND Dubai who nevertheless think the Burj Khalifa looks pretty in plastic should check out the LEGO Architecture Burj Khalifa set, which can be built at home. This 15-inch model may lack the grandeur of the Dubai version, but it is elegant in its own right and makes a great gift
 

Singapore puts drone plans in motion-

Singapore is looking to expand its use of drones to support public services, for instance, to help monitor dengue-ht areas and construction sites.

The Ministry of Transport announced on Tuesday that it had awarded a main contract for the deployment of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, to three key vendors, from which government agencies would then approach to deploy the technology. This "master contract" arrangement would allow for economies of scale, said the ministry, adding that more public agencies were expected to conduct pilots using drones to support their daily operations.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore would administer the two-year master contract, which would end October 31, 2018.
Aetos Security Management and Avetics Global had been selected to offer both tethered and non-tethered drone services, while CWT Aerospace Services would deploy non-tethered drone services, said the transport ministry, which had called for the tender in April.
It described a non-tethered UAS as a drone that could take flight without any attached cables, while a tethered system would require the use of cables attached to the device. Tethered systems would have access to power supply and be able to send and receive data.
The Transport Ministry in February had unveiled plans for more than 25 use cases in which the public sector could tap drones. Singapore's Maritime and Port Authority, for instance, could deploy UAS from its patrol boats to respond to marine incidents including oil spill surveillance and support for search and rescue operations. Codenamed Water Spider, the drone in such use cases would improve operational efficiency during such emergency situations and complement traditional use of helicopter flights and satellite images.
The National Environment Agency also would use drones to support dengue control initiatives, such as monitoring roof gutters to ensure these were not clogged. In addition, a UAS could be used to deposit bacillus thuringiensis israelensis larvicide into roof gutters and exterminate mosquito larvae.
According to the Transport Ministry, the Land Transport Authority would expand ongoing trials at 10 work sites involved in the construction of Singapore's subway Thomson-East Coast Line, including Upper Thomson, Orchard, Marina Bay, and Havelock. The pilots were expected to run for up to a year.
Here, the drones could be deployed to study construction work, such as excavation and onsite traffic flow.