Constructing Environments – week 7 What we did: For this week we were divided into groups to go to a site visit. My group’s site was the one at Elizabeth Street. Our task was to listen and observe what happens in a construction site and the different aspects that are involved in the construction.
The building was about 60% done and it had a budget of around 13 million dollars. Most of the primary structures like load bearing walls and flooring were already finished, and they were just about to finish putting up all the plaster walls and ceiling.
The first are that we visited was the ground floor service area. In this are we looked at the plumbing system and how the PVC pipes were for water drainage and also to provide water for the apartments and the copper pipes were to provide hot water.
After looking at the service area we then looked at one of the rooms of one of the apartments. The room was just about done, all the plaster walls and ceiling were already put up and also the plumbing and electrical part of the room was also already finished. For the walls that the colour of the painting was red it meant that it needs a fire check before finishing the final coat of paint. The apartments had acoustic insulation between them and they had a board like system for the flooring.
After the room on the first floor we took the elevator to what I am guessing was the last floor of the building. For this floor I could see that pretty much most of the structure of the building was steel frame. We also looked at the ducts that provided airconditioning and heat to all the apartments and that when using them the maximum length in which they could be flexible was 5 metres and that after that they had to use a non-flexible metal duct before using the flexible ones again.
Lastly we went up to the roof of the building. The roof seemed to have the same type of material as factories and storage structures. I also noticed that the roof was horizontal with a little bit of a slant to provide water runoff.
For this section of the building although it might not have been the most useful information for me it was the most interesting as it had been question which I have been trying to figure it out for while which was how did they go on about removing the crane that was in the middle of the building, and the answer was so simple it shocked me which was that all they did was use another mobile crane to remove the crane in the building. But then another question popped up in my head which was how did they do it in really tall buildings like the eureka tower? But I didn’t have time to ask the builder.