All Features articles – Page 647
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Features
Cost model: Building services
Services installations are crucial to the smooth running of construction projects, as well as the finished product, but their complexities are too often ignored. Mott Green and Wall, the specialist building services team within Davis Langdon & Everest, examines the specification, procurement and costs of a City office’s building services
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Features
Clash points
Pay-when-paid has been outlawed at the end of the subcontract chain, but the industry is still passing risk to firms in the middle. Why not have stand-alone contracts with each party accepting its share of liability?
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Features
Clash points
True, subcontractors are still being forced to bear the same risk as main contractors, and stand-alone contracts are a fine idea. But it is clients that can really affect how liability is distributed.
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Features
Coming up roses?
In the first of a series on urban regeneration, we report on the New Deal for Communities and ask if the programme is living up to its promises.
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Features
Constructiongateway.Com.UK
This site by Business to Business Internet sets out to provide an information highway for construction, but it looks overcrowded and unfocused. It claims that it is a “one-stop” guide to the UK industry and it does provide links to other sites, but it is fiddly to use.The search facility ...
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Features
A cunning plan
Don't drift between jobs or settle for second best. Start running your career like a business and maximise profit.
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Features
Space-age design: a fly's eye view
The pair of giant spaceframe “biomes” at the £75m Eden Project in Cornwall are two of the most futuristic artificial structures in the UK. However, their design by Andrew Whalley, project director at Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners, was deliberately influenced by the natural geometry of leaves, fly eyes, dragonfly wings ...
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Features
Don't forget to write
Does the Construction Act apply if there is only an oral agreement? The act seems to say yes, but the judge in a recent case said no. Clearly it's an urgent case for treatment.
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Features
Guaranteeing the Eden experiment
The Eden Project is the brainchild of a drop-out musician-turned-historic garden restorer Tim Smit. This CV hardly qualifies anyone to design and manage a ground-breaking construction project worth £75m, yet Smit had the foresight to second Ronnie Murning, director of London-based Land Architects, as design and development director.In combination with ...
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Features
The threat of exposure
Adjudication has put insurers under pressure. So what do they do? Pass the burden of risk on to their policyholders, of course, inventing all manner of get-out clauses to make it hard for them to recover.
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Features
Good as their words
The second article in a series on collateral warranties looks at the principal warranty, supplementary warranties and a vital aspect of professional indemnity insurance.
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Features
Site lines
These sites are billed as the "construction marketplace" and the "one-stop guide to the industry". Do they live up to their slogans?
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Features
New school tie
Birds Portchmouth Russum's bridge linking two school buildings is a sculpture in steel and fabric with a Wild West theme.
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Features
The power of speech
No amount of flash graphics and high-tech software can compensate for a presentation that is unstructured and hard to follow. Remember your first duty: to keep your audience awake.
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Features
Newcastle's budget halls
A new international passenger terminal has been added to a terminal at Newcastle International Airport. The addition, along with the refurbishment of the existing terminal, cost £27m and increases the airport's capacity to 4 million passengers a year. Designed by Crispin Wride Architectural Design Studio and engineer Gibb, it is ...
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Features
The Inflatable Café
How do you put a concrete and plastic structure in an area of outstanding beauty without spoiling it? Well, you could bury it, make it invisible, or blow it up it to resemble a cloud floating on a hill. Or all three
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Features
Cases In Point
Court cases challenging adjudications often focus on whether or not the adjudicator had jurisdiction. Maybe it is time to allow the adjudicator to have some say in deciding his own jurisdiction.
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Features
Charted Territory
Ove Arup's Columbus is billed as a project document management system but, apart from the nifty viewing facilities, it hasn't really discovered anything new yet.
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Features
Materials whole-life costs
Building Performance Group's guide to building components' lifespans and life costs tackles domestic kitchen units.
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Features
The West Country's Stansted
Opened earlier this month, the new £27m terminal to Bristol International Airport replaces a building on the other side of the runway. The clear-cut rectangular building beneath an oversailing canopy roof and behind clear-glazed walls stands as the symbolic gateway to the West Country. Its 17 500 m2 area, which ...