A Columbus, Ohio, developer is re-evaluating plans for a $65 million apartment complex on the North Shore, in part because of concerns about the dramatic increase in the number of units that have been built in or near Downtown over much of the past decade.

Continental Real Estate Companies is considering all options for the parcel adjacent to the Hyatt Place Hotel and PNC Park, said Barry Ford, president of development in Pittsburgh.

While Continental is not ruling out housing, other options it will explore include offices, a hotel, entertainment, and restaurants.

Were back to looking at everything for that lot, trying to figure out what works best, Mr. Ford said.

With construction of a seven-story office building on the Allegheny riverfront set to start in August, Continental now has more time to ponder other uses for the apartment parcel less than a block away.

Under an extension granted by the Pittsburgh Stadium Authority in November, Continental, which was hired by the Steelers and the Pirates in 2002 to develop the land between Heinz Field and PNC Park, has until May 31, 2018, to buy that tract, known as lot 4.

Mr. Ford said the surge in apartment building in recent years is one of 10 reasons Continental is re-evaluating its plans for the site, where it planned to build 250 residential units.

The market has changed the last couple of years. Were evaluating the right use, the right mix, he said.

In its 2017 State of Downtown Pittsburgh report issued last week, the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership noted that nearly 2,000 apartment units have been added to the Golden Triangle, the North and South shores, the Strip District, the lower Hill District, and the Bluff/Uptown since 2010, with another 4,222 in the pipeline.

There are signs that all that building might be having a detrimental effect. In its report, the partnership found that apartment occupancy in and near Downtown dropped to 90.3 percent in the fourth quarter last year after staying at a flat 92 percent through the first three quarters.

And after peaking at $1.86 in 2015, the rental rate per square foot fell to $1.83 last year.

Continental hopes to submit a revised plan for lot 4, where the apartments were to be built, to the stadium authority this fall, Mr. Ford said.

Mary Conturo, the authoritys executive director, could not be reached for comment.

Were taking our time. With [the office building] in process, its given us time to re-evaluate lot 4 and, based on current market conditions, come up with the right plan for the lot, he said.

Were looking at multiple options that will have a long-term positive impact that will play off of PNC Park.

The developer has until Sept. 1 to take title to the land for the office building, which will be the headquarters for SAP, a German software firm. It hopes to start construction of that building in mid to late August, with completion set for late 2018 or early 2019.

Once the office building is finished, lot 4 will be the last major parcel on the North Shore Continental will be responsible for developing.

In the past 15 years, the firm has produced three office complexes, including one housing the Post-Gazette, a concert venue, and a variety of restaurants and nightspots between the ballpark and the stadium.

Mark Belko: mbelko@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1262.

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Developer reconsiders its plan for North Shore apartment complex - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The business case for sustainable design keeps getting stronger. Consider these takeaways from theWorld Green Building Trends 2016 Smart Market Report:

That second bulletthe operational savings over the lifespan of a buildinggets most of the attention when it comes to sustainable design. Yet what impact does sustainable design have on owners with a finite construction budget or developers who wont own the building after construction? Historically, this group has been told that a high-performing building will only cost themmoremoney to constructdollars that may not be available in project financing. But it is no longer true that sustainable buildings have to be more expensive.

We have delivered many deep green projects that came in below cost or at similar price points to what those same buildings would have cost without sustainable design elements. We did this by focusing on three tactics for improving sustainability: leveraging integrated design, employing energy modeling and programming for efficiencies.

Integrated design helped the LEED-Platinum DC Consolidated Forensic Lab come in 17 percent under budget.

With integrated design, all stakeholdersarchitect, mechanical engineer, contractor, preconstruction services consultant, cost estimator, building owner and operator, and other consultantscollaborate early and often to understand how building systems link to one another and then use that knowledge to find efficiencies and tradeoffs. While this approach requires more planning on the front end, it often leads to free or passive solutions that reduce system loads and building costs. Integrated design might reveal, for example, how a slight modification to a buildings orientation can reduce solar heat gain and increase natural daylighting, resulting in less expensive HVAC and lighting components.

Our work on theDC Consolidated Forensic Labprovides a real-world example of how integrated design can lead to first-cost savings. The LEED Platinum building in Washington, D.C., came in 17 percent under budget with much of the savings due to its sustainability. For instance, collaboration with the projects mechanical engineer, Vanderweil, resulted in outfitting the building with an active chilled beam system, heat shift chiller, enthalpy wheels and glycol energy recovery loops that reduced the mechanical load of the building and the number of chillers that would have been required with a traditional HVAC system. Because chilled beams are a hydronic system that do not require nearly as much plenum space as traditional air ducts, we were also able to reduce the floor-to-floor height of the building, which led to construction and material savings.

As part of the integrated design process, we knew that the building operator desired sustainable features to reduce long-term energy use and costs. This information allowed us to incorporate a dynamic glass louverwall along the buildings south facade. The glass louvers (featuring a 50 percent ceramic frit pattern) serve as a solar shield, automatically adjusting, opening and closing depending on sun angle, wind and barometric pressure. Unlike a true double-skin facade, the louversset three feet off the curtainwallallow the airspace between the exterior wall and sunscreen to vent without impacting air pressurization requirements in the interior lab space while at the same time mitigating solar heat gain and glare along the south of the building.

Energy modeling revealed how a passive cooling system could cut expenses at NOAAs Pacific headquarters.

Energy modelingsoftware simulation that provides detailed analysis of a buildings energy usehelps us understand long-term and short-term consumption costs. This crucial component of integrated design often leads to additional savings and helps justify the costs of sustainability features that might not be immediately apparent.

Energy and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Daniel K. Inouye Regional Centerin Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which was honored with anAIA COTE 2017 Top Ten Green Project award, showed how a passive cooling system would provide substantial operational and first-cost savings compared to other HVAC options. The novel cooling system we used on the building pumps cold seawater from a 1,300-foot-deep well to the buildings chillers where heat is rejected into the seawater, eliminating the need for traditional cooling towers. The seawater then flows into a series of chilled coils. The system takes advantage of the trade winds to drop chilled air passing over the coils into the building without using mechanical fans.

Deep seawater is pumped to the rooftop of NOAAs Inouye Center. Trade winds then send water-cooled air into the building.

Savings from the cooling system allowed the design team to outfit the LEED-Gold project with additional sustainable design features, such as increased daylighting. Designers used small-scale mockups to test the size and spacing of daylight openings to provide even daylight levels across office work areas. As construction proceeded, full-scale mockups fine-tuned the teams initial daylight studies, ensuring that interior workplaces took advantage of the maximum amount of natural light while also blocking direct sun exposure. Once in operation, the NOAA Inouye Regional Center achieved 33 percent annual energy savings in addition to its first-cost neutral sustainable design.

Energy modeling isnt just for building owners who care about sustainability or LEED certification. Energy modeling can often find savings that far exceed the costs of setting up and running the energy simulation software.

In Washington, D.C., we designed a multi-building commercial office project (Constitution Square Buildings 1, 2, 3) that achieved LEED Platinum status without additional building costs. For the final phase of that project, Constitution Square Building 4, the developer secured a full-building tenant and hoped to leverage building performance to position the structure for higher resale value without increasing first costs. Energy modeling on that project, however, revealed that by reducing the buildings window-to-wall ratio from 56 percent to 51 percent and improving the window glazing, the design team could reduce the number of chillers that service the building. In this case, the energy model ROI was dramatican investment of $24,000 to perform iterative modeling at all design and Value Engineering stages netted approximately $500,000 in first-cost reduction, bringing the mechanical system back into budget while maintaining 35 percent energy savings. The developer has since sold the building (still under construction) at a price that reflects its high-performance design.

A review of how employees would use NASA Building 20 allowed HOK designers to reduce its size by 11 percent.

Taking a detailed look at how many people will occupy a building and how they will use the space can help teams design for efficiencies.

HOKs work onNASA Johnson Space Center Building 20in Houston shows how using this planning strategy can both reduce costs and improve a buildings sustainability. In the RFP for the project, NASA specified it wanted a LEED-Silver building of approximately 93,000 square feet. In reviewing how the buildings 520 employees would use the space, our team was able to reduce the overall building size by 11 percent while still meeting the requirements of the agencys occupants.

In reducing the square footage of NASA Building 20, the design team was able to add other sustainability features, such as a sloped ceiling that allows daylight to penetrate deeper into the interior space.

Savings from the compact design opened the budget for additional sustainability featuresincluding exterior sunshading devices, advanced lighting controls, a building section optimized for daylighting and an underfloor air distribution (UFAD) systemthat ultimately earned the project 57 percent energy savings and LEED-Platinum status without going over budget.

The previous examples demonstrate how a holistic design approach can enable clients to build higher-performing projects for a lower cost than initially expected. But even if sustainable design does not lead to first-cost savings or neutral building costs compared to more conventional designs, there still are reasons to consider sustainable strategies.

Our internal research, for example, has found that if energy modeling doesnt pay for itself during design and construction, it almost always will within the first few months of a buildings operation. And, as theDepartment of Energy has reported, thats true regardless of building typebe it an office building, hotel, hospital or research lab.

The bottom line is sustainable design is more achievable than ever and no longer has to be more expensive to deliver. The key is getting all parties to invest the time and resources early onand throughout the processto fully explore the options and understand how they can improve a project.

Anica Landreneau, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP, works out of HOKs Washington, D.C., office and is the firms director of sustainable design. In addition, she oversees HOKs efforts to achieve acarbon-neutral design portfolio by 2030.

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Green buildings don't have to cost more - Building Design + Construction (press release) (registration) (blog)

May 02, 2017 00:00 ET | Source: Nordecon

multilang-release

A consortium of Nordecon Betoon O (brand name NOBE), a Nordecon Group company, and Mapri Ehitus O entered into a contract with Ekerepol O for the design and construction of a 14 storey office and apartment building in WoHo quarter located Mustame tee 3, Tallinn. This building with 12,618 m gross space will have one underground floor and 14 floors above ground. WOHO 2 will be a multifunctional building with office and commercial spaces on floors 1 to 7, offices and guest apartments on floors 8 to 9 and apartments on floors 10 to 14.

The value of the contract is close to 11.7 million euros plus value added tax. The construction works will be completed in autumn 2018.

Nordecon (www.nordecon.com) is a group of construction companies whose core business is construction project management and general contracting in the buildings and infrastructures segment. Geographically the Group operates in Estonia, Ukraine, Finland and Sweden. The parent of the Group is Nordecon AS, a company registered and located in Tallinn, Estonia. In addition to the parent company, there are more than 10 subsidiaries in the Group. The consolidated revenue of the Group in 2016 was 183 million euros. Currently Nordecon Group employs close to 700 people. Since 18 May 2006 the company's shares have been quoted in the main list of the NASDAQ Tallinn Stock Exchange.

Andri Hbemgi Nordecon AS Head of Investor Relations Tel: +372 6272 022 E-mail: andri.hobemagi@nordecon.com http://www.nordecon.com

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Construction contract (WOHO 2 office and apartment building) - GlobeNewswire (press release)

Morgan-Keller Construction received two Associated Builders & Contractors, Baltimore Chapter, Excellence in Construction merit awards on April 12 at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore.

Morgan-Keller Construction won awards for its work on the Brandywine Crossing Medical Office Building in Brandywine and Nymeo Federal Credit Union project in Gaithersburg.

The Nymeo Federal Credit Union project involved a 1,747-square-foot renovation to an existing branch bank to create a fully functioning financial services credit union.

The Brandywine Crossing Medical Office Building project involved the construction of a 65,330-square-foot, three-story medical office building using tilt-up structural concrete wall panels and interior steel column and beam framing.

Morgan-Keller Construction is a general contracting and construction management firm with offices in Frederick and Columbia. For over 60 years, Morgan-Keller Construction has completed custom home building and commercial building projects.

Follow Allen Etzler on Twitter: @AllenWEtzler

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Morgan-Keller Construction receives two honors - Frederick News Post (subscription)

US construction spending slipped in March Miami Herald U.S. builders trimmed construction spending slightly in March, one month after building activity hit an all-time high. Construction spending slipped 0.2 percent in March to a seasonally adjusted $1.218 trillion, the Commerce Department reported Monday. and more »

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US construction spending slipped in March - Miami Herald

HICKORY A vacant building along First Avenue SE will soon find a new purpose as office space for two local companies.

By June, Alex Harrill, owner of the customized home and renovation company Harrill Construction, said the building will have a new paint job and a new storefront.

The front space of the building will be used for office space for both Harrill Construction and the automotive customization business Xtreme Machines.

Its not the first time Harrill and his company embarked on a renovation project in that part of town.

The Block, a mixed-use development that housed both Harrill Construction's offices and the offices ofXtreme Machines across the street from the building being renovated, also was renovated in 2015.

The space at The Block is currently being rented out, while Harrill Construction offices are temporarily located off Highland Avenue until renovations are complete, Harrill said.

Giving new life to old and dilapidated buildings is a passion of Harrills.

"I just really love old buildings," Harrill said. There are buildings that are past the point of being repaired, but there is so much history in these thingsso much thats happened, that I think its important that we preserve what we can preserve.

In years past, the building has been used as a Chrysler dealership and the Ferguson Plumbing company.

Though Harrill said he had not set foot in the building until last year, he does remember it as the Ferguson Plumbing building.

Harrill said that while the building was in "poor condition," he saw a great deal of potential in it.

You know, a lot of people saw something that just needed to be torn down, but I saw opportunity, Harrill said.Its just really cool; the architecture of it and the barrel top roof is really neat.

The front part of the building had leaked and was moldy, Harrill said.

Renovators also had to contend with deteriorated wood in the building, but overall, the project has not been as difficult as the renovation at The Block, Harrill said.

The total cost of the project is roughly $500,000, a cost that will in part be covered by a $20,000 revitalization grant through the City of Hickory.

Community Development Manager David Leonetti said in a phone interview the project would be good for that area of town.

Were very excited to see the building moving toward re-development, Leonetti said.

Once this project is completed, Harrill hopes to continue renovating other buildings around the city.

I think its important that these buildings be refurbished and used, Harrill said. I dont like to see them torn down.

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Harrill Construction tackles renovation project in Hickory - Hickory Daily Record

The future of construction just got a little bit more real. Researchers at MIT have created a mobile robot that can 3-D-print an entire building in a matter of hours a technology that could be used in disaster zones, on inhospitable planets or even in our proverbial backyards.

Though the platform described in the journal Science Robotics is still in early stages, it could offer a revolutionary tool for the construction industry and inspire more architects to rethink the relationship of buildings to people and the environment.

Current construction practices typically involve bricklaying, wood framing and concrete casting technologies that have been around for decades in some cases, and centuries in others. Homes and office buildings are often built in the same boxy, cookie-cutter-like templates, even though the environment from one area to another may change dramatically.

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector tends to be risk-averse: Most project fabrication data nowadays have been digitally produced, but the manufacturing and construction processes are mostly done with manual methods and conventional materials adopted a century ago, Imperial College London researcher Guang-Zhong Yang, the journals editor, wrote in an editorial on the paper.

In recent years, scientists and engineers have begun to explore the idea that buildings could instead be built through additive manufacturing that is, 3-D printing. A home could be customized to its local environment, it could use buildings resources more efficiently, and it could deploy materials in more sophisticated ways.

Right now, the way we manufacture things is we go to the mine, we dig out minerals and materials, we ship them to a factory, the factory makes a bunch of mass-made parts, usually out of a single material, and then theyre assembled screwed together, glued together and shipped back to consumers, said lead author Steven Keating, a mechanical engineer who did the research as a graduate student under Neri Oxmans group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But the groups many projects, he added, revolved around this question: How do we actually fabricate in a way that is more consistent with how biology works?

Keating pointed to the tree as one example of a natural builder. Trees can self-repair, operate with self-sufficiency, build onsite with locally sourced materials, and adapt to their environment.

These are the kinds of principals that weve looked at for a lot of the projects in the group, he said.

While several groups around the world have been working on large-scale 3-D printing techniques, there have been challenges in this process, Keating said.

A lot of other research projects that are looking at digital construction often dont create something of an architectural scale and if they do, theyre not using a process that could be easily integrated into a construction site, Keating said. Theyre not using materials or a process that can be easily code-certified. And what we wanted to make sure could happen is we could actually break into the construction industry, because its a very slow and conservative industry.

Keating and his colleagues robot, called the Digital Construction Platform, looks to address those issues. It features hydraulic and electric robotic arms and can be loaded with all kinds of sensors to measure its environment, including lasers and a radiation-detecting Geiger counter.

In less than 13.5 hours, the robot was able to zip round and round, printing a 14.6-meter-wide, 3.7-meter-tall open dome structure out of a foam used as insulated formwork.

Strange as it looks, this formwork could be filled with concrete. Since this is essentially what already happens in traditional construction, this 3-D printing process could be integrated into current construction techniques. (In both the traditional and 3-D-printed scenarios, the formwork ends up as the buildings insulation.)

The DCP builds an architectural-scale structure out of conventional insulation foam. (Rahkendra Ice / Keating et al., Sci. Robot. 2, eaam8986)

This process has a number of advantages, many of which allow the robot to design and build more in the way that living systems in nature do, Keating said. Three-dimensional printing uses fewer materials more efficiently. It can also create useful gradients, such as reducing wall thickness from the bottom of a wall toward the top. (Nature does this too: Think of a trees trunk at the base versus near the top, or the way a squid beak goes from hard at the tip to soft at the base.)

This process can create and work with curves, which are usually more costly for traditional building methods. The formwork also cures so quickly (within about 30 seconds) that the robot can build horizontally without needing structural support the way traditional construction methods do.

Rather than trying to design the perfect structure beforehand, a 3-D-printing robot could produce a building thats completely in tune with its environmental factors soil moisture, temperature, wind direction and radiation levels, among others. This is how scientists think animals such as termites build their homes by modifying the structure in response to the environment.

Since its solar-powered, this robot can be self-sufficient. And like living things, it could potentially create building materials out of stuff in the local ecosystem: The authors showed that the robot was able to take scoops of dirt and turn the compressed earth into building material. The researchers were even able to print with ice.

I know it sounds silly why would you want to print with ice? but if you actually look, NASAs very seriously thinking about using ice as a fabrication material for places in space such as Mars, because ice actually absorbs a lot of cosmic radiation, Keating said.

Printing with ice from the environment would be much more sensible than lugging all your building materials all the way to the Red Planet, he noted.

amina.khan@latimes.com

Follow @aminawrite on Twitter for more science news and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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Check out this building that was 3-D-printed by a robot - Los Angeles Times

Those shiny new office buildings downtown and trendy office parks under construction on Jefferson Highway may be good for the local construction industry. But theyve added a lot of space to the office market, which is a key factor behind the decrease in occupancy last year.

Overall occupancy decreased from 85% to less than 82.5% in 2016, while rental rates remained flat, according to Ty Gose with NAI/Latter & Blum in a presentation on the office sector at the annual TRENDS seminar.

The other factor affecting the slight downturn was the continued low price of oil, which fell to below $40 per barrel last year.

But oil is now stabilizing at $50 and BRAC has estimated we will gain 2% in employment this year, Gose says. So hopefully occupancy will go back up.

Among the other takeaways from Goses presentation:

In the local residential market, the flood has had a significant impact and in many respects it has been positive, according to Kyle Petersen of Keller Williams Realty First Choice, who made the residential presentation at the TRENDS seminar.

Home sale volume was up more than 10% in 2016 over the previous year, and demand outpaced supply, causing homes to fly off the market: 53% of homes sold within the first 30 days.

Two weeks ago, I listed a house at 6 p.m. Petersen says. I had two offers by 8 p.m. and had to cancel seven showings the next day. Homes are selling within hours of being on the market and at full asking price.

That said, average home sale prices in the Capital Region decreased 3% in 2016, after increasing a total of nearly 10% in 2014 and 2015.

Stephanie Riegel

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New available space, oil downturn cause Baton Rouge office occupancy rate to fall - Greater Baton Rouge Business Report

Before and after: The $44M transformation of a downtown Raleigh building Triangle Business Journal Built in 1970, the 192,370-square-foot state office building had been largely unchanged since its construction. It still had a large amount of asbestos a material commonly used in buildings before asbestos was banned for its risk of causing serious ...

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Before and after: The $44M transformation of a downtown Raleigh building - Triangle Business Journal

The former Goodman Furniture store, a problem property Bethlehem fought in court to get redeveloped, could become a $2.5 million project of storefronts topped by 14 apartments.

The proposal, which Bethlehem will present to a judge next month, calls for about three first-floor tenants, a bus depot and an optional building addition to the property at 30 E. Third St. The 700- to 800-square-foot apartments would be on the second and third floors.

The plans were proposed by Collaboration 3, a trio of Lehigh Valley partners: D'Huy Engineering, Alloy 5 Architects and Skepton Construction.

Bethlehem picked the project out of four submitted after the city put out a call for proposals on what to do with the vacant property.

Alicia Miller Karner, director of the city's economic and community development department, said she liked the proposal because it calls for several commercial tenants rather than one large tenant.

She also likes the idea that some of the tenants will face the Greenway trail and Adams and Mechanic Streets. She said that would promote use of the Greenway, which meanders between Third and Fourth streets along the path of a former railroad bed.

She said the plans show the option of a drive-thru for a commercial tenant, but drive-thrus are not allowed in that zoning district. She said the city would not support that portion of the project.

Collaboration 3 indicated the project could be completed within 16 months. The city needs to get approval from a judge because of a legal maneuver the city used to force the redevelopment of the building.

The city had battled with owner Alvin Kanofsky, a 78-year-old physicist, for years to fix up the vacant building. Over the last couple of years, he was cited for code violations some of which are still under appeal.

The city stepped into make emergency repairs in the building and successfully argued to be appointed the building's conservator. Under the conservatorship, the city can make decisions that a property owner would but does not hold the title to the land. The city is looking to force a sale to Collaboration 3.

The plan must be approved by a judge. The city is scheduled to present the plan May 8.

Kanofsky, who has represented himself in court, could not be reached for a comment. In the past, he has declined to discuss the property because of pending appeals.

The building was a priority for the city to redevelop because it is in a high-profile section of the South Side Business District.

The building is in a block the city has invested tens of thousands of dollars in to build up in the wake of Bethlehem Steel's demise and is around the corner from a parking garage and an office building under construction. The office building, developed by Dennis Benner, is to be anchored by St. Luke's University Health Network and Lehigh University.

nicole.mertz@mcall.com

Twitter @McallBethlehem

610-778-2253

Redevelopment plans for the former Goodman furniture store:

3 commercial tenants

14 apartments

1 bus depot

Source: Collaboration 3 proposal

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What's in store for old Goodman building in Bethlehem? - Allentown Morning Call