Hands-On Construction 101: Introduction

As most in this business already know -- either as students or teachers -- the challenge to construction (and design) education at the college or university level is finding the time in a curriculum to cover the basics of hands-on construction.

There are electives and workshops of course, usually taught by energetic but technically inexperienced professors, where students gain some understanding of construction technology, but with so much to learn, the rigors of hands-on assembly are lost to more mundane and largely predictable academic subjects.


How a House is Put Together
As a result, it remains for most constructors (and a few designers) to find out for themselves how buildings actually go together. A lucky few find sympathetic mentors or leaders with the patience to pass on the things that they cannot believe weren’t already taught in school -- but most entry level professionals wind up picking things up in snatches and glimpses while being paid to do some other narrowly defined task.

At the same time, few construction managers (and fewer designers) have any desire to get down and dirty and actually “work” on a jobsite. Especially to devote the years it takes to appreciate what it’s like to actually build a building efficiently.

It stands to reason though, if one is expected to manage (or design) a technical process, it is only logical to have a deep understanding of how buildings actually go together – if for no other reason than to be able to anticipate the scope of the work, resolve problems in the field, and continually consider cost effective alternatives.

 
Construction is Color Blind
An important premise to understanding hands-on construction is the fact that to builders, anything that can be imagined can be built -- as long as someone is willing to pay for the time, materials, and resources necessary to build and maintain the finished product. On the other hand, construction both expands and restricts the possibilities of a design. And it’s only when design and construction work together that the resulting effort is efficient, purposeful, and sensitive to the needs of our shared environment.

The goal in this series of articles is to therefore bring about some understanding of hands-on construction methods. The objective is to demonstrate the basics without fear of confusing an aesthetic of color and form with the nuts and bolts of a technical process that deals strictly in black and white.   
Click to Zoom
Except for scattered notes and comments, almost all of the material to be presented in this series has been taken from our book, “How a House is Built: With 3D Construction Models,” including a few of the book’s illustrations, captioned text, videos, and models.

These articles will cover eight distinct phases of the construction of a simple house, beginning with how the house is actually located on the lot, then to excavation, foundations, framing, roofing, close-in, and MEP installations. Sidebars include a buzzword index, construction safety, and tips and tricks about the process.


SketchUp will of course be the construction modeler, giving you some idea of how we use construction models in our books and business. As most who read our books already know, none of this comes easy, so click the images to zoom, and feel free to interact with the information.

(To be continued…)
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Twitter as a Construction Management Tool

Some might think social media is only good for constructors (and designers) with nothing better to do than shift through the self-promoting babble found in the constant banter of marketing information on Facebook or MySpace. But they have it wrong.


For many project managers, social media is a way to see both the big picture of what’s happening in the industry and eavesdrop on what their competitors are doing. In practice, they are able to mine public information by reading posts and searching keywords to build competitive strategies in an ever changing construction industry.  

Twitter is simple and spontaneous  
In particular, the simplicity and off-handed comments found in apps like Twitter bring out unguarded exchanges that are telling when seen in the context of a stream of related tweets. This includes inadvertent security breaches by marketing staff and employees about current or pending projects.


You might think nothing substantive can be said in 140 characters, but add a consistent presence in a Twitter timeline along with links and pictures and these seemingly innocuous little posts begin to reflect not only a broad view of the industry, but a particular company’s way of thinking. As such, it doesn’t take long to read, recognize, and evaluate the collective thoughts found in the underlying messages that are exposed by this media.

This deeper understanding of a group’s thinking is in fact what makes Twitter valuable as a collaborative tool. In fact, any idea that Twitter is just for sending, sorting, and searching messages misses the power of this new media to visually direct a team’s collective consciousness toward a single minded focus.  

Twitter as a management tool
The key to using Twitter as a management tool is to harness this interaction in a carefully controlled Twitter list or account. The objective is literally to crowd source the project from its inception, deeply embedding “buy-in” for team members as they are invited to join as followers. Important is that as followers, they are invited into the group and remain only as long as they add value to the team as a whole. In other words, their tweets become a measure of the value they bring to the collaborative efforts of the team as a whole.


In these exchanges, the concise nature of a tweet means project communications are no longer delayed or distorted by staged meetings, reports, proposals, or carefully rendered models. Instead spontaneous messages are sent immediately as part of a continuous flow of input, ideas, and second screen comments that shape the ongoing communications between active team members.

The value of Twitter is therefore the immediacy of the media itself. Participating in the conversation is like feeling the pulse of the entire project team, mashed together into a project long stream of consciousness that is visible in the flow of tweets, retweets, replies, hashtags, and comments, supplemented by photos, video, illustrations, and model images that carry their own perceptive insights.

SketchUp and Twitter
SketchUp adds to these interactions with site scans, photographs, videos, and illustrations from construction models that reinforce content with an immediate visual context for each tweet.


Collaboration begins between principals using site utilization models and overlays to establish scope, later in massing studies, simplified design models, and engineering as early images are gradually mixed by select followers with line item specific content from spreadsheets and schedules.
Like the tweets themselves, cumbersome documents are reduced to real time snapshots, visually gif-ifying content by clarifying collaborative exchanges from concept, through construction, and into facilities management.  

Twitter apps are tools
The apps used to contribute and maintain this content are an ever changing collection of programs that were once used to send simple quick posts to a public forum, but have now advanced into sophisticated tools that incorporate multi-project administration. These include:

 
Short message service (SMS), still the fastest way to tweet images and video into a project account. Twitter uses short codes to sync text messages and images directly into an account from any cell phone with a camera.


Twitter also has an app that makes tweeting a little more complicated. The app has four icons: Home for your current timeline, Connect to track Interactions/Mentions, Discover as the search menu, and Me for settings and profiles. Click the New Tweet icon in the upper right corner to tweet and add a picture, video, or a library image.


Tweetdeck works pretty much the same way as the Twitter app, except it categorizes tweets into separate timelines. Image attachments are currently limited to Library Photos and Take Photo, but no videos, which eliminates motion captures (except via YouTube). Names have been changed to Home, Me, Inbox, and Search as you swipe horizontally to access adjacent screens.


HootSuite adds menu features to manage lists as categories of followers. It has a Compose menu for tweets, with images limited to Take Photo and Choose From Library, again no video, except through YouTube. Hootsuite’s menus also include Streams instead of Home, a Search function, Stats, and Contacts.

 
Posterous is one of the most comprehensive of the Twitter apps. Instead of lists, Posterous uses Spaces to divide content. Each Space is actually a micro-blog/website where any member in the Space can contribute longer descriptive text along with a range of photos, videos, and illustrations. Text and images are posted through tweets, emails, or directly within the Posterous program.

In the end, each of these apps has its limitations, with some, like GroupTweets, fading with obsolescence and inattention. At the same time, to maintain the value of immediate and unguarded collaborative exchanges, a Twitter app should be simple and fast enough to serve its purpose as an immediately useable multimedia messaging tool.
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Twitter and Construction Modeling

Multidimensional images extracted from piece-based construction models have found a new home in rapid project related communications. As part of a catalogue of 3D illustrations and process animations for an ongoing project, they are used to clarify and communicate ideas in immediate exchanges using shorter, almost haiku like Tweets that adapt to the growing complexity and speed of modern construction management methods.

BIM vs. SketchUp Construction Models
While BIM models may have a place in coordinating the production of 2D bid documents, they are way too cumbersome for real-time collaboration and are often quickly dated by changes and program upgrades - sometimes before a project is even finished.



On the other hand, SketchUp construction models are life-cycle models, generating 3D illustrations and videos available for use from concept to facilities management simply because they are built with an uncomplicated, intuitive, and freely available modeling program.



Builders who are able to anticipate benchmarks and key frames in their construction models use these images to coordinate critical phases in the production process. This includes clarifications, change orders, and RFIs during construction, but also field photos and videos that are now part of hourly, if not minute by minute, image transfers from the jobsite.

Mobility is the New Management Norm
Because 4G and wireless networks are now found on almost all jobsites, its become routine for a technically proficient project team to not only download files and communicate directly with team members anywhere in the world, but also to capture snapshots and video of project activity in real-time. Mobile apps send these images immediately from smart phones and other hand held devices via e-mail or direct messaging along with labels and comments, where they are archived for later searches.



However, while these apps are great for generating a continuous flow of instant communications, the information they carry is quickly buried in unsorted and remote data files after only a few days of jobsite activity. As a result, the latest challenge for project managers is to organize the increasing flow of graphic information into an information resource that works to inform team members.

Real-time communications
In response to this challenge, a variety of social networks are available to visually support project production. These include project specific blogs, webpages, collaborative Wikis, and sites like Linked In, MySpace, Tumblr, and Flickr.

At the same time, by definition these programs are social sites and not easily adapted to project management. For example, now antiquated project webpages that were once used to regularly post schedule and budget details along with other project information, are now confused by a range of different formats, broken links, and duplicated reports that make the web much too slow for real time interaction.



Even Facebook, used by some companies for project communications, finds its pages tangled in tagged photos and follower comments after a few days on a scrolling timeline, leaving even the simplest single family residential project overwhelmed by the clunky Facebook interface and any Friends still bothering to follow its linear format.

Twitter as a Construction Model Management Tool
In practice, Twitter is the most promising new tool for continuous construction communications and process management. First, because it allows project managers to interact quickly with very short messages that by their very nature are limited to specific comments, leaving the image itself to relay the information.

In addition, the program is able to automatically organize comments, model images, field photos, and process videos according to phase, dates, and locations in ways that virtually stream visual information to the project team.



Twitter is also able to organize teams of followers into groups and lists, transferring comments, images, and links while sorting and categorizing exchanges into archives that can then be searched and accessed as an integral part of project documentation.

Along with apps like Tweetdeck, GroupTweets, and Posterous, Twitter becomes a short-form messaging tool, as a micro-blogger, with a growing potential to be at the heart of a real time network for team members.



TweetDeck is an old-time Twitter favorite that has been used by project managers to create groups and manage Twitter communications almost from the beginning of twitter-time. Now owned by Twitter, TweetDeck was one of the first project organizers to use a dashboard as a kind of dedicated webpage that allows users to receive and send tweets, view profiles, and photo attachments.



GroupTweet is a simpler tweet organizer that works well for short term projects, especially for complex interior remodels like hospital or mechanical equipment installations, where it’s important to keep both users and suppliers informed of current project activity. GroupTweets uses a homepage as a group messaging board, helping team members to interact while making it easier for everyone to keep up with the production process.



Posterous is probably Twitter’s best team management app (at least for now) because it has controls that correlate project information into separate galleries for specific groups of users. The app uses Posterous Spaces to make sharing and searching the images, photos, videos, comments, and ideas simpler and more intuitive for replies or retweets to non-members.

We’ll look at Twitter basics and these programs next.

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Mobile Construction Modeling

It’s hard to believe but the first commercially available email programs didn’t appear until the late 1980’s, and though the communication benefits of electronic messaging were clear by the mid 90’s, many construction companies didn’t use email until the very late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

2D Techs or Construction Managers 
In fact, it took a new generation of project managers to introduce this simple technology to reluctant old-timers – and as most would admit, the fight goes on.

For example, now that cell phones and voice mail have become standards for project communications, some offices actually still take messages on hand written note pads, while senior managers without keyboard skills have assistants write memos and handle emails for them, finding computers intrusive, distracting, and perhaps a little frightening.

At the same time, according to a recent tweet from The Mortensen Company, more contractors now use BIM software than designers. Of course, it goes without saying that the average builder has no idea who Mortensen is, and though construction companies may claim to own some version of BIM software, complex 3D modeling is largely ignored for spreadsheets, print outs, and face to face fieldwork during actual construction. Even at Mortensen’s.  

BIM in the Real World 
It’s no secret then that BIM software requires trained technicians, anchored to software and graphic workstations that require constant updates and attention. In practice, working with this kind of technology is simply not practical on most jobsites, especially when a rolled out set of printed 2d contract documents are the basis for the actual scope of the work.

It’s also important to point out that design, including BIM and its 2D documents are only a very small part of the real world of construction management. Based on the value and cost of services, barely 10% of the entire process is design, permitting, and preconstruction, and of that, perhaps half of the effort falls into actual BIM production.

90% of Construction is Communications
Following the money, the focus should be on what is happening on the jobsite and finding ways to communicate more efficiently with the real world that surrounds it.
 
Especially considering that today, computer programs like SketchUp transfer files over the internet, send emails from menu selections, and automatically upload images, cost and schedule data, and daily reports to the cloud as a common way of storing, cataloging, and accessing construction information.

For a new generation of managers, communications between team members now occurs on PDAs (personal data assistants), immediately using smart phones to photo, scan, text, and tweet annotated images and video exported from SketchUp to coordinate project activities.

Mobility is the New Norm 
The mobility of these new devices and their ability to access an unlimited combination of resources has become a fundamental part of a continuous and instantaneous flow of project communications.

All of which is broadcasted wirelessly via satellite, cells, or broadband routers, giving managers immediate access to project information, the web for searches and bookmarks, networking platforms like Linked In and Facebook for market and background information, and graphical tools like You-Tube, image reference libraries, and animations for process control.

Today, the challenge is to understand how to use these new technologies effectively for construction communications, waiting again for a new generation of builders to demonstrate their competitive value in the real world.
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Homebuilt Builders are Outsiders

Builders who chose to be “outsiders” use random objects as form-givers, apply them as immediate solutions, stockpile them for some future application, or recognize some latent potential that inspires an entirely new direction in a constantly evolving architectural form.
 
Outsiders touch at the soul of a self-taught vision, human feelings, and an unmediated freedom of expression. Free from the constraints of stylistic trends and social expectations, these builders sculpt their constructions in real time.

Guided by instinct and a hands-on feel for their material, these self-taught builders use intuition and their own internal logic to assemble buildings that stand outside the mainstream of our more common social constructions. What we see as a result appears disordered to the institutionalized eye because they stand outside the boundaries of a straight and level world.

Homebuilt builders
Homebuilt house builders are also outsiders. They too are self-taught, intuitive, and self-determined. They also work to assemble a house without a plan according to random opportunities, not knowing when the work will ever be completed, or what it might look like if it ever is eventually finished.
 
What we see in a homebuilt house is architecture in motion, constantly evolving, responding to opportunities, material finds, and the insecurities of their uncertain worlds. Because they work on the margins of a formal economy, the construction of their buildings extends deep into an informal economy, where self-determination and self-reliance are largely misunderstood because of the characteristic chaos of what is a materially impoverished architectural vernacular.

As the product of informal transactions, these buildings are interesting counterpoints to the formal practices of modern construction industries, opening a window into the constraints modern builders face, including diminished craft for contracts and limited creative contributions in the buildings that they build. Their exclusion comes from the abstract explanations used to represent real world construction.

Two-dimensional abstractions 
What outsider architecture points to is how difficult it is to plan and capture its buildings in a 2D drawing or even a 3D model prior to their actual construction. By definition, outsider architecture, whether artistic or impoverished, defy preplanned abstractions.
 
Two-dimensional abstractions came with social controls that introduced specializations. Beginning with commissioned oil paintings that vaguely suggested a direction for builders to follow, these illustrations came to separate craft from construction. With industrialization and modernity, paintings evolved into technical drawings, ink on linen, then 1000h, vellum, Mylar, and finally CAD -- now hyped as BIM/3D (to 2D).

 In the end, it’s these cut and paste, two-dimensional tools that have come to shape our sense of order. Along with the predictability of the processes they dictate, the builder has been long removed from the creative process, forced to follow contractual documents as a linear and unimaginative legal obligation.

“…process becomes a substitute for thinking.” Elon Musk

Of course, without a plan, there can be no permits, contracts, or predictable outcomes to their architecture. But there is also a freedom in the absence of a plan to build structures in ways that parallel the hands-on origins of architecture as an outsider, allowing builders to think creatively in the field.  

Outsider documentation
At the same time, there’s value in capturing and understanding an outsider’s method, not in anticipation of an installation or to analyze alternate assemblies, but as a device to definitively track and deconstruct an erratic and unpredictable process in order to validate the logic of its construction.
 
These are buildings that do not fit well in an abstract 2D world, instead they are piece-based and resource driven, and must be sequenced and animated in real-time to interactively identify each piece as part of an erratic assembly, exactly as it occurs in the real world.

Unlike the linear BIM to 2D translations used in the field today, the indeterminate nature of outsider architecture requires multidimensional construction models that draw on the full potential of computational tools just now becoming available.

A good example of these new tools is the SimFonIA Animation Plug-in for SketchUp. Almost a complete rewrite of the SketchUp interface, the software allows outsiders to animate a piece-based construction model by directly controlling the graphical attributes of groups and components within the model. This includes the use of key frames as predefined transformations and relative motions between objects during an intermittent assembly process.

Because the hierarchy of the groups is respected by SAT’s software, attributes and transformations respond to time, gravity, and conflicts, allowing builders to revisit and replay undocumented sequences in order to understand or further explain what was, at least at the time, an otherwise indeterminate process. A construction document that follows these kinds of object oriented data relationships opens the door to a real time, interactive, multidimensional construction document as a system of graphical information.

The value of such a document is obvious to a builder who works outside the bureaucratic constraints of our regulatory governments. But to mainstream practitioners, institutionalized methods and formalized practices mean such an open-ended approach to construction communication remains well beyond the margins of our now antiquated BIM/3D (to 2D) standards.

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Elements of a Homebuilt House

Working excerpt taken from: HOME-BUILT HOUSE: Shelter for an Uncertain World, ISBN 978 09762741 7 9

Abandoned Land: A homebuilt house is built on unwanted or otherwise unusable land, when ownership is unknown or confused. Neglected, abandoned, and unclaimed property occur on private and public land where the jurisdictions of local, regional, and federal authorities is loosely defined and unclear, especially along right of ways, reserves, or borders and boundaries between governing agencies, private parcels, and lands held in the public domain due to long abandoned titles.

Home as a Sense of Place: A homebuilt house starts by occupying a site long enough to establish a visible presence and a sense of place on the land as a home. This begins with informal gestures, incidental interactions, and minor site improvements that vaguely signal intent to settle on the land. Initial improvements might include removing trash, clearing weeds, trimming branches, and trying different paths to test unobtrusive ways to access a possible house.

Materials Negotiate Tenure: Months may pass with only minor improvements to the home-land before deciding to proceed with the house’s construction. Expendable materials are then used as pawns to signal intent and test reaction. First placed on the land, then slowly pieced together as a shelter on land already used as a home. Each piece of the assembly further tests the site’s potential for long-term occupancy. The process is slow and cautious; continuing for years with each step slightly more visible than the last.

Form Giving Resources: Where conventional housing begins with an engineered plan and permits, a homebuilt house starts without a plan and no preconceived idea of its eventual size or shape. The house emerges like sculpture, using whatever tools and materials that become available for its construction. The slow and methodical hands-on process means skills also evolve gradually as tools are accumulated and the house slowly morphs into a more ordered form.

Imperceptible Process: A homebuilt house evolves so slowly that no one knows when construction actually began or even if it continues. The key to its initial success is a patient strategy where no single action triggers a response from neighbors or regulators. The process requires a measured balance, incrementally taking on the beginnings of tenable housing, both recognized and ignored as it evolves over decades into its final form.

Three-dimensional storage: Keenly aware of the variables, a homebuilt house is assembled to be reconstructible, ready to be moved or reconfigured whenever an unforeseen event or some newly found material comes along. The result is an architecture shaped by chance and marginality. This is architecture at the baseline of consumption, almost Zen-like simplicity, not much more than the essence of what a house really is, but physically transparent, revealing the disorder that is a unique characteristic of its vernacular of uncertainty.

Intuitively Engineered: Where a conventional house is engineered according to manufactured materials and a predictable process, a homebuilt house is built intuitively, following the logic of trial and error. Its random materials mean each piece of the construction must be carefully considered in the context of what has already been assembled. Failures are resolved by reinforcing weaknesses with temporary solutions while continually exploring alternatives.

ConstantState of Improvement: Where most houses are in a constant state of deterioration, a homebuilt house is in a constant state of improvement. This means the house is constantly changing, growing slowly as it is shaped by its random resources, financial reserves, and the socio-political environment in which it is assembled. What we see as a result is an incomplete house-form, whose shape is shifting, evolving slowly, changing in response to life in an uncertain world.

Debt-Free and Self-Sustainable: To be sustainable, a homebuilt house must be debt-free. The primary motivation for the hardships and sacrifices necessary to build a homebuilt house is the reluctance of its builders to spend what little they might have on a mortgage, rent, taxes, fees, and unnecessary consumables. Already marginalized by an economic system that leaves them with just enough to survive, any payments to landlords and government agencies means a substantial portion of their income would be lost in mind numbing rituals that leave them with few opportunities.
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Definition of a Homebuilt House

A working except from our new book: Surviving @ Net Zero: Building Shelter for an Uncertain World (Dec 2012)

A homebuilt house is the product of a self-determined hands-on process, assembled from a unique collection of accidental materials, installed intuitively with inventive details that accommodate uncommon combinations of salvaged scrap. The house evolves slowly on otherwise unusable land with no preconceived plan, little if any money, and no political or stylistic obligations. What we see as a result is an innate human determination to create shelter, stripped of the restrictions of codes, standards, and commonly held practices.



This is a piece-based construction model built in real time, a uniquely human structure, unplanned and unregulated, the antithesis of the pretense and excess of consumptive practices. Fundamentally sustainable because of the absence of superfluous ideals, its lessons suggest an instinctive approach to construction without stylistic constraints.


As such, homebuilt houses share a richly impoverished vernacular, one that holds lessons for builders who practice in a more privileged but equally uncertain world. Obviously, this begins with the random and unpredictable nature of its materials. In this construction, available resources dictate both design and process. As accidental discoveries, materials and tools are form-givers, repurposed according to an instinctive logic, tentatively applied to resolve an immediate need, leaving the outcome unfinished and constantly evolving.

Most important, this is architecture in motion, emerging from its uncertain context like reconstructible sculpture, morphing according to new needs and opportunities, conforming to the essentials of each moment in a constant struggle for relevance and survival.