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I went to two different local concrete ready-mix plants on Friday, looking to get a small quantity (two buckets) of fly-ash for an R&D project. Both places mentioned the shortage of fly ash.

Drivers traveling into or through Baltimore on Interstate 95 are going to encounter a construction project that will replace the highway’s concrete deck along the 4.4 miles between the Fort McHenry Tunnel and Exit 50 at Caton Avenue. Nothing like this has happened since the tunnel opened in 1985. If your summer vacation drives take you through Baltimore, if you plan to see the Orioles or Ravens, or will be visiting the Inner Harbor, Fells Point or Fort McHenry, you will want to be aware of this work, which is scheduled to end in 2016. The Maryland Transportation Authority project...

California's economy continues to experience a tepid recovery since the Great Recession. One reason why: according to CEO Magazine, California has had the worst business climate in the nation for the last eight years, due in no small part to policies out of Sacramento.Any economic growth in the Golden State is largely driven from the continued tech boom in Silicon Valley - although even it may not be immune to California's poor business climate. Depending on how one categorizes "small businesses"- typically, either fewer than either 50 or 100 employees - as of the 3rd quarter of 2012, between 96%...

SACRAMENTO (Reuters) - A group of Republican California lawmakers are breaking with their party's skepticism over immigration reform and asking the U.S. Congress to give immigrants a path to citizenship to help their state's heavy dependence on migrant labor for agriculture and construction. Flanked by representatives of the state's agricultural, construction and restaurant industries, 16 Republican state senators and assembly members joined a national push to demand a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Chinese companies have been known to build major real-estate projects very quickly. Now, one company is taking it to a new extreme. Suzhou-based construction-materials firm Winsun New Materials says it has built 10 200-square-meter homes using a gigantic 3-D printer that it spent 20 million yuan ($3.2 million) and 12 years developing. Such 3-D printers have been around for several years and are commonly used to make models, prototypes, plane parts and even such small items as jewelry.

From Oreos to body parts, 3D printers have been cranking out some pretty unbelievable stuff lately. But in Shanghai, WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. has been using a monstrous printing device to build homes at a breakneck pace — 10 homes in 24 hours. Measuring out at roughly 105 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 21 feet tall, this clearly isn’t your average retail printer. Unlike most 3D printers, this printing giant is fed with cement rather than plastic, making it especially well-suited for home construction. The best part is the houses are super cheap to make and they’re made...

Currently rising layer by layer in Amsterdam is the world's first house to be built by 3D printing technology. Dutch architectural firm Dus Architects commissioned the 20-foot tall 3D printer given the name, "Kamermaker," or room builder. The project to build the 3D house is simply called the "3D Print Canal House." Dus had Kamermaker built when it decided upsize the scale-model rooms it was already 3D-printing and turn them into the real thing. What Kamermaker does is to build a series of rooms that can be snapped together to form an entire house, Lego-brick style. So far, the printer...

Washington, D.C. may have the highest number of certified green buildings in the country, but research by Environmental Policy Alliance suggests it might not be doing much good.The free-market group analyzed the first round of energy usage data released by city officials Friday and found that large, privately-owned buildings that received the green energy certification Leadership in Energy Design (LEED) actually use more energy than buildings that didn’t receive this green stamp of approval.LEED is the brainchild of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a private environmental group.

Building a 2,500-square-foot house in less than 20 hours? It sounds like a tall tale, but a professor at the University of Southern California says it is absolutely possible. He would toss out traditional building practices and replace them with a single 3D printer. It's called contour crafting, creator Behrokh Khoshnevis, the director of the manufacturing engineering graduate program USC, tells CBS News. "Construction the way its done today is very wasteful," he explained in a presentation at TEDxOjai. "Our solution benefits from advanced technology...it is essentially a way of streamlining the process of construction by benefiting from the experience...

Why Build With Straw Bales? Straw bale construction lends itself well to an owner builder project. Some of the applications well suited for straw bale include: a cottage, office, garage, studio, and an art barn. You don’t have to limit yourself to these smaller projects. Thousands of people have successfully built their own straw bale house. As a world leader in straw bale education we want to help you every step of the way. I’ve created a great introductory video on why to build with straw bales. You can watch that by clicking the play button below. Please read on...

The University of Southern California is testing a giant 3D printer that could be used to build a whole house in under 24 hours. Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has designed the giant robot that replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, this squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home according to a computer pattern. It is “basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of building,” says Khoshnevis. The technology, known as Contour Crafting, could revolutionise the construction industry. The affordable home? Contour Crafting could slash the cost of home-owning, making it possible for millions of displaced...

Architects in Zurich have erected an impossibly ornate room entirely from 3D-printed blocks. The designers say it's the first time anyone has used a 3D printer to design a work of architectural art from sandstone and could suggest a new way of thinking about building construction. "We aim to create an architecture that defies classification and reductionism," said the architects on the project's website. We'll attempt to classify and reduce it anyway: It basically looks like Antoni Gaudí crammed all the flourishes of La Sagrada Familia into a 172-square-feet room. Designed by "customized algorithms," the architects say the work (called...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu plans to announce extended Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria next week, Channel 2 News reported on Wednesday. The announcement is expected to come parallel to the release of another 26 terrorists as a “gesture” to the Palestinian Authority (PA). With the planned announcement, Netanyahu has essentially rejected a request by the United States, which had asked him to hold off on new construction announcements so as not to hurt the ongoing peace talks with the PA. Previous announcements on construction raised the ire of the PA, which demanded that Israel cancel any tenders it has...

Building on the Moon, 4D printing, self-repairing bridges, movement monitoring quadrocopters, 3D printed concrete houses and generating electricity from unwanted noise may all sound like science fiction. But at computing giant Autodesk’s annual convention in Las Vegas last week, it all began to look a little realistic. There was a growing movement throughout the conference that urged engineers to rethink their traditional methods, to look outside their organisations for innovative ideas and to place themselves on a higher plane of thinking to allow the computers to do the repetitive leg work. But there was another faction present that wanted to...

What if you could assemble your house like Legos using free modeling software and a 3D printer? That’s the idea behind Eric Schimelpfening‘s WikiHouse – a home designed entirely in SketchUp that can be downloaded by anyone, customized to fit the user’s needs and sent to the 3D printer. The components are then snapped together using less than 100 screws to make rooms that can be rearranged as easily as you would rearrange furniture.The WikiHouse Open Source Construction Kit can be downloaded by anyone interested in building a house. What distinguishes it from the modular houses of the 1950s...

Downstream capital spending projected to hit $100 billion over the next three years will create labor shortages, especially in skilled trades, panelists said at a conference Wednesday morning . The Gulf Coast will see much of that spending — and the tight labor market — as companies build or expand refineries, chemical plants and pipelines, speakers told oil and gas leaders at a forum sponsored by the research firm IHS. But the labor demand will not approach the heyday of 2007, characterized by relentless recruitment wars between companies and double-digit wage inflation. speakers said. Wage growth for skilled trades probably...

Years before skyscrapers, when New York City’s tallest building was still the 281-foot spire of Wall Street’s historic Trinity Church, state lawmakers passed the Scaffold Law, which made property owners and contractors liable for most “gravity-related” injuries to workers on construction sites. … Some New York government agencies and contractors say the cost of the insurance, which can often be double that of other states, is hitting a crisis point that could soon suspend work on bridges, schools and the recovery from Superstorm Sandy.“It increases the cost of doing business and decreases what we are capable of doing in New...

Housing starts fell 9.91% in June. 1 unit starts, however, only fell 0.84%. It was multi-family starts that dragged down the overall number. sdata 1 unit starts have fallen to 1982 levels. hs1unit0717 The same for 1 unit building permits. 1unitperm Multifamily starts fell 26% and fell back to September 2012 levels. mfstarts0717 Where were you in ’82?

According to the US Census Bureau, privately-owned housing starts in May were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 914,000. This is 6.8 percent above the revised April estimate of 856,000 and is 28.6 percent above the May 2012 rate of 711,000. Single-family housing starts in May were at a rate of 599,000; this is 0.3 percent above the revised April figure of 597,000. The May rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 306,000. While this is good news, the print of 6.8% was far below the expectation of 11.4%. Privately-owned housing units authorized by building...

Despite rumors of a building freeze in Judea and Samaria in the past months, construction in Jewish communities in the region grew sharply during the first three months of 2013. Construction was up 176% during the period, as compared to a year earlier. According to Channel Two, building in pre-1967 Israel actually slowed during the period compared to a year earlier, while growing sharply in the lands liberated by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. Construction in areas within the 1948 armistice borders fell 8.9%, Channel Two said. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, January 2012 saw a...