Construction Commonalities and Differences

While on a field visit, I observed the activities taking place at both Whiting Turner's new VT Basketball Facility and Branch's VT New Residence Hall West and record their similarities and differences. Similarities included tool use such as hand chisels for detailing Hokie-Stone; site utilization which included the use of storage containers for miscellaneous materials, use of dumpsters for waste created on the job, and on-site administrative trailers, and use of large gravel at access points to keep access easy for machinery. Both had ideological mock walls on site that gave a visual representation of what would be happening through the majority of the building. Both also had scaffolding for workers to use to build up the Hokie-Stone.

Differences between the two sites include the different types of machinery used to carry out construction tasks, such as the use of forklifts instead of a crane to lift materials to the top of scaffolding; different forms performing actual construction activities such as applying parging all at once to CMU bearing walls or going from section to section when applying the parging; the different styles of bulding materials (Basketball facility is about 50/50 precast concrete and Hokie-Stone, while New Res. West is dominantly Hokie-Stone with precast concrete trim used throughout the design); the different styles of on-site temporary machinery such as concrete mixers; the precast style of production (Basketball facility had its precast concrete delivered to exact specifications, whereas New Res. West has precast concrete delivered with correct details but had cuts made on-site to accommodate adjustments); and also the points of access to the site in order to have easy access and a certain traffic flow for the site (Basketball facility has 3 accesses, and New Res. West has 2 accesses).

Different sites have different ways of handling their jobs because companies have their own standards, creating diverse work environments for different jobs. Regulations must be established and vocalized to all coming on a site in order to ensure that nobody messes with the standards of that company, in turn keeping everyone safe.