I’m a co-chair of our ULI chapter for the state. In a recent meeting, James Fowler, who leads planning, design and construction for UAB, started talking about “Road Diets.” While I had never heard the term, it made a lot of sense after I heard him explain. The initiative is to make urban campuses more …
Last spring, I wrote about a great retail site with tough soils, and how we were approaching the job. Nature then turned this project into a case study in weather extremes, from the record-setting drought over the summer, to late fall monsoons. In case you are not familiar with Geogrid, it is basically a woven polymer …
I just returned from the ICSC National show, the 2nd largest retail show in the country. Optimism was fairly decent, but then again it’s a retail conference. A few things I heard on the floor and in the taxi lines: If investors are willing to risk secondary equity at 12%, we may be closer to …
I was recently invited to a dinner as a guest of Alan Fuller and my daughter Chappell, both of Alliance Real Estate, to hear Alliance’s thoughts on what is happening in the CRE world along with those of Suzanne Mulvee, Director of Research for Costar Group. It was nice that they chose the mountains of …
A couple of weeks ago, I had a brush with death. Well, not really, but it felt that way for a few seconds. I was in Asheville, NC at the intersection of Airport Road and I-26, a “diverging diamond interchange.” This video shows you exactly how traffic flow works, where one is essentially crisscrossing …
Every year, there are more regulatory boxes to check and forms to fill out for a job site. However, our number one job is always to ensure anyone who enters our site remains safe. Our project superintendents are on the front line, and we ask them to walk their job “more than once,” looking for …
Strange as it sounds now, back in the 1970s, getting a concrete floor into a “flat mode” was at times measured as “no more than an 1/8 inch difference in 10 feet,” or for the old timers, “throw a nickel on a wet floor, and if the water doesn’t bead over the top, it’s okay.” …
EIFS (exterior insulating finish system) was once one of the hottest building materials on the market, then water intrusion problems signaled the demise of the way it was being used. The industry then took a hard look at means of installation and corrected those earlier problems. Beyond revising installation errors, a whole new family of cool finishes …
Restoring buildings to their original state, or at other times giving them new purpose, brings a lot of satisfaction. Our Thomas Jefferson project falls into this category. We are in the process of converting the circa 1920s hotel into 96 apartments targeted at Millennials, complete with food and retail on the ground floor. One of …
A few years ago, I wrote about the “streetwise parking” trend we are seeing, where parking fields are getting smaller and smarter. In the 4 years that have passed since that post, we are seeing more innovative parking solutions in our own projects. Two examples: Merchant’s Walk, a Whole Foods-anchored retail center that included hybrid street …
Several decades ago, in most of the larger southeastern cities, union contractors prevailed. As the market began to change toward a more open working environment, these companies formed what would be referred to as a “double-breasted operation,” where the ownership of one company was the same as the other, and yet one was union and …
While there are a number of contract forms for building services, they all sort of revolve around these four: Design and Bid. The architect prepares plans and the contractor builds. Fairly simple. Over the last several years, it seems the budgets for architectural design are getting tighter and thus there is not enough design money …