The principals of St. Louis-based The Lawrence Group architectural firm and SG Blocks plan to recycle used metal cargo shipping containers into sturdy, attractive homes and housing developments. The recycled shipping containers are much stronger than traditional construction in a hurricane or tornado and are very energy efficient. Read more in the April 20 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And check out photos of the process at www.synergy-pr.com.

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Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

When an industry embraces an initiative the way architecture has embraced LEED green design and building, it only makes sense there will be a lot of “firsts.” FacilitiesNet reported on the first green law school, the first green building on Capitol Hill, the first green residential high-rise and the first green hotel and conference center.
And now…(drum roll)…the first LEED Gold certified building made out of straw bales.  It’s true and quite impressive! Designed by St. Louis’ own architecture firm Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, the $20 million sustainable building in Santa Clarita, California serves as an administrative, maintenance and bus washing facility for the city’s new compressed natural gas bus fleet.  In addition to achieving LEED Gold, the facility exceeds California Energy Efficiency Standards by over 40 percent.

This may not directly be AEC industry news, but it’s an important trend that all business people should watch. Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper, the world’s oldest paper still in circulation, has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace, according to KARL RITTER, Associated Press and the blog MicroPersuasion.

Many in the newspaper and PR industry believe this is the fate facing many of the world’s best-known publications, as more people (like you!) get their news online. Here’s what Time Magazine has to say on the subject.
The paper edition of Post-och Inrikes Tidningar, by the way, had a circulation of just 1,000, although the Web site is expected to attract more readers.

Bloggers are not coders, which I proved last week when I added a simple bit of information to the AEC St. Louis blog — it not only crashed the blog but also took the entire server with it! I’ve promised not to play at programming…at least for awhile.

You’re checking blogs and email on Christmas Eve? Well, you deserve a little early Christmas gift so check out Elf Yourself, an online “gift” from OfficeMax. Transform yourself or a friend into a dancing elf - it’s easy and the most fun you’ll have online today!

Just for fun…here are a couple of odd construction stories that recently made the news and Building 101, a blog on ENR.com:

On December 12 in Richmond VA work was stopped on a construction site after a backhoe unearthed an unexploded artillery shell thought to date from the Civil War-era…

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, a tower crane in Seattle appears to have gone insane. Buffeted by unusually high winds, the unmanned crane was spinning around madly for hours on end, drawing confused looks from pedestrians and construction workers alike. Written descriptions are sometimes not enough, so here’s a link to a video of the twirling tower crane one unnerved Seattle resident posted on YouTube.

Several other videos of the mad crane are circulating the Internet. Which all goes to show, you can’t keep a good (or bad) story quiet in this age of online communications.