Construction on Campus: Commercial Site Visit

          Currently under construction next to the Inn on the Virginia Tech campus is the Visitors and Undergraduate Admissions Center.  This is a steel frame two story, 20,000 square foot structure which began construction in April 2010.
           Workers are in the process of applying the exterior sheathings to the building now the structural steel members have been placed.  The first layer of sheeting is gypsum wall board which runs up along the side of the building attached directly to the metal stud framing.  Concrete panels have also been hung around the top edge of the building as a facade, along with a large concrete panel facade along the south side of the building.

          Workers are now currently in the process of working on scaffolding and hanging the signature Hokie Stone veneer around the sides of the large concrete panel.  The thing I found interesting about the scaffolding that these workers were working on was that it wrapped around a good portion of the building with multiple levels.  I would think that it would be very costly to erect and maintain all of this scaffolding but in the end I guess that it must safe on time and money from having to take down and put back up the scaffolding whenever you have to move to a new section of the building.

          The most interesting thing I saw while visiting the site today was a group of workers moving a 12' tall tree into the back of a pickup truck and moving it across the site to a new location.  I was somewhat amused to see that there where noticeably more workers moving this small tree than there were putting up the Hokie Stone veneer.  It seemed extremely inefficient to me however some of the other workers may have possibly been on their lunch break as I did visit the site around 11:45 am.

           I will continuously revisit this site throughout the remainder of this week and post back here with pictures and updates.