Visited a job site yesterday in Palos Verdes and the house is coming along nicely. Talk about some tall walls!
Just got an email about one of the more interesting projects going on in Downtown LA. DLANC Sustainability Committee
The Downtown Los Angeles Youth & Cultural Center needs to build a parking lot on the blank lot adjacent to its center at 132 S. Beaudry Avenue – right next to the 110 Freeway to generate the necessary revenue to maintain their lease. Green Pockets Project
Wouldn’t it be great to see a permeable parking lot with plants and maybe even a water feature instead of the standard asphalt surface?
The DLANC Sustainability Committee is looking into how we can provide the Center with resources and partners to help it build a smarter, more sustainable parking surface. We hope to collaborate with other Neighborhood Council committees on this project and would like to invite you to a kick-off meeting to discuss next steps.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at the Downtown Los Angeles Youth & Cultural Center (132 S. Beaudry Ave.), starting at 6:30pm
If we could have a device to save us time through the day would we buy it? I have my 2 24″ Monitors telling me yes. How nice is it that I can sit here with my drawing open while looking at an Architects site plan on the other screen. Kind of like a 21st Century huge drafting table. Now imagine you could have all the most used functions in your favorite drafting software at the tip of your fingers on the mouse instead of using the keyboard. I have found one of the most time saving devices recently. The Razer Naga Mouse is not only a comfortable mouse, but it has 12 buttons that can be programmed with Macros. This mouse was originally designed for gaming, but I was curious if they would allow programmable macros for any software. And yes it will allow that. It’s easy, you just assign a macro profile to your software and then tell button 1 to be your line command. Or button 3 to be your perpendicular command. Even button 12 can be a save command. Maybe make button 11 be an audit/purge 3 times combo command. I was looking for something to save me even more time to crank out work even faster and this has been a very nice find.
So we had our Green Charette meeting and was that ever so interesting. I was told beforehand from an Architect buddy’s friend that this meeting is what all the consultants must go through. As LEED is still pretty new and most people don’t know what is going on we were lead through a powerpoint presentation. From what I saw the Mechanical Engineers and Architect have the most say in obtaining LEED points. Us, as Civils, basically meet the LA City SUSMP requirements to meet our LEED points. Just like I thought we don’t have any say in what goes on. I will update this slowly as I think about the meeting more.
We are doing a LEED for New Construction application for this project. I learned a lot at this meeting and have a ton of notes to pilfer through before posting more.
I know I know, this blog is about Los Angeles. The only problem is besides my favorite building ever located in Las Vegas, the controversy regarding the Harmon in Las Vegas has kept my ears open for any news. So now it seems that part of City Center is dead in the water for who knows how long. For anyone not familiar with the story, everyone missed the fact that the rebar was missing on a certain floor(s) and was found out after building about 10 more floors. This eventually caused the building to be redesigned with many less stories than originally planned. Now the outfall is happening.
http://www.lvbusinesspress.com/articles/2010/04/12/news/iq_35241001.txt