Way the fuck wrong.
So I’ve been watching this new 5-story reinforced concrete building that’s going up near our house. This is the same project that led to the hurtling box of rocks post, but all that’s safely in the past now, and no real harm done. Anyway, it’s a fine looking structure, as these things go, and apart from having rather shallow foundations, it’s been soundly put together.
Until now.
Around the back of the building, some of the exterior walls had been left completely open, and there were also some balconies and roof edges with no guard walls or rails. Some brave new architectural adventure seemed to be in the works, and I was wondering what they had in mind for these areas. It didn’t look as if they were going for the usual options — more reinforced concrete, or else masonry, or else a mixture of the two — and I was hoping they might opt for something elegant, perhaps involving floor-to-ceiling tempered glass, or even glass blocks, with maybe some stylish aluminum rails…
Alas, it was not to be.
A few days ago they started framing in these openings. When I say ‘framing’ I use the term loosely. These are the kind of frames you might kludge together for a stage flat, where you don’t care about strength, rigidity or solidity.
Just take a look at this –
On the plus side, the dead weight loading of these frames is pretty much negligible.
Check out the exterior corner of the balcony framing on the left. For comparison, a regular ‘California Corner’ uses three 2×4s, but here, as you can see, the ‘Keelung Corner’ makes do with two 1×1’s. Heck, it doesn’t even provide a corner nailing surface for one of the interior sheets.
And 1×1″s!??! I mean FFS, are they shooting for a Darwin Award or what?
What on earth were they thinking? Surely they didn’t seriously intend for these flimsy sticks to be part of the finished structure?
Well, apparently they did, because today they started sheathing this tracery with plywood.
Is that marine grade plywood? Oh fuck it, it’s not like it’s going to make any difference.
Assuming that no-one barges into them, those guard rails and room walls will probably hold up OK for one, maybe two years at the outside, and then the finish will crack, and the sea air and the humidity and the formosa termites and the fungi will get in there and work their magic. The nails will rust through, the wood will rot. Someone will lean against a rail and the whole thing will fall over. Someone will slam a door inside the building and a whole fucking wall will blow out. Failing that, a typhoon will come a-knocking and it’ll be goodnight Vienna. I’ve seen it happen. (That is, I’ve seen the aftermath: an entire wood-framed wall complete with doors and windows blown wholesale right into the house.)
Fuck it, these guys are on course for an epic fail. I’m going to have to go talk to the site manager about this. Watch this space.
UPDATE (Nov 8, 2008)
Crap! It’s not them doing it wrong, it’s me. Doh!
First some background:
Out here, when someone wants to put up a new block of apartments, they usually try to pre-sell the units from a special, purpose-built, on-site ‘promotional building’. To lure the punters in, these temporary erections are hammered together muy rápido from plywood, and then cunningly finished to look as opulent as possible. Here are a couple of typical examples.
The Premier. The finished building will look absolutely nothing like this.
‘Bygone New Future The One and Only’. Indeed. Comes complete with a fish’n'lilypond.
For anything up to a year or so, these glorified salesrooms will keep their specious luster. But thereafter — since they were never built to last — they will rapidly start to fall apart. Which is just fine because by that time they will have served their purpose and be due for demolition anyway.
But here’s the thing: The technique used to construct the walls of these seriously underbuilt pieces of promotional eye-candy was exactly the technique being used on the real actual building at the top of this post.
In the case of the real actual building though, my mistake was to leap to the conclusion that these flimsy guardrails and walls were going to be left as part of the final structure. Whereas in fact, as I finally figured out and have now confirmed with the site manager, the plan is to use the building itself as its own promotional building, and then, once the units are sold, these temporary areas will be redone using proper materials according to the buyer’s requirements.
So — hooray! A happy ending!
And someday, maybe we’ll get to see some stylish floor-to-ceiling glass and some elegant aluminum guardrails after all.
