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Comments
Very nickable!
Anyone know if you can get it powder coats to disguise it?
Metal theft is very common in my area, drain cover etc. One customer came home from work to find someone had hacked of his lead work above his bay windows , damaging the render , bay ceiling , about £1200 worth of damage for £20 scrap :sad:
http://sdrv.ms/14p9ntH
If we got rid of our stuff that might get stolen we all would have nothing.
In my experience, it's not that uncommon to find a gross mismatch in the material quality and longevity of a variety of discrete building parts - so having a roof covering good for 200 + years on a building where everything else has a 40 or 60 year life is a bit nuts - and the client may well be sensible to sell off the asset and use a tile which gives him say 30 years - which may be what he wants out of his building anyway.
regards
Barney
Yes, we may well have clients that know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, but it's no good moaning that you'd like structure, windows, doors and roof that have a 100+ year design life when it's a spec. building going up on a plot on an out of town developement park or it's social housing being built to a cost or it's a school or hospital being paid for down the PFI PPP route.
Or in a similar vein, that the bulding is now needing to be designed for a 1x 10^-3 flood event or a 1 x 10^-4 seismic event - which costs quite a bit of money up front - for a product that's only required to be there for the next 30 or 60 years (or whatever the design criteria are).
Start thinking like that and what's so wrong with cheap and effective timber or steel frame buildings with short (ish) lifetimes but capable of full recycling of contents.
By all means lets have buidings that are "loose fit" and adaptable over time - but if that means clearing a site after say 60 years and rebuilding, that could actually be more environmentally friendly that building structure that has a 200 yeardesign life.
Look at our victorian housing stock - if they hadn't been well built (to the standards and thinking of the time) tyhen we would have swept them away lomg ago and replaced them with something a little less energy hungry and totally unfit for anything other than tinkered, playing round the edges refurbishment.
Think it through in terms of welsh slate roofing 90% of London housing - was it a good idea ?
Regards
Barney
I think that people get confused with comparing Georgian and Victorian housing with 1950's to1970's mass produced housing. Both were mass produced (actually going back a little further most mining towns look the same from Scotland to Cornwall), just different materials and architects/town planners.
I am all for cheap housing that can be replaced as society changes.
As we say, It might be nice to design a primary school that has sufficient lifespan so it can turn into a chiropody clinic and give the occupants a cradle to grave experience - but in reality ?
Housing, for sure is a prime candidate - but first we'll have to get over that peculiar UK mentailty that housing is permanent and increases in value. Once we clear that hurdle, what's wrong with high efficiency, high density "park homes", in clusters, in the green belt that have no intrinsic value after 30 years other than recovering the material value - no one will worry because buying one will be like buying a car - we expect it to lose value from day one as we use it.
For sure the below ground infrastructure, bases etc can be designed for longevity (lets say 200 years) - but the above ground superstructure may well have been replaced half a dozen or more times by then - it wouldn't take long to work out the sweet spot in terms of materials and energy in and what that costs over XX years to decide the optimum replacement cycle.
Equally we may decide that mass concrete structures of long life with internal pods of short life are the way to go
Ahh well - back to reality
Regards
Barney
Be fun and has to be a better way to build a town than a highly controlled and limited council doing it. You may end up with a new St. Ives or Bourton-on-the-Water, or even a new Basildon.
Now back to reality :cry:
(no one won the Euro on Friday)