Apartment Look

Advocates for a code change that would allow taller heavy-timber frames are buoyed by the good performance of mass-timber structures in the first U.S. fire tests on full- scale furnished apartments . “The tests went as expected,” says Stephen DiGiovanni, fire protection engineer for Nevada’s Clark County Dept . of Building and Fire Protection . DiGiovanni, also chairman of the International Code Council ’s 17- member ad hoc committee for tall wood buildings , plans to use the final test report to help justify a code change that would allow  wood frames as tall as 180 ft, depending on building design and use. The report is due out before Jan. 8, the deadline for code-change proposals for the 2021 edition of the International Building Code . IBC currently limits the height of heavy-timber structures to 85 ft. Under the likely code-change proposal, the maximum height for mass timber, fully protected with noncombustible sheathing, would be 180 ft. A height of 120 ft would be allowed fo...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...