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Closing the week with a construction update from — Atlassian Central, the 39-storey hybrid mass timber tower next to Sy...
05/22/2026

Closing the week with a construction update from — Atlassian Central, the 39-storey hybrid mass timber tower next to Sydney's Central Station.

When it's done, this will be the world's tallest hybrid timber building. 183 metres. Mass timber core, steel exoskeleton, glass façade with integrated solar. Designed by SHoP Architects (NY) and BVN (Sydney), built on top of (and into) Australia's busiest rail station.

We covered Walmart's mass timber Home Office campus on Tuesday — the largest commercial mass timber project in the US. This is the international counterpart. Two corners of the planet, same shift in how big commercial buildings are getting built.

Anyone in your firm working a mass-timber or hybrid-timber project right now? Where is it going up?

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Glaziers and curtain wall crews — the trade that hangs the skin of the building.They show up after the structure is clos...
05/21/2026

Glaziers and curtain wall crews — the trade that hangs the skin of the building.

They show up after the structure is closed in. They work at height, with panels that weigh hundreds of pounds, with tolerances measured in millimeters. They're the reason your office building doesn't leak in a sideways rainstorm. And they almost never make the press release.

If you've worked with a great glazing crew, share the project below. If you ARE a glazier reading this, drop where you're working this week. Long overdue spotlight on this one.

05/20/2026

Pick a side:

Design-build, or design-bid-build?

Not which one is more "modern" — which one has actually delivered your projects on time, on budget, with fewer change orders, fewer RFIs, and fewer trips to the lawyer.

The data has been pretty consistent for a while: DBIA and the Construction Industry Institute both put design-build at significantly lower cost growth and schedule growth than design-bid-build. But data doesn't equal experience. The owner relationship is different. The contract is different. The risk allocation is different. And the people you trust to deliver are different.

If you've worked both sides, drop the answer in the comments. Bonus points for the one project that changed your mind.

Richard Branch at Dodge on the gap most contractors are watching this year:"The pipeline is full. The constraint is conv...
05/20/2026

Richard Branch at Dodge on the gap most contractors are watching this year:

"The pipeline is full. The constraint is converting planning into starts — and that's a labor and financing problem, not a demand problem."

The Dodge Momentum Index has been signaling strength on the commercial side for months. But the actual move from a project in the planning phase to a project breaking ground is slower than the index alone suggests. Two reasons most contractors say out loud:

— Skilled crews are already booked, and the lead time on key trades has stretched.
— Owners are negotiating financing in a higher-rate environment than they were 18 months ago.

The work isn't going away. The question is when it actually lands on the ground.

What part of your 2026 pipeline is sitting in planning longer than it should?

California's first new major reservoir in more than 50 years is about to break ground.Sites Reservoir — 1.5 million acre...
05/19/2026

California's first new major reservoir in more than 50 years is about to break ground.

Sites Reservoir — 1.5 million acre-feet of off-stream water storage in Colusa County — cleared its final CEQA challenge last year and is moving into the construction phase. Total project cost is now $4.4B. It'll capture excess winter flows from the Sacramento River and release them in dry years to roughly 24 million people downstream.

What's interesting about this one is the delivery side. After 40+ years of permitting, the project ended up funded by a coalition of more than 20 local water agencies — not a single big state appropriation. The Bureau of Reclamation is in for some of the federal share. The rest is paid back by the agencies that take the water.

If you've worked on civil/water/dam projects in California, what's your read? Is the country's water infrastructure backlog finally about to move, or is Sites going to be another one-off?

Source: Sites Project Authority / CA Department of Water Resources

Friday closer — ironwork and rebar from .The people tying steel on a cold morning don't show up in the press release abo...
05/15/2026

Friday closer — ironwork and rebar from .

The people tying steel on a cold morning don't show up in the press release about the building that just topped out. But they're the ones who made it stand up.

One thing this account is going to do more of: pull the camera away from the press release and put it on the people actually doing the work. If you've got a photo from your project this week, share it below. We'll feature the best ones next week.

Have a good weekend out there.

Sean McGarvey, NABTU president, on the conversation construction has been waiting for."This keeps the building trades at...
05/14/2026

Sean McGarvey, NABTU president, on the conversation construction has been waiting for.

"This keeps the building trades at the forefront of innovation while advancing our mission to deliver family-sustaining careers."

The framing matters. AI in construction isn't a story about software vendors. It's a story about whether the people building the country get to use these tools, get paid for using them, and pass that knowledge to the next generation. That requires labor at the table, not just at the receiving end.

NABTU's partnership with Microsoft is one version of that. There's room for more.

What does "trades at the forefront of innovation" look like on your jobsite right now?

Three to five days of manual laser scanning, replaced by one 40-minute drone flight.UK construction firms running weekly...
05/14/2026

Three to five days of manual laser scanning, replaced by one 40-minute drone flight.

UK construction firms running weekly drone capture with RTK and Ground Control Points are getting sub-10mm horizontal accuracy on real sites. Site supers are pulling up the drone-derived point cloud on a tablet, overlaying it on the model, and seeing the gap between as-built and as-designed before the next pour.

Question for the supers and PMs reading this: do you have a drone on your project right now? And if you do, is the data actually getting used by the people on the ground — or is it sitting in a server somewhere only the BIM coordinator opens?

05/12/2026

California just put $18.6 million into apprenticeship programs across the building trades — funding 55,000 apprentices across 160 state-registered programs.

A few things worth sitting with on this one:

— The money is going to the trades that are about to be the bottleneck on every megaproject in the state — electricians for the data center buildout, ironworkers for the steel, sheet metal for the mechanical scope on every healthcare and chip-fab job.
— Registered apprenticeship is one of the few workforce programs where the ROI numbers are clean: 50–70% lower turnover, under 3% rework on graduates, and a worker trained to the firm's own standards.
— California is one state. The federal goal is one million new apprentices nationwide by the end of the decade.

Question for the people running crews: what would you actually do with a fully-funded apprentice on your jobsite this summer? And what's the part of the training that you've always wished an apprenticeship program would cover but never does?

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