Going Downtown

Whenever I get to go abroad, it turns out to be more of a becoming holiday for me - I spend more time looking at building sites rather than the tourist sights. This time it was a trip to Los Angeles, and as with all things American, the scale of construction is so much larger than here in the UK. This site, I'm assuming, next to Staples Centre in downtown LA, home to the Clippers, I'm thinking this is going to be either some conference centre, or such. The first site has what appears to be a Transfer slab - with great big lumps of steel, I'd estimate the slab to be 1.5m thick, steels ranging in the 40mm range. The second site has been excavated about 10m below the road level, and what struck me first is the soil - even at ten meters it's so sandy, there doesn't appear to be a bedding layer - which will explain the sheet piling around the perimeter, and the size of the pad stones marked out.

I can't resist the touristy views of some of the greats of modern architecture either, and spent some time running around Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, and the classic Bradbury Building on Broadway, downtown LA, made famous in Blade Runner, but in it's own right a fantastic example of cast iron architecture.