The competition for local jobs is about to get a little more stiff now that 550 people are out of work.

Cambridge greeting card maker Image Craft Inc. closed its doors on Friday after owner Paramount Cards Holding Corp. declared it could not continue to meet operating costs.

Four-month employee Brenda Hagey went to work on Friday afternoon, only to find the doors to Image Craft locked.

“All employees are out of a job,” she said. “I had a bit of warning though.” Read more…

Gregory Burkhart hushed his tour group into silence as an alarm buzzer sounded. All 20 gazes fixed on him as he raised a hand and looked around. The floor shuddered and started to quiver as a roar filled the cavernous hall. It was the groan of the Colorado River, surging through giant pipes beneath our feet, as it was tortured for its potential energy.

Seventy years ago the green waters of the Colorado ran wild down the 275 miles from the Grand Canyon in Arizona to Black Canyon, here on the border of Nevada. The river flowed unhindered through a sheer 700-foot gorge it had carved out of the sharp-crested Black Mountains. It was warmed by summer sun that at times would bake the canyon to well over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And it was protected from humans by an utter lack of roads, water and electricity. Read more…

When New York City’s giant World Trade Center towers plunged to earth following successive suicide terrorist attacks on September 11th, the world was confronted with one of most shocking—and sickening—sights of modern times. The mechanisms by which these huge and seemingly solid edifices suddenly collapsed, snuffing out the lives of thousands, was the subject of a preliminary postmortem conducted last week in Cambridge, Mass. A panel of Boston area-based civil and structural engineers convened to discuss the fate of the superskyscrapers, struck by hijacked passenger planes, in front of an overflow audience on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their starkly sobering analyses highlighted the vulnerabilities of ultra-tall buildings to fire and pointed out steps that could be taken to lessen them. Read more…

CORE Real Estate LLC and Prudential Real Estate Investors plan to construct a new office building to meet increased demand in the Energy Corridor submarket of west Houston.

The developers plan to break ground Sept. 1 on a three-story, 174,000-square-foot office building at 17000 Katy Freeway in the Park 10 development. The building will have parking for roughly 800 vehicles and be ready for occupancy in the second quarter of 2007.

Mike Wyatt of Houston-based CORE Real Estate expects that energy, energy engineering, oil support and technology support companies will be interested in the new building. Those types of tenants are having a more difficult time finding large contiguous spaces in the Energy Corridor, he says. Read more…

What a shame it is that the New Urbanists have adorned themselves and their nostalgic, reactionary neighborhoods with that snappy, forward-sounding label, because it’s architects like Ray and Mary Johnston who actually deserve it.

Over the past eight years, the Johnstons and their small Seattle firm have quietly designed a succession of small-scaled, intensely urban townhouse developments that point the way to an urbanism that’s not only refreshingly new but also gentle and humane. They haven’t resolved all the issues of compacting more and more people onto ever smaller lots, but they have tested a number of ideas that deserve an appreciative look. Read more…

An office building in East Boise is getting a new look, thanks to a well-known woman in the community.

Velma Morrison has made numerous notable contributions to the Treasure Valley including Ann Morrison Park and the Morrison Center on the BSU campus. Now, she’s renovating lives and renewing the environment by partnering with a local non-profit, which helps people recovering from alcohol and substance abuse get their lives back on track.

From the outside, the Strand Building on 815 Park Boulevard looks just like any other office structure, but inside, the decades old space is in the process of being gutted. Read more…

For more than 2,000 years, chemists, engineers and interested amateurs have been working to build a better concrete. The Romans started the process with their invention of a concrete made from quicklime, ash and pumice that enabled the construction of their fabulous–and long-lasting–architecture and infrastructure. Nearly two millennia later, John Smeaton–the father of civil engineering–improved this basic building material by improving the cement that held it together. Yet despite numerous improvements over subsequent centuries, concrete structures exposed to the worst conditions are not surviving for as long as expected. A new analysis of a long-running experiment on concrete, however, has yielded insights into what should make for a stronger building block. Read more…

IT is one of Britain’s most striking and unusual buildings, and has been affectionately known for years as The Tube.

Now the famous waterfront icon in Cardiff is set to inspire a version in the heart of Leith.

The Cardiff Bay Visitor Centre was only supposed to last a couple of years after its completion in 1991, but still survives as the focal point of the regenerated area.

Developers masterminding the multi-million pound transformation of the Capital’s docklands are now planning to create the port’s own cylindrical visitor centre. Read more…

A PAIR of semi-detached homes are set to be built in a former orchard in Portobello.

Head of planning Alan Henderson recommended the application for 25 Argyle Crescent be approved at a meeting of city planning chiefs on Wednesday.

He said access and boundary arrangements were acceptable, but some details on landscaping were needed.

He said: “The proposal has a scale and design which respects the character of the area and it does not infringe neighbouring amenities. It is recommended that the committee approves the application.”

LifeStyle Homes & Properties, a real estate sales consultancy in Qatar, will be exclusively promoting the Sabban Towers on The Pearl-Qatar.
The LifeStyle office located on C Ring Road (H Fikri Building) has been designed to be totally customer-centric, a release yesterday said.
LifeStyle, under the operation and management of Sabban Property Investments (SPI) “will use their in-depth market knowledge and expertise to manage the sales of residences within the three luxury Sabban Towers being built on Porto Arabia”.
To ease the burden resulting from high rent rates coupled with the high demand for properties within Sabban Towers, SPI has entered into a partnership with Commercialbank to introduce a first-of-its-kind mortgage scheme. Read more…