I was looking on the Lynda.com site to see if I could find any good photography, cad or design videos and I found one on concrete vs. cement. Which sounds SUPER BORING. But it really wasn’t. Being in the design/building industry it is literally the foundation. And I have focused more on design so I thought it would be interesting to learn a little more.

I would highly recommend this class as a primer to anyone in the design/build field as it covers the basics without getting too bogged down with details. Those are available in other classes.

Click Here to go to the course page.

Case in point, the Millennium Tower in San Francisco which is built entirely with concrete, not steel construction. The building is the tallest residential structure on the west coast. It was completed in 2009 and has sunk 17+ inches and is leaning 14” toward it’s neighboring buildings. The tenants paid millions for their residences and now some are selling at a loss because they don’t want to crash to their death in the middle of the night. Really the issue is the structure was not stabilized by digging down to bedrock(200+ ft), some how they got the city to approve some half ass method of digging to like 80 feet below the surface and somehow that seemed logical since the entire building would be poured concrete so the building is heavier than that of like structures built with steel. There are numerous stress fractures in the lower level that have monitors on them to measure the movement.

It just goes to show how absurd living conditions are in SF when people are paying millions of dollars to live in a building that might crash and burn at the first earthquake tremor just to live in San Francisco. Can you tell I am a little bitter? I moved from the Bay Area because the rents are ridiculous and not worth it. And there are lots of other beautiful places to live that are worth it.