Building a 30 story building in 15 days


Surpassing a previous record of building a 15 story hotel building in 6 days, the Chinese company, the Broad Group has constructed a 30 story building in only 15 days.

It would appear a majority of the building was built off site in panels that were lifted into place, a practice that is likely to become much more common in the near future. A 6 minute time lapsed video can be viewed here.

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for the original article.

More bricks and mortar fall to clicks


In a Wall Street Journal article dated today, Borders Group has indicated that they are making preperations to file bankruptcy in the forthcoming days.

Similar to the fallout of music stores after iTunes, Amazon website and digital readers has encouraged many readers to abandon physical stores. Companies that have figured out how to the digital frontier continue to thrive, while those that haven’t die. Interestingly , the same articles mentions that Borders tried going dot com a while back, threw in the towel and sold their initiative to Amazon.

“I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within 10 years,” says Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York consulting firm. “Book stores are going away.””

—wsj.com 2/12/2011

Borders Group currently has over 600 locations, less than 1/2 of what it had in its peak at 2005.

In our market, Borders has a prominent location in the ABQ Uptown lifestyle center. I will be curious to see what the new highest and best use of that store will be.

Honey, where did we park the house?

I could have sworn we left it right here on the corner of Sinkhole Avenue and Dropoff Blvd…

500x_guatemala-sinkhole-2010

This first appeared on one of my favorite gadget blogs, Gizmodo, and then was followed by a posting with more photos on the National Geographic website.

Before my friends in Albuquerque chuckle too much about those crazy places (like California) that seem to suffer from too many of these natural disasters, a few years ago, an Albuquerque sink hole swallowed up a Albuquerque Fire Department truck.

Latest update – we now have video.

Too my friends in the development business, how would you value a site like this?

What is a lease worth in the middle of no where?

How much would you pay to lease land that looked like this?
upham2

Not too much I would expect.

You know the old adage in real estate – location, location, location? Well it comes into play here as well.

Although I am a lifelong NM native, and I was born hundred miles due east of Upham, NM I had never heard of the name of this town, until our Governor, Bill Richardson, pushed through an initiative to turn it into Space Port America.

It was reported that earlier this month, the state of NM and Virgin Galatic signed a 20 year lease valued at $50,000,000. According to an article in the New Mexico Business Weekly the payments of the lease are based on the number of times the runway is used, so most likely this is the largest percentage lease every signed in the history of humankind.

KKOB TV Channel 4 reports that the lease is the next stage of what it takes to release state funding of $200M in infrastructure and construction.

So how did this remote location get chosen?

If you take a look at this map,
uphamnm1
you can see that Upham is just over 150 miles south of Albuquerque, and about 30 miles north of Las Cruces and runs along the White Sands Misslie Range. The Range was originally part of the World War II project to develop nuclear weapons, known as the
Manhattan Project
.

This large swath of land was condemned from New Mexican’s to support the war efforts and after the conclusion of the war was made part of the missile range for future testing.

A no fly zone exists over this part of NM (and in fact, a no drive zone as well) which makes this an ideal location to launch rockets into orbit as there is no cross traffic to compete with.

Few locations on the earth today have no-fly zone, so indeed, this location is unique and priceless.