Scaffolding’s Day

 

A structure made of scaffolding, for workers to stand on while working on a building. Middle English scaffold, scaffalde, from Medieval Latin scaffaldus, from Old French eschaffaut, escadafaut (“platform to see a tournament”), from Late Latin scadafaltum, from ex- + *cadafaltum, catafalcum (“view-stage”), from Old Italian *catare (“to view, see”) + falco (“a stage”), a variant of balco (“stage, beam, balk”), from Lombardic palko, palcho (“scaffold, balk, beam”), from Proto-Germanic *balkô (“beam, rafter”), from Proto-Indo-European *bhelg- (“beam, plank”). Akin to Old High German balco, balcho (“scaffold, balk, beam”). Pronunciation: (UK) IPA(key): /ˈskæfəʊld/, (US) IPA(key): /ˈskæfəld/ or IPA(key): /ˈskæfl ̩d/

 

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Introduction

Introduction to Scaffolding : Basic Terms

Scaffolding Design 3D Tube & Fitting / Modular

 

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Select Types

Trestle Scaffolding are widely used for minor repairs or painting works inside the rooms. Trestle scaffolding consist of working platforms supported on movable ladders with no standards, putlogs, etc. These type of scaffolding can be easily shifted from one place to another.

Modular Scaffolding is made up of standardized components that can be assembled in various configurations. It offers flexibility and is suitable for projects of different sizes and complexities.

Tube and Clip is a popular scaffold design because of the ease in assembly and disassembly. To build this type of scaffolding, tubes are connected to make long runs, and then the horizontal and vertical tube runs are clamped together with a specially designed clip.

Also known as a bricklayer’s scaffold, a Putlog Scaffold consists of an outer row of vertical members (standards) joined together by ledgers fixed with right-angle couplers. This type of scaffold is only suitable for new work in bricks or blocks.

Bamboo Scaffolding is commonly used in Asia and is known for its eco-friendliness and cost-effectiveness. It’s lightweight, easily available, and offers surprising strength. However, it’s limited to certain types of construction due to its specific properties.

A popular choice in commercial construction, Kwikstage Scaffolding provides a safer and more robust platform to work on. Kwikstage uses galvanisation in the manufacturing process, creating a more durable platform that protects against the elements on an outdoor site.

The use of Scaffolding Staircase Tower is to access to the main scaffolding platform for work as it is more safer than using ladder. In the same way, staircase tower is useful to work independently from its own platform for small works like fixing light…etc .

An access Birdcage Scaffold consists of standards arranged at regular intervals in parallel lines, usually evenly spaced apart. If the birdcage is to be used externally, or in an open structure exposed to the wind, it must be specially designed.

Toeboard is a parallel set of boards, supported on putlogs, which provides protection at the working platform level.

Mast Climbing Scaffolding can extend to various heights. Instead of hanging from wires, this scaffold can climb up and down on fixed mast structures that are placed on the ground. This type of scaffolding is favored by scaffolders who need to support heavy loads.

As the name suggests, Tubular Scaffolding uses steel tubes that are connected by clamps. These tubes can be connected at any angle and at any interval as long as it follows safety rules and regulations. Though this type of scaffold is labor and time-intensive, it has excellent load-bearing properties.

 

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Collapses

Denmark

London

Melbourne

Surrey

London

 

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Jean Genet

‘Here are the trees again – I haven’t really conveyed how fragile they were. The yellow leaves were attached to the branches by a fine yet real stalk, but the forest itself looked as frail to me as a scaffolding that vanishes when a building’s finished. It was insubstantial, more like a sketch of a forest, a makeshift forest with any old leaves, but sheltering soldiers so beautiful to look at they filled it with peace.’

‘He was free to leave his body, the audacious scaffolding for his balls. Their weight and beauty he knew. With one hand, calmly, he opened the folding knife he had in the pocket of his peacoat.’

‘Nothing in the world was odd: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock−market quotations, the brief life of the scaffolding, it is the elaboration of that expedition which takes to the sea and continues.’

‘I cling to myself on the scaffolding of my onanistically created characters, to prove their … what?’

‘The scaffolding of bodies, still a shelter for noxious acts collapsed into regret.’

 

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Resources

The Scaffolding Magazine
National Access & Scaffolding Federation
Safety requirements for scaffolding
Industrial scaffolding @ eBay

 

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Examples

 

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News

Four Painters Moving Scaffolding Hit By Ten Thousand Volt Electric Shock

Watch frightening moment daredevil fan falls from scaffolding during A$AP Rocky performance

Hearst Tower Scaffold Collapse Traps Two Window Washers

Guillaume Mazars Reimagines El Lissitzky’s Horizontal Skyscrapers In Scaffold And LEDs

The Strange World of Scaffolding and Why We’ll Be Seeing More of It

Helicopter filmed hitting scaffolding and tearing itself apart

Insane Workers Assemble Scaffolding

Construction worker left with HALF A HEAD after horrific scaffolding accident has skull rebuilt

Dozens Hurt When NYC Tour Bus Crashes Into Scaffolding

Justin Bieber descends from the scaffolding dressed as an angel

Bubble Wrap Saves Falling Scaffolding Worker

Daredevil rooftop ‘free runners’ shot by airgun sniper as they scaled scaffolding

 

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Movies

The Dark Knight

Ask the Dust

Jurassic Park 3

Fellini’s Roma

Transcendence

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Duncan Jones’s Moon

The Hundred Foot Journey

Louis Malle’s Alamo Bay

Ironclad

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

Safety First

Giant

The Shining

 

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Science fiction

‘Science fiction writers need to build out their worlds with enough detail and system knowledge to provide consistent scaffolding for character behavior, allowing the reader (and the author) to understand the flow of the story logic. It’s often the case that a good portion of the world-building happens behind the scenes — written for the author’s own use, but never showing up directly on the page. But there’s little need for science fiction writers to build their worlds beyond that scaffolding. Futurists need to make as much of their world-building explicitly visible as possible (and here the primary constraint is usually the intersection of limits to report length and limits to reader/client attention); any “behind the scenes” scaffolding risks leaving out critical insights, as often the most important ideas to emerge from foresight work concerns those basic technology drivers and societal dynamics. When a futurist narrative includes a story (with or without a main character), that story serves primarily to illuminate key elements of the internally-consistent, plausible scaffolding. In science fiction, the scaffolding supports the story; in futurism, the story supports the scaffolding.’ — Jamais Cascio

 

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Art

‘Sarah Sze’s mixed-media installation Book of Parts (Centennial) is made up of tiny wood, plaster, felt and string objects that are ‘put on display’ across a large metal scaffolding. The work, dramatically lit, occupies an entire gallery in the museum’s modern and contemporary art section. Sze represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennal.’ — Blouin Art Info

 

‘Highly evocative machines, small planes are capable of stirring up passionate feelings of wanderlust and the romance of travel. They are also symbolic of a particular kind of fearlessness and an individual will we often associate with the long solo voyage. Inspired by tales of journeys on small aircraft, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro have created a new work titled Stasis (2012) for the MCA exhibition. This temporary installation on the Museum’s front lawn consists of a Beechcraft Travel Air suspended in a cube matrix of metal scaffolding. The bright orange plane is held aloft by the scaffolding system, yet also appears to have been captured mid-flight. Positioned with the plane’s nose pointing towards the MCA, its angle of trajectory suggests an ominous result.’ — MCA

 

‘New Zealand artist Mike Hewson and Australian artist Agatha Gothe-Snape recently transformed the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia into an enormous six-storey high public artwork that is part of the of the maintenance scaffolding. Playing with the uneven exterior of the Museum, the work uses dimensional perspective and a clever play on words to create a poetic and intriguing artwork that grows and shrinks and changes in appearance and meaning as scaffolding is assembled and deconstructed.’ — Junk Culture

 

Olafur Eliasson, Reversed waterfall, 1998, Scaffolding, steel, water, foil, wood, hose, and pump
122 4/5 x 109 2/5 x 63″ (312 x 278 x 160 cm)

 

‘Ben Long’s evolving series of Scaffolding Sculptures examines the value of hard graft associated with manual employment and describes the process of work as a methodical, cumulative endeavor. Inspired by his experiences working on building sites as a teenager, Long constructed the first of his Scaffolding Sculptures in 2004 after two years of development for this ambitious series of artworks.’ — belong.co.uk

 

‘New York City-based artist Olaf Breuning displayed his latest artwork for a series entitled Smoke Bombs at the 2012 Fiac contemporary art fair in Paris. For his series, Breuning photographed exploding pigment that he placed along scaffolding in the street.’ — Enpundit

 

‘Allan Weller’s Scaffold Furniture (1988) isolates the components of the dining table without the structure of the table. A chair’s seat and back float on a skeleton of scaffolding. Surrounding the chair is a plate, cup, glass, napkin, knife, fork, spoon and a lamp. Each is held with minimal support. Scaffolding is an element I use often to isolate and define. It is important to the understanding of process. Scaffolding floats an object in space and is crucial to the process of construction in architecture.’ — allanwexlerstudio.com

 

‘Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s In-Habit: Project Another Country (2012) is a floor-to-ceiling installation of miniature cardboard condominiums supported by steel scaffolding. The work has connections to the artist-duo’s own lives, it was inspired by the fragile houses and itinerant existence of the marginalized Badjao people, who live scattered across several islands of the Sulu Archipelago in the southwestern Philippines, and on the northern shores of Borneo. Living mainly in fragile stilt houses on the margins of the ocean, which both provides sustenance and contributes to its cultural identity, the Badjao community doesn’t conform to a modern state’s expectations of its citizenry or to the demands of a liberal economy.’ — artasiapacific.com

 

‘French artist Christian Boltanski’s CHANCE is an immense and complex installation – it’s like a oversize filmstrip running on large scaffolding so it looks like a giant film projector or newspaper press. You walk underneath and inside the scaffolding with a large filmstrip moving through it. The filmstrip is a series of photographs of newborn babies, taken from birth notices in Polish newspapers. There’s also two digital clocks which show the number of births and deaths across the world in real-time. Every evening at midnight, these clocks provide the figures for the day and tally a summary of births and deaths.’ — sydneycool.com.au

 

‘Architects HWKN have won this year’s MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program competition and will install a giant spiky structure that cleans the air in the courtyard of the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York. Nylon fabric will be stretched across a grid of scaffolding to create the pointy arms of the installation, which is to be named Wendy.’ — dezeen.com

 

‘In the late 1980s Noland began a series of sculptures and installations examining the masculine underpinnings of the American dream, embodied in men’s beer consumption. Crate of Beer (1989) is a wire-mesh basket full of empty Budweiser cans. In her 1989 untitled installation at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Noland stacked six-packs of Budweiser atop one another. Metal scaffolding transformed these mountains of alcohol into a construction site. For the artist, Bud cans are as potent an American symbol as Old Glory, both being red, white, and blue.’ — Box Vox

 

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere came to international prominence in 2003 at the Venice Biennale where she exhibited The Black Horse—a monumental, abjectly deformed figure covered in glossy horse hide. She specialises in sculpture in various media including wax, wood, wool, iron, lead, horse skin and hair. Be they human, equine or vegetal, her nightmarish sculptural displacements conjure and reflect upon suffering and vulnerability, love and brutality, loneliness and memory. De Bruyckere’s most recent work consists of horse figures on scaffolding.’ — undo.net

 

Graham Hudson The Ruins, 2009, scaffold, pallets, ladders, 5 x turntables, on off timer and light chaser, cm 540x540x540

 

‘Diana Al-Hadid’s multi-tiered and gravity-defying sculptures suggest time, space, human presence and absence. Simultaneously earthy and otherworldly, Al-Hadid’s work reverberates with architectural and natural forms that are both familiar and foreign. Nolli’s Orders (2012), the central work in this exhibition, is an enormous sculpture composed of a series of terraces and scaffolding onto which are affixed cloud-like structures and headless bodies.’ — art HOPPER

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! No problem. I had that recently when brown water started pouring down one of my walls, the one over my desk/computer unfortunately, but, in that case, it was the upstairs neighbors’ fucked up shower, and it similarly ruined a day. Wait, new SCAB!!!! Everyone, High alert! Dominik’s amazing zine SCAB has a new, very long awaited issue for you to devour absolutely free of charge right here! I just took my first peek, but there are all kinds of treasures there by the likes of the great Alex Rose, Ellie Chou, Jamie Giles, Nichols Alexander Hayes, Shane Allison, and tons of others. This is huge. Go there, I implore you, for your own sakes. So exciting! The technical screening went well. We have to do just a little adjusting of the sound design and a bit of color fiddling, but it looked great. It was so exciting to see it on a real movie theater screen. Zac and I were thrilled. Ha, that was the last time I picked up a hitchhiker or let anyone I was riding in a car with pick one up, yes. No surprise that love has a musical prodigy-type ass. Love reading SCAB from ‘cover’ to ‘cover’, G. ** Charalampos, Hi, thank you. I never saw the final River film either for similarly instinctual reasons. ‘Five Easy Pieces’ is highly recommended. I’m not sure that I understand how that phrases thing works, but it sounds exciting. Love from spookily early spring-like Paris. ** Allegra, Oh, okay, Well, I’ll check it out and give you a report then or Facetime with you from inside or something. I haven’t been playing on Switch because I forced myself not to plug it in because I’ve been too busy and afraid of distracting myself, but, when I do restart in the next days, I will begin to catch up by playing the latest Paper Mario game. I’m happy you read and liked ‘HHU’. I’m fond that one. Keith Mayerson’s art is so great in it. No, I haven’t read that bio. Hm, maybe. That is one hell of a poetry line, yes, wow. Oh, and it’s by Martin Wong. I haven’t read that book, but I quite like his paintings. Thanks, pal. ** Barkley, Hey, hey! Well, the tradition is that a film has a premiere at a film festival, so we’ll be waiting to see which one accepts it. Then you have to find distributors. I think our producer is looking for a French one now, and then we’ll try in the US. A lot of waiting and hoping and worrying, not the best part. I’ve never read ‘Dhalgren’, which is weird, I guess. I’m never drawn to sci-fi related fiction naturally for some unknown reason, I have to make a real effort. No doubt it’s really something since all the smart people think so. So good to see you! ** Justin, Hi, J. She’s in a bunch of good films as well as quite a number of fun bad films. Thanks about ‘SoH’! No, I don’t know Matthew Schiavello’s work, but that glimpse you gave me is intriguing, so I’ll investigate. Thanks a lot. All good so far this week? ** _Black_Acrylic, Yay! New PT and SCAB on the same day. Whoa! Everyone, _Black_Acrylic’s imperative podcast/music fest Play Therapy is back with a new episode, and, as always, I beseech you to indulge in its foxy, propulsive pleasures because you all deserve that. It’s here. Thanks, B. Counting the minutes until I can push that arrow. ** Joe, Hi, Joe, hi, pal! Oh, that makes so much sense that you like Metcalf. How interesting, sure. My favorite, like yours, is ‘Waters of Potowmack’. Back when I was doing my lit zine Little Caesar in the early 80s, I had the honor of publishing a piece of that novel before it was published. I’d never heard of him before it was submitted, and I was, like, holy shit! He’s so incredible, no? Nothing like it. I’ve read, I think, four of his books and adored all of them. One of these decades he’s going to be finally proclaimed as a genius by the upper literary echelon. Thanks about the adjustments. It’s going really well. I’m super excited. Everything good with you? Thanks so much for coming in. Always a real boon and joy. xo, me. ** Steve, I was a total Chemical Imbalance junkie. The screening was good. We can see the finish line, and it’s very close. Amazing that there’s someone who not only looks like Phil Lynott but can ‘be’ him. Singular looking guy. ** Bill, It went well, thanks, Bill. Well, I can understand why that film of hers that springs to mind and outdistances the one that doesn’t, personally. ** Cap’m, Hey there, Cap’m! I hope yours seas are calm. Well, not too calm, ‘cos … zzzz. How the hell are you? ** Darby😋, Hi. Oh, shit, well, I’ll concentrate on the new desk, being an eternal optimist and everything. Congrats! I agree about the ‘cute’ animal possessiveness issue. People suck, says the eternal optimist. I remember your stinky, annoying roommate, and I’m glad she’s history. I’m only not a weirdo vegan anti-meat-eater because I eat cheese, I guess? Weekend was alright, nothing too celebratory to speak of, but no stressing out, which is, you know, good. I have a total weird fear of a needle accidentally being stuck in one of my arteries, I guess because a junkie friend of mine died that way. Eek, I don’t want to think about that. I get goosebumps, not the good kind. ** Mark, Happy happy morning after birthday! My friend Benjamin Weissman was talking at length about Trulee Hall in a Zoom I had with him and other friends on Saturday. I need to check out her work. How’s the bio unfolding? Enjoy your new age, man. ** Guy, Hi. It went well, thanks. Oh, you wrote ‘Hbu’ which I assumed meant ‘how be you’, and so I wrote ‘Ibok’ as shorthand for ‘I be ok’. And it took me seven tries before my spellcheck stopped correcting that to ‘iBook’. Anyway, mystery solved? ** Nick., *Kaboom* Nice, the road trip. I miss road trips. Zac and I are talking about taking a road trip to Scandinavia. The important thing is that you’re being booted up. I think I’m still a huge child, or, no, huge teenager because I’m not especially emotional or whiny. What’s up with me is just mostly finishing the film. Getting close though. Life may return soon. My last sweet treat … does a pain chocolat count? Probably not. Then … a Pixie Stick. A friend bought one for me. Boy, it was good. The purple one. Welcome home. ** Uday, Hey. People knelt before you! I can’t remember the last time anyone knelt before me. Maybe never. So, wow, score, even it was under false pretences. What’s next, you? ** Okay. Today scaffolding finally, finally gets its day in the sun of my blog. See you tomorrow.