News in Brief: July/August 2010

Amendments to the Housing Grants, Construction and Regen-eration Act 1996 (the Construction Act) were passed by Parliament in November last year as Part 8 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) has recently concluded a consulta-tion on what consequential amendments will be needed to the Scheme for Construction Contracts, the secondary legis-lation which provides a default adjudication procedure and pay-ment provisions. More informa-tion can be found  on the BIS website at www.bis.gov.uk/Consultations/construction-contracts-regulations-1998-amendments?cat=open. The amendments to the Construction Act are expected to be brought into force next year.

Tekla software has been used in the structural design and cons-truction of the stadiums of this year’s FIFA World Cup which took place in South Africa. Of the ten arenas for the world’s most watched sports event, three have been modelled using the Tekla Structures 3D BIM (Building Information Modelling) software. A total of five completely new stadiums were built for the Cup. Two of them, the Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit and the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth, were modelled using Tekla Structures. In addition, the modeling of the Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, renovat-ed for the Cup, was made with Tekla software.

Last month’s (June) issue of New Steel Construction had an error on news page 7 under the headline of Olympic venues on track during busiest year. The final sentence of the story should have read: ‘The steelwork packages for the Stadium and the Aquatics Centre have been completed by Watson Steel Structures and Rowecord Engineering respectively, using a total of 12,800t of structural steel.’