An 18,088 square foot middle school facility for the Blue Ridge Independent School District, Blue Ridge, Texas opened the 2011/2012 school year this past Monday (8/29/2011). The building utilizes Ramtech’s Accelerated Building System which provides the speed, quality, and flexibility of prefabricated building components combined with the durability of an engineered slab-on-grade concrete foundation. (more…)
The TASA/TASB Convention on September 29, 2011 will be held at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX. Since 1960, the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) and the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) have partnered to bring school board members and school administrators the state’s premier education-related convention. With more than 6,000 attendees, the TASA/TASB Convention draws attendees from three-quarters of the state’s 1,034 school districts. (more…)
As Ramtech moves ahead with the development of our hybrid construction program joining the Accelerated Building System (ABS) permanent modular building method with other forms of site construction, we took a look back at some previous steel building system and ABS projects to learn how the facilities were performing for three particular clients in the education, healthcare, and commercial environments. (more…)
Ramtech Building Systems has for 30 years utilized a unique approach to design-build construction. It combines the advantages of the design-build delivery system with the benefits of Ramtech’s vertical integration and its Accelerated Building System (ABS). By doing so, Ramtech can provide a building with the look and feel of site-built construction, with a number of distinct advantages. (more…)
There have been discussions recently around the blogosphere that point to some evidence that the use of the design-build delivery system for construction has been declining lately, specifically on federal projects. The transparency requirements and reliance on ‘fixed-priced’ contracts from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka The Stimulus Act) were originally, and erroneously, thought to have restricted the use of design-build. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has also been cited as one agency that is pulling back from design-build. But is this the case for the federal government as a whole? Recent reports like this one indicate that it isn’t, and if you factor in the number of states that have adopted and changed their laws allowing it, design-build delivery would seem to have a pretty bright future. (more…)