Thursday, January 22, 2015
Need-to-Know Building Terms
Builder Magazine: In a text-filled world where everything is abbreviated, no one ever spells anything out. At IBS, it’s no different. Here’s our quick go-to glossary of building acronyms you should know while walking around the show floor
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4 comments:
Our industry has TMA (to many acronyms), and when I clicked on this article I was hoping for actual terms and not just acronyms. I thought it was going to be cool things like an obscure type of screw or some random technique or joint. Instead it was a list of acronyms that didn’t mean all that much to me and that were not really related to theatre. I thought that some of the interlocking and modular building systems that were compared to Legos were cool, and it would be cool to try to incorporate the principles of those systems into theatre, but the rest didn’t mean anything to me. The insulation acronyms and the energy stuff had little relevance to me, and I didn’t really learn anything worth knowing from the list. I don’t know a lot about building stuff, so I was hoping that these terms would be cool an interesting terms, but it was just letters. I was excited that I knew what OSB stood for, because it meant that I knew at least one of the terms on the list.
This is a pretty handy glossary if not just to be used to expand familiarity with materials and forms of measurements in the industrial world. I would always get so frustrated at lighting, media and sound for having so many acronyms and terminologies that I just could not understand. But now building has their very own! I feel like most of these terms would be used in construction instead of theatre, but I can imagine some usage of these terms when it comes to fire retardant materials and CFM, when related to pneumatics and really any classifier on the list. I am not the most fluent in technical and building terminology, but this list could be a step in the right direction. Sure, I learn new words just from working, but they’re not always the clearest in definition when learning them on the fly. Maybe I can study more words like this for a clearer definition and understanding.
This glossary of terms was actually an interesting inside peek into the world of building, which is something that I do not experience very often in my time at CMU Drama. Architecture and building structures in general are a large fascination of mine, so reading all these different terms on what goes into making a building was pretty cool. I suppose if nothing else, knowing at least a couple of these acronyms might help you read the occasional construction document with slightly greater facility. That being said, I hope not to run into any Optimum Value Engineering in the near future! Building industry aside, there are certainly at least of few of these that we run into in the Theatre world. CFM, FRT, and GFCI are all things that I have run into over the course of my time in the Theatre world. I'm honestly more interested in hearing about the International Builder's Show. I have never heard of that conference, but I can imagine it must be pretty neat with all the new technology in that industry coming online.
A friend of mine mentioned to me that there are three levels of engineering. There is precisely engineered, in which case one does rigorous analysis of the system to be built, and designs the components to meet the requirements. There is over-engineered, where you put components together without much analysis, but you are sure that everything is far too strong for this system anyway. And there is value engineered, where the minimum amount of materials are used so that the system is in a state of just about to fail, but not. The acronym OVE seems to not have the negative connotation of value engineering, but it is good to know that this is an official term, and not just a humorous anecdote. The other thing that seemed odd to me, was that there were several acronyms on this list that have no explanation, they explained what the rating systems were for, but not what the name was.
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