The Construction Research Laboratory is an amazing, one-of-a-kind place located in a gritty, industrial area of Miami.

Since 1975, companies like mine (Builders Architectural) have built and tested portions of buildings (usually windows and large walls of glass called "curtainwalls") at this world-renowned facility.

After testing is complete, the actual building will be built "for real" almost anywhere in the world, utilizing knowledge learned here.

The process is called building and testing a "mockup", and sometimes these mockups can be 40 feet wide and 60 feet tall! World-famous proprietor A.A. Sahknovsky - Sak to most everybody - though clearly no spring chicken, unstoppably shuttles between numerous mockups. Sak directs his able crews in the construction, deconstruction and configuration of all manners of custom-made testing chambers, the large reinforced steel and concrete boxes upon which mockups are built.

From the Palmetto Expressway just North of the 74th Avenue exit, you can see the lab off to the West. From the random outcroppings of structural steel, you immediately assumes the site to be unrepaired devastation from the most recent hurricane.

Looking closer, however, you notice that the steel has an odd appearance. Some pieces old, some new. It is more of a patchwork quilt made of conglomerated hunks of steel, wood and concrete.

The vintage steel has been used, reused, and used again. It has been cut, moved, welded, cut, drilled, sealed, cut apart, craned and bolted. It has seen searing Florida sun, torrential rainfalls, and uncountable tests.

Now about the tests...
A typical test sequence for a prominent building in Chicago would list as follows:


    Air Infiltration,
    Static Water Penetration,
    Dynamic Water Penetration,
    Uniform Load Deflection,
    Retesting of Air and Water,
    Structural Overload.


A brief explanation of each will be worth your while. Remember that each mockup is sealed to a reinforced steel box. This allows the lab to use big blowers to force air into or out of the chamber and apply powerful forces to the test specimen.

Air Infiltration

Lab personnel remove air from the chamber with a blower while measuring the amount of air it is removing to maintain test pressure, often 6.24 psf (pounds per square foot), the equivalent of a 50 mph wind. Using plastic film sequentially applied, the lab determines how much air is passing through each element of the mockup.

Air tests can be harbingers of results to come, so we participants tend to hold our breaths awaiting the outcome.