Construction sites: types and specific peculiarities

Yards, construction sites, dockyards … we all know, more or less, what one refers to when speaking about this, but most people do not know the peculiarities of these workplaces and would describe a yard simply as a wide space where you can find scaffoldings, workers wearing a yellow helmet and unidentified equipments.

In order to clear your mind about yards, their peculiarities and the differences among the various types of yards and construction sites, here you find a brief and simple excursus. Let’s begin with the definition of the term: a construction site or yard might be described as a temporary workplace where buildings or infrastructures are assembled using specific tools and equipments that are to be found open air. The things that are assembled and built inside a yard or construction site can be of various types: houses, other types of buildings, ships and much more, and it is on the base of the type of works that are built in these sites that we can speak about different types of yards or construction sites: building sites, shipyards (or dockyards), plant construction and aircraft construction. It might be enough to read these terms to understand what is built and assembled in each of these spaces, but here we are going to try to describe more thoroughly the peculiarities of these different spaces, as well as the roles played by the different categories of workers and employees that work in them.

Let us begin with the first type, the building site. This is where various types of buildings, houses and palaces are built, and this is probably the first category that comes to the mind of most if us, when we think about this subject. First of all, we must say that the management of a building site includes two essential and different steps: the first one is the preparatory one and includes the distribution of tools and equipments as well as the acceptance, check and storage of the materials that are necessary for the construction; the latter step is the phase of construction, and includes many different stages, like the erection of scaffoldings and the installation of materials. And who works in these sites? Although the only image that many people have in their mind is that of a worker wearing a yellow helmet, in a building site you can find many different types of professionals, from the project manager, who has to verify that the project is carried out in the correct way, to the workers that are in charge of mounting scaffoldings, from wall, window, door and furniture decorators to the experts of hydraulic and electrical systems. And the list might be much longer than that!

But now let’s speak about the other types of yards. Plant construction refers to the realization of big plants (power, chemical and nuclear plants, for example). Shipyards or dockyards are where ships are built and where professionals like welders, carpenters, mechanics and electricians work. Aircraft construction refers to the realization of civil and military aircraft indoor.