Los Angeles city leaders and officials broke ground last Tuesday at LAX’s Terminal 1 to signify the start of a $508 million modernization project. The thirty year-old terminal is the busiest terminal at the airport as it handled 9.65 million travelers in 2013. In addition to renovating Terminal 1, LAX has also been upgrading other parts of the airport including the new $1.9 billion Tom Bradley International Airport, Terminal 6, and parts of the airfield to accommodate larger planes. The projects are expected to create 4,000 construction jobs as well as 2,000 new concession jobs at the airport.

The Minnesota Vikings announced last week that they plan to add $19.7 million to their contribution towards building a new stadium for the NFL team. Vikings Vice President Lester Bagley made the announcement at the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA) meeting in Minneapolis alongside John Wood with Mortenson Construction and MSFA chair Michele Kelm-Helgen. The additional funding means the Minnesota Vikings have now contributed $526 million towards the new facility which has a total price tag of over a billion dollars. Lester Bagley announced that the extra funding was to counter the rising price of steel and ensure all of the items from the original plan were built on time. There is roughly 7,000 tons of steel in the stadium’s external shell. The steel was budgeted at $4,800 per ton but is now costing closer to $6,000 per ton.

Chicago Ironworker Danny Drozd has spent 13 years working on various jobs around the city of Chicago including the Trump Tower, McCormick Place, and other skyscrapers.  He realized he had a tough time explaining to his friends what an ironworker does so he decided to attach a GoPro to his helmet one day and show what them what his day at work is like at his newest project.  Last week he posted the video to Youtube and it already has 300,000 views.

A new $900 million, 740-foot skyscraper is being proposed for Boston’s Financial District. If approved, the skyscraper would be the tallest building in the Financial District and the third tallest building in the city. Entrepreneur Steve Belkin is hoping to receive approval for the tower after failing to receive enough interest or funding for a 1,000-foot building at the same location in 2006. If built, the complex would include office and retail space, a 300-room hotel, and possibly condominiums on the upper floors. The tower would be one of a few skyscrapers built in the area since the 1980s.

An animation was released last week showing what a ride on the world’s tallest roller coaster will feel like. The 570-foot roller coaster called “Skyscraper” will be built in Orlando, Florida and will open in 2017. It was designed by Orlando-based architectural firm HHCP and will be built by Eufforia. The “Skyscraper” will be built on top of a new 495,000 square-foot shopping and entertainment complex on Orlando’s International Drive. Once completed, the roller coaster will overtake the 465-foot tall Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey as the world’s tallest roller coaster. Construction is set to begin early next year and take two years to complete.

CNN recently compiled a list of the world’s tallest buildings scheduled for completion in 2015. The top ten list is dominated by China and the Middle east which each having four and three representatives on the list respectively. The Vostok Tower and the OSO-South Tower, both being built in Moscow, provide Russia with two buildings on the list, and North America’s lone representative comes from 432 Park Avenue in New York City.

The ten-foot thick foundation mat for Comcast’s new Innovation and Technology Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was successfully poured on Saturday. Concrete contractor B. Pietrini & Sons started pouring the foundation around 1 a.m on Saturday and finished roughly twelve hours later. The contractor coordinated 50 concrete trucks making over 400 deliveries to the jobsite on Saturday morning making the building’s foundation one of the largest concrete pours in Philadelphia history.

Six years after California voters approved a $9.9 billion bond act to help finance a high-speed rail line between that eventually will carry riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles. California Governor Jerry Brown and other officials led a ceremony in downtown Fresno on Tuesday to mark the start of construction for the project. Instead of picking up shovels and scooping a pile of dirt like many groundbreaking ceremonies, the Governor instead decided to sign a ceremonial steel rail. Although the ceremonial start to construction took place on Tuesday, major construction is still likely weeks away. According to High-Speed Rail Authority board chairman Dan Richard, “We are entering a period of sustained construction on the nation’s first high-speed rail system for the next five years in the Central Valley, and in the decade beyond that, we will be building across California.”  The first segment will cost $6 billion and be completed in 2018.  It will connect Merced to Bakersfield.

This Sunday the Seattle Seahawks will host the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship game. Many believe Seattle has one of the best home field advantage’s in the NFL due to the amount of noise their fans create. While it is not one of the largest stadiums in the NFL, Seattle’s CenturyLink Field is certainly the loudest.  This weekend, representatives from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network will be studying the stadium for earthquake research. They plan on placing three seismometers around the stadium including one near the top of the stadium and one near the ground.

New building features with innovative places for students to hide from a mass shooting will be established in a Michigan school.