It's certainly not your average building project by any stretch of the imagination – a 2.2 million-square-foot, open-air sports facility with a contract value in excess of $1 billion, boasting 82,500 stadium seats and 217 luxury suites, and utilizing 3,000 pieces of precast concrete and 23,000 tons of structural steel during construction.
Add to that a variety of complicated elements – such as the installation of a state-of-the-art NFL spectator experience that features impressive video, sound and light displays, an enormous outreach effort to increase individual and business diversity on the project, the installation of an elaborate food service operation, the management of a comprehensive program related to environmentally sustainable "green" design and construction practices and much more – and you get the construction of the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey for the National Football League's (NFL) New York Giants and the New York Jets. The account gets even more interesting when you learn that the design-build lead, Skanska USA Building, will be completing the project months earlier than the original, aggressive design-build schedule of 36 months.
But we're getting ahead of the story.
In the beginning
The New York Giants and the New York Jets have shared the Giants' football stadium (opened in 1977) in East Rutherford, N.J., since 1984. In recent years, the teams decided they wanted to go it alone and build their own new high-tech venues. The teams worked with separate design firms to develop these new facilities, to be located on the grounds of the existing stadium (for the Giants) and on Manhattan's West Side (for the Jets). It was a story of twos – two sports teams, two projects, two design teams and two project sites. If the Biblical Noah had been around, there would not have been room on the ark for the huge cast of characters.
Ultimately, though, the Jets did not get approval from the local community for their Upper West Side project. The two teams then decided to partner again, but this time, they would build a new stadium: the New Meadowlands Stadium, which is the first facility ever built to accommodate two NFL teams.
As soon as the teams agreed to go forward with the project, they were eager to move construction along at a fast pace. The project owner, a joint venture of the two teams – named New Meadowlands Stadium, LLC – chose the design-build delivery method because it had the most positive implications with regard to the need for extreme speed and the formation of a cohesive and integrated professional building team. Further, design-build offered the client greater cost certainty and greater assurance of timely completion because both the project price and the project schedule, respectively, would be set before design was completed. Stated succinctly by Mark Lamping, president and CEO of the New Meadowlands Stadium, "We operate an entertainment venue. There is no margin of error for being late or being over budget. Speed to market is essential in our business. Skanska delivered a well-thought-out plan, backed up by top-notch leadership and management."
Hurry up!
Once Skanska USA Building secured the job, things happened very quickly, recalls Skanska's Frank Falciani, senior vice president and project executive. "We hit the ground literally at 100 miles per hour," he says. "At this point in the job, we are putting in $30-40 million of work in place each month."
The assignment included sister company Skanska USA Civil as a subcontractor to Skanska USA Building for the structural steel, a contract worth $150 million. "Since structural steel fabrication and erection were on the critical path, timely delivery was vital to the owner," says Falciani. "By partnering with USA Civil, we demonstrated how Skanska can self-perform, control the critical path and provide better overall value to the client."
Other key partners on the job were Ewing Cole, Philadelphia, the executive architect, architect-of-record and mechanical, plumbing and electrical engineer-of-record, and Thornton-Tomasetti, New York, the structural engineer. Craig Schmitt, RA, principal at Ewing Cole and actual architect of record himself (responsible for signing thousands of individual drawings), stated, "I've been involved in large-scale sports venues in the past, but Meadowlands is on a spectacular scale at breathtaking speed. It is not for the faint of heart."
Anjana Kadakia, PE, principal-in-charge at Thorton-Tomasetti and herself a veteran of many stadium projects, noted: "The entire design-build team had great rapport; we were empowered to trust one another and collaborate. There was much to be done in such a short period of time. We had to rely on one another."
Steel and speed were important considerations from the project's start. Before Skanska's design team had even completed construction documents – actually, in the earliest phase of schematic design and on very limited documentation – the firm's purchasing team ordered 6,000 tons of steel from a mill in Belgium, before the concern shut down operations for a year to retool. It was the right decision, considering that the mill was the only one in the world that could produce steel in the large sizes specified for the new stadium. The early purchase demonstrated the project owner's absolute seriousness about the project and Skanska's ability to rally its design-build team to make early and accurate decisions.
The momentum continued. Thousands of drawings, tens of thousands of pages of specifications and multiple bid packages were produced in a short period of time at the project's start. Ewing Cole and Thornton-Tomasetti combined herculean efforts to process and exchange information in record time, using special software and speedy electronic file transfer. Expedited permits were sought and obtained. Adding another layer of complexity to the job, the new stadium is being built within an entertainment complex with an operating race track, arena and the existing Giants Stadium football stadium itself, the latter a mere 34 feet away from the new stadium. Events are being held somewhere on the property almost every day, if not multiple times a day.
Mobilization, procurement, management
The building team mobilized its onsite operations quickly, barring no expense to put building professionals on the ground early so site preparations could begin. "We came in like the cavalry," says Tom Webb, Skanska's vice president and deputy project executive, with a smile. "But it was the right thing to do. We were able to accomplish a great deal in a short period of time. We had to drive 5,000 pilings and we finished early. The point was to set the tone early and never let up."
The project team also had to contend with a number of on-site challenges at the beginning of work, including unmapped sub-surface conditions and abatement of hazardous materials. The Meadowlands site had once been a dumping ground for every known unexpected item, including demolished house debris, old cars and sand and muck dredging from the bottom of the Hudson River. It was all found and disposed of properly. What was not found were the remains of slain union labor leader Jimmy Hoffa (a popular urban myth placed his remains at this location), but plenty of site workers dutifully searched for him as the site was opened up.
Meanwhile, a massive procurement effort was in high gear. Skanska maintained a full-time team of professionals on-site – not at a nearby office – to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trade contractor packages, materials and labor sources needed to build the stadium. Trade packages were so large that multiple trade contractors were selected for the same type of work – multiple mechanical, plumbing and electrical firms, etc. – to mitigate potential risks of performance problems. Plus, multiple trade contractors introduced the notion of friendly competition – while the firms were all on the same team for the common good, they clearly did not want to be outdone by their peers and that made them all work even harder. It was football, after all, and teams like to compete!
With such an enormous, fast-paced project, careful attention to design management was crucial, says David Kaplan, AIA, LEED AP, lead design manager at Skanska. "We manage professional service providers to maximize efficiency and timeliness, or, as we say, Ôto feed the construction machine.' The fully integrated process borrows from lean manufacturing business techniques so that every design professional partner is ready and able to do their part at the precise time it matters to advance the project." Kaplan added, "No one should be distracted by door hardware when foundations or exterior walls are the urgent needs du jour."
Skanska maintains a full-time, in-house staff of licensed design professionals – architects and engineers – whose responsibility is to aggressively manage professional design practitioners for design-build projects. The mission, though, is really about building partnerships and integrating and coordinating processes on small and large aspects of a project. For instance, in this case, that translated into adding tens of millions of dollars worth of technologically advanced visual displays and scoreboards, a distributed sound system, way-finding graphics and signage, thousands of food service pieces of equipment and specialty advertising elements AFTER the design process was substantially complete. All key members of the construction and design team, including engineers, architects, interior designers, trade contractors and the project owner's representatives, attended sessions on a weekly and sometimes several-times-a-week basis so they could communicate about current issues and iron out any difficulties or questions that arose. As Kaplan glibly noted, "It was intense."
Technology scores
To more optimally manage the project schedule, quality and budget, the team used several technologically advanced approaches, all of which were utilized in conjunction for the first time.
Virtual design and construction (VDC) and building information modeling (BIM), important three-dimensional visualization tools, were used for clash detection and prevention. By employing these tools, the team was able to further speed up the schedule without sacrificing quality and also increased collaboration among project partners.
3D steel modeling was created by the structural engineer Thornton-Tomasetti, then used by the detailer, then used by the fabricator, simultaneously coordinated with the architect, in the generation of more than 16,000 shop drawings for steel members. The sometimes-traditional hierarchical organizational process would not do. The intensity of collaboration based upon mutual respect and trust was extraordinary.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging was chosen to track the 3,000 pieces of precast concrete being manufactured and shipped from two plants. A microchip with an antenna was attached to precast elements at the beginning of production. When a piece was scanned, tracking reports were produced, a 3D computer model was updated and field staff were able to determine where an individual piece of precast was in the overall construction process. In fact, Skanska was nominated for an award based on the innovative use of existing materials management technology – that is, RFID – to track precast concrete on the job.
Conclusions and lessons learned
Many decisions contributed to the success of this project to date, such as selecting the most appropriate delivery method; choosing the right team; procuring long lead time items swiftly; mobilizing onsite operations quickly; putting the right management tools in place; using the best that technology has to offer; conducting top-notch outreach and other programs to increase diversity on the project; making sustainability a high priority and putting a stringent safety program in place. As a result, the team has been able to not only meet an aggressive, 36-month schedule, but will be able to better it by an amazing four months by delivering this remarkable project to the owner in December 2009.
There are always lessons learned on projects. Some key takeaways for the Skanska team on this stadium were:
- Spare no expense, resource or human capital during the construction start-up phase.
- Get the culture right early and formalize the design-build partnership and respective roles and responsibilities as ambiguity costs precious time and money.
- Understand that the inability to make a decision – or no decision – is worse than the wrong decision.
Perhaps the most significant lesson learned is that despite – or in addition to – the best available technological tools, nothing replaces good old-fashioned hard work, planning and leadership. The stadium project team has proven what kind of superior results can be achieved with the total commitment of team members. Indeed, that strategy was all-important in making this assignment a success.
About the author: Jim L. Whitaker, AIA, DBIA, is a 20+-year veteran of design-build project delivery. Trained, licensed and practiced as an architect, he is now charged to implement design-build best practices and project development nationwide for Skanska. Whitaker has been involved in numerous large-scale, fast-track design-build projects, most recently the $1-billion New Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. He is a requested speaker by industry groups, universities and professional firms, where he is recognized as an expert in design-build, alternative careers for design professionals, effective teaming strategies and efficient dispute resolution.