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| Construction Manager of the Year Medal Winner Skanska UK’s project manager Bill Brock has received a Construction Manager of the Year Gold Medal from the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB). Bill Brock received the award in the category for projects in the £20 – 45 Million range for his management of the construction of the Radisson SAS Hotel at Stansted Airport. It was thanks to Bill Brock that this project got off the ground at all. With airport owner BAA and the client Radisson SAS at loggerheads on the number of beds they wanted in the hotel (500 and 350, respectively), Bill brokered an agreement: to build 350 in phase I and then proceed immediately into phase II and another 150 beds. A hotel naturally involves modular construction, but Bill took offsite to new heights on this project. The original programme allotted nine weeks for the traditional construction of the atrium roof, but Bill installed a complete roof panel instead, containing everything from weathering membrane to prefinished soffit, which had the whole area covered in five days, eliminated ceiling works, satisfied the airport's strict acoustic requirements, and allowed work to proceed rapidly in the building below, including the installation of storey-height plasterboard and spray-applied plaster. Innovations included clamping a predrilled steel safety plate to the soffit of each slab to cover the holes required for the building's 250 service risers and help to support the fire infill; this was Bill's idea and worked extremely well. He also designed a cage to take the bathroom pods to the edge of each bedroom, where they could be rolled off into position. This helped keep manual handling to a minimum and offered an excellent solution to getting the pods into the building on a site where cranes were banned because of planes taking off and landing. Departing from the typical horizontal build sequence of completing blocks from one end of the structure to the other, Bill progressed works vertically instead, from the ground up to roof level in each of the sections into which he divided each of the hotel's three blocks. With such a large number of rooms to build, he insisted on a complete-as-you-go ethos from trades subcontractors to prevent problems stacking up later in the project. Bill's control of this project was so emphatic that he was even able to accommodate the client's introduction of a 13m-high glass wine tower nine months in without affecting his planned completion of construction seven weeks earlier than specified in the contract. write your comments about the article :: © 2005 Construction News :: home page |