Bring On Da' Bling

By William J. Angelo, Editor-in-Chief

	ANGELO

We live in a world that is in constant pursuit of glamour. From movies, fashion, jewelry, magazines, houses, cars, antiques to even such pedestrian items as bottles, almost everything has a glamorous element. And design-build is no exception. Besides delivering well-known time and cost savings advantages to owners, design-builders have also produced some very glamorous projects or, working in tandem with owners, have come up with some elegant solutions to nettlesome problems. Either way design-build can rightfully be called "design-bling."

Our cover story about the new Inn of the Mountain Gods Casino and Lodge is an example. Situated on the Sacramento Mountains located about 200 miles south of Albuquerque, this stunningly beautiful complex features a casino, hotel, convention center and spa as well as the largest underground steel parking structure in the U.S. It is owned and operated by the Mescalero Apache Tribe on their sovereign land and honors its Native American and southwestern heritage by boldly blending structure and décor into a glamorous package. The team of Centex Construction and WorthGroup thought long and hard about the $149-million project and it shows.

A different example of glamour can be found in England where government officials came up with an elegant solution to address their pressing transportation design issues–they decided to use design-build project delivery and brought the design-builders into the process earlier in order to get a better handle on costs and final design. One of their new projects is a $145-million finance-build-operate bridge linking an industrialized island port with the Greater London Metropolitan Area. This 19-span 1.25-km long structure eliminates a critical bottleneck created every time the existing Kingsferry vertical-lift bridge rises for frequent boat traffic.

Carillion PLC, a large Wolverhampton-based construction group leads a team of familiar U.K. firms to build this low-profile bridge, which is approved by the Royal Fine Arts Commission.

In College Park, Ga., first-time design-builders Southern Construction Group and Doherty Sommers Architects Engineers Inc.–firms barely a year old– teamed with Airport Builders Group to come up with a simple yet functionally elegant solution to building a pilot training facility for Alteon Training LLC, a Boeing subsidiary. Computer rooms, classrooms, offices and the flight simulator hall provide a jewel-case setting for five flight simulators that will hone the professional skills of some of America’s best pilots. The novice team came in $1 million under budget and had the facility working in less than 10 months.

As we did last year, we also are presenting our annual listing of the Top 250 design-builders–industry trend setters that routinely push schedule and technology envelopes to deliver better quality projects. Based on Engineering News-Record’s Top 100 survey, our Top 250 had impressive 2004 collective revenue of $52 billion.

Finally, we have a new feature, a Technical Viewpoint on the design and construction of the massive Rion Bridge spanning the Gulf of Corinth in Greece. William Welburn, contracts manager for Vinci Construction Grands Projets, which design-built the five-span cable-stayed structure, writes a finely detailed piece about an engineered beauty that will long endure.

As members of design-build teams, we may not all get to work on signature projects, but we can all work together to find elegant solutions to common or unique project problems. That’s the beauty of design-build. So whatever your interest–speed, schedule, cost or glamour– these stories have something for everyone.

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