When Trainor went bankrupt, it had not completed fabrication of the solar blades. Skanska ended up hiring a Raleigh firm, Accurate Machine and Tool Co., to complete the last 300 of the total 2,500.

A less-disruptive snag involved the metal deck, which started to sag during construction. Structural firm Stewart Engineering, Raleigh, had designed the main floor for a standard load, but that didn't prove sufficient, as the more than 850 in-floor power and data boxes—typically deployed 10 ft on center in every direction—began to cause the deck to deflect.

"The number of floor boxes was causing the metal deck to deflect too much prior to pouring the concrete, so additional rebar, creating a basket underneath the floor box, and metal angles fastened below the corrugated deck spanning the weak axis, were required to maintain stiffness," Rader says.

Focus

Keeping construction crews constantly productive was a major focus for Skanska. Toward that end, Skanska rolled out a centrally positioned digital jobsite kiosk—a high-tech plan station. The kiosk enabled anyone working on the job to easily access the building model, plans and drawings.

Workers took to it quickly, which made the kiosk "the biggest slam dunk" of all the high-tech tools used on the job, Senner says.

In one instance, a superintendent used a drawing from the plan station to help a subcontractor figure out the finish detail for a stairwell.

"He just navigated to that detail on the model, did a screen shot, printed it out and just handed the picture to the drywall sub who went and built it off of that picture," Senner says.

Currently, Skanska is making plans to create a consistent design for this workstation and roll it out to other projects across the country.

All of the efforts are coming together to provide a near fairy-tale ending for the visionary librarian.

"It took us 25 years to get to this point," says Nutter. "We had great creativity."