Frank Sciame assessed his prospects as a designer after he graduated from the City College of New York with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1974. “I realized I wasn’t the next Pritzker Prize winner,” he says. But the path he traveled with F.J. Sciame Construction, the company he built, has led him to prestigious jobs on projects with recent Pritzker Architecture Prize winners in Renzo Piano, Thom Mayne and the Swiss design team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
The New York City-based general contractor, which oversaw $177 million in construction contracts in 2005 in the New York region and is on target to oversee $186 million this year, has had a bumper crop of high-profile projects in the past year. The projects are part of a memorable stretch for Sciame, the company’s chairman and CEO. As the firm completed a highly complex, $102-million project designed by Piano at Manhattan’s Morgan Library & Museum, Sciame himself was ending his term as chairman of the New York Building Congress, an industry association.