Cornell University had high expectations for the team on a five-building, 776,000-sq-ft student housing complex and dining hall project completed this year on its Ithaca, N.Y., campus. Not even a global pandemic, supply chain crisis, spiking inflation or local labor crunch knocked the team off track as it delivered the $272-million residential expansion ahead of schedule and under budget.
Barely a year after breaking ground on an effort to deliver housing for sophomores by 2021 and freshmen by 2022, the state’s COVID-19 lockdown halted work in April 2020. The team got the university’s blessing to stockpile materials during the downtime, says Ben Robertson, senior project manager for the construction manager Welliver, based in Montour Falls, N.Y.