Global Best Projects Relied on Deliveries, But Not From Amazon

Precasting on a massive scale was needed on China’s 4th Ring project in Zhengzhou.
Photo courtesy Sun International

This year’s ENR Global Best Projects awardees, 34 in all, which you can learn about here, involved a lot of big deliveries—although not the kind that come in an Amazon box.

Many of these deliveries involved project sections that were pre-assembled or fabricated away from the construction site. Offsite prefabrication and assembly isn’t new if you think of segmental bridge sections, steel roof trusses and industrial pipe modules. Analysts speculate that the pandemic may speed up prefabrication and pre-assembly, and this year’s best project entries seemed to include more.

On Google’s Bay View Campus in California, ENR editors’ choice for Global Project of the Year, seven steel facilities prefabricated steel bays for the sweeping roof canopies. For the Tianfu Agricultural Exposition in China, structural engineer StructureCraft decided to fully prefabricate in Europe the glulam segments of its mass timber structure and ship them to the site in containers.

Another Chinese project, the 4th Ring Transportation project in Zhengzhou, required construction of eight new precast yards with more than 400 precast stations, which were designed and built within five months to manufacture the 50,000 segments needed

Looking at this year’s selected project awardees, many shared the burden of communicating remotely during low points of COVID-19.

On one project, vendors communicated with subcontractors and clients via video to learn how to construct and install equipment. At other times, just using the telephone was best. “As crazy as it sounds, a phone conversation did better to coordinate than any other method, even if it was to let the other party know that a critical email or update was posted” to the project model, says Andre Bohren, construction manager for project contractor PCL on Lakeridge Gardens, which won in the Best Health Care category.

Read them all at this link and be sure to submit your best projects next year to ENR.

Deputy Editor Richard Korman helps run ENR's business and legal news and investigations, selects ENR's commentary and oversees editorial content on ENR.com. In 2023 the American Society of Business Publication Editors awarded Richard the Stephen Barr Award, the highest honor for a single feature story or investigation, for his story on the aftermath of a terrible auto crash in Kentucky in 2019, and in 2015 the American Business Media awarded him the Timothy White Award for investigations of surety fraud and workplace bullying. A member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Richard has been a fellow on drone safety with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Richard's freelance writing has appeared in the Seattle Times, the New York Times, Business Week and the websites of The Atlantic and Salon.com. He admires construction projects that finish on time and budget, compensate all team members fairly and record zero fatalities or serious injuries.

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