Best Projects2011LettersBook Reviews

Competition Opens: May the Best Project Win

Ready, set, enter! ENR’s 2011 Best Projects competition has now begun. This will be the first competition since McGraw-Hill Construction’s former regional magazines were integrated into the ENR brand.

“With more than 1,000 entries, the annual Best Projects competition has become one of the premier awards programs in the industry, particularly focusing on an entire project’s life cycle, not just on the design or the construction phase,” says Scott Blair, ENR Southwest editor. Blair has been involved with the Best Projects competition for more than 10 years and led the team that brought the awards program to the national stage three years ago with the first ENR Best of the Best Awards.

BLAIR

“Our program honors all project participants: the owner, architect, engineer, general contractor and subcontractor alike,” he says. “The judges—members of the construction communities in the regions where the projects are located—home in on jobs that demonstrate outstanding teamwork, safety, innovation and workmanship.”

Projects built anywhere in the U.S. can be entered in one of 18 categories. The winners will be honored at an awards ceremony in the region and will be featured in the regional editions of ENR. Projects deemed best in their category automatically will be entered in the Best of the Best Projects 2011, a national juried competition. Regional winners in each category compete against each other, and winners receive national coverage. This year, in another first, one project will be selected by the ENR editorial team as Editors’ Choice and given top recognition.

“We put a lot of thought into making this year’s program more user-friendly based on input from past submitters and judges about what they liked and didn’t like,” says Carolina Worrell, assistant editor of ENR New York. As a result, we reduced the number of categories, which had become unwieldy, and focused the safety questions on standard industry metrics.

You can read the rules and enter the competition by downloading the Call for Entries submission form at http://enr.construction.com/toplists/best_of_awards/2011/. The new entry form is an interactive PDF that can be saved and shared by members of the project team before it is uploaded and submitted.

Jan Tuchman is editor-in-chief emeritus and events consultant for Engineering News-Record, continuing to work on content development for both the New York/New Jersey and the LA Infrastructure forums. After a 48-year career at ENR , she retired from full-time work in August of 2024—most recently serving as executive editor for the brand’s entire events portfolio. She is a member of the Columbia University Center for Buildings, Infrastructure, and Public Spaces, and she is active in The Moles, a heavy construction leadership organization, and the National Academy of Construction. Her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism are from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Industry honors include NAC’s Ted C. Kennedy Award and the service and supply award from the Beavers. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and spends time singing in the Brooklyn Community Chorus and working on a climate change action committee.

Post a comment to this article

Live: June 4, 2026 at 2:00 pm EDT Your VDC team invests weeks in coordination: modeling, resolving clashes, aligning MEP, structural, and specialty systems down to the inch. But when it's time to build, not nearly enough of that work actually reaches the field. We'll walk through how Skanska made it work, the key decisions, and the hard lessons.