Maybe it was fate that brought Michael Burton not to his Queens, N.Y., office early on Sept. 11, but to lower Manhattan for a meeting at City Hall–just a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
Maybe it was fate that brought Michael Burton not to his Queens, N.Y., office early on Sept. 11, but to lower Manhattan for a meeting at City Hall–just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Or maybe it was destiny that the scrawny kid from Rockland County, N.Y., whose parents toughened him up with karate lessons in seventh grade, would grow up to manage the largest peacetime mobilization of construction forces in the wake of the most unprecedented act of terror the world had ever seen. The calm of a sunny late summer morning was shattered that Tuesday by
Over the past year and a half, design firms have been bracing themselves for a major construction recession. Industry veterans who remembered the deep recessions of the 1980s and early 1990s were ready to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. Since then, the storm has come and rattled some windows, but there seems little danger of the roof falling in. Many designers already are seeing the skies brightening in the distance, signaling that a rebound may be in sight. Last year may have been the beginning of the market downturn, but you would never know it from
MODEL AUDITORIUM 4D visualization tool sequenced steel erection. (Photo courtesy of Warren Aerial Photography Inc.) It's a classical music palace named for the king of cartoons in the film capital of the world. It has a 15-year history that reads like a Hollywood drama–with budget busts, fits, stops, restarts, cast changes and rewrites. But that's not why the contractor for the 293,000-sq-ft Walt Disney Concert Hall donned a producer's hat and commissioned an animated "documentary" about the job. It was more because, if the star of the show is a description-defying building designed true-to-formless by Frank Gehry, then a moving
There are a few people in the powerplant construction business who would love to see James M. Bernhard Jr., the smooth-talking multimillionaire chairman of what is probably the world's most sophisticated pipe fabricator, The Shaw Group, fall flat on his face. Bernhard, through a series of contracting acquisitions, has gone into competition against some of his customers, including powerful Bechtel Group Inc. He began easing his way into the turnkey powerplant construction business from 1997 to 1999, adding value, he would say, to the pipe fabrication work at which Shaw Group excels. Eighteen months ago, he upset the power pecking
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