The complex nature of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)—which develops imagery and map-based solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense—is reflected in the $1.77 billion endeavor to consolidate seven existing facilities into one 2.4 million-square-foot federal office building on Fort Belvoir’s 98-acre New Campus East.
With a complicated job on their hands and a 2011 deadline mandated by the Base Realignment and Closure program, NGA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Baltimore District (USACE) decided to take a different approach to project delivery: integrated design-bid-build.
While integrated design-bid-build is more of a public model of construction manager at-risk than a true integrated project delivery, early contractor involvement was still a must. NGA and USACE put out a draft request for contract in 2006, when less than 20 percent of the project had been designed by the joint venture RTKL, Baltimore, and KlingStubbings, Washington, D.C. After meeting with each firm that responded, USACE selected joint venture contractors
Clark Construction Group, LLC, Bethesda, Md., and
Balfour Beatty, Fairfax, Va., based on their value, approach to integration and portfolio of building fast-track jobs.
“This is a very specific execution model. Some other USACE districts have used similar methods, but this is the first time we’ve done it just like this—fast track and large scale,” says Mike Rogers, USACE program manager. “The Corps is now trying this on several large programs across the country.”
Traditional design-bid-build and design-build were ruled out due to NGA’s desire to be hands on, as well as its desire to maintain the services of the design joint venture.
“Having a contractor on board very early in the process has helped us engineer things that would not make sense or that would be costly,” says Tom Bukoski, NGA’s assistant program manager for design and construction on New Campus East. “We were able to get real-time prices on what we were trying to do and find out where we could
get the biggest bang for our buck. Having a contractor look over the drawings helped us design the facility in a way that would get us what we wanted, but would prevent construction problems.”
For example, the team realized it
could save $50 million by exchanging cast-in-place concrete for precast concrete on the 5,100-space parking garage. Clark/Balfour Beatty also urged USACE to consider precast concrete for the building skin, originally designed as a glass curtain wall. Though the change didn’t end up shaving much off the budget, it did ease some strain on the project timeline because the precast contractor was only about a mile away from the jobsite.
“We decided the project would be LEED Silver early on, so we opted for a unique chilled-beam cooling system,” Bukoski says. “We thought it would cost more initially, but it also chopped four feet off the building height. So we got a state-of-the-art system to save money long term, and it helped with initial construction costs.”
Thanks to early collaboration on a number of fronts, the overall construction schedule is about six months shorter than the original proposal.