the National September 11 Memorial & Museum
foundation hired Lend Lease as the lead contractor.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
was assigned responsibility for building the memorial, while the foundation focused on the integrity
of the design.
“At the time, it was forecast to be a three- to
five-year project,” says Brian Santos, a Lend Lease
project manager. “But over the life of the project,
the schedule grew until the memorial deadline was
finally pushed to the tenth anniversary.”
In 2006, after five years of planning and design
competitions, the project team had a design in place
for the memorial and museum and began to work
on the site’s foundation.
That year, the team hit its first delay. The project
was put on hold to conduct value re-engineer-ing, which meant reassessing the initiative’s goals
HI TTING A WALL
Immediately after the World Trade Center’s twin
towers fell, Lend Lease—one of the world’s largest
construction management companies, headquartered in Sydney, Australia—became involved in
the recovery effort, overseeing the entire cleanup
operation. For 265 days, the Lend Lease team
coordinated and worked with hundreds of New
York City police and fire department personnel and
thousands of volunteers to complete the recovery
phase, clearing more than 1. 6 million tons of debris
from the site.
“I came down on that first day to help with the
rescue,” says Neil Clarke, senior project manager
and vice president, Lend Lease, New York, New
York, USA.
As the project moved from the recovery phase
to rebuilding the site as a memorial and museum,
he project team had a clear objective: to answer
destruction with creation. A US$700 million initiative would build a memorial and a museum on
the same site in New York, New York, USA where
two skyscrapers collapsed after hijacked jetliners
flew into them on 11 September 2001.
Over the next 13 years, the team would have to keep its sights fixed on that
goal as it encountered logistical predicaments and environmental disasters that at
times became so extreme it seemed the team could not possibly recover.
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