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BUSINESS NEWS NYSDOT SELECTS POSILLICO/EL SOL JOINT VENTURE WITH DEWBERRY FOR VAN WYCK EXPRESSWAY CAPACITY AND ACCESS IMPROVEMENTS, CONTRACT 1 DESIGN-BUILD PROJECT The Posillico/El Sol JV, along with Dewberry has announced that it has been selected by New York State Department of Transportation to provide design-build transportation services for the $340 million Van Wyck Expressway Capacity and Access Improvements to the John F. Kennedy Airport, Contract 1. This project will increase capacity on VWE between the Kew Gardens interchange and JFK Airport, improving access to and from the airport. VWE provides passenger and commercial truck access routes to JFK Airport, which is one of the largest in the U.S. for personal and
business travel, and international air cargo. As part of the project, the team will lengthen nine bridges that carry heavily used avenues over the VWE, allowing for future roadway widening. Dewberry will also replace two ramps and provide improvements to address geometric deficiencies. Four of the nine bridges will be completely replaced while the other five will be lengthened and have their decks replaced. All the bridges require complex staging and an innovative method to build new abutments behind the existing ones, while keeping the bridges fully operational. “When the VWE is widened in its final phase, not only will it help to reduce traffic in the local communities, but it will be the gateway from JFK Airport to New York City that the governor envisions,” says Dewberry Design Manager,
Paul Nietzschmann, P.E. “It is very exciting to be a part of that effort.” Dewberry is partnering with Greenman- Pedersen, Inc. on the design. This project is anticipated to be completed at the end of 2023. Dewberry is a leading, market-facing firm with a proven history of providing professional services to a wide variety of public- and private-sector clients. Recognized for combining unsurpassed commitment to client service with deep subject matter expertise, Dewberry is dedicated to solving clients’ most complex challenges and transforming their communities. Established in 1956, Dewberry is headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, with more than 50 locations and more than 2,000 professionals nationwide.
GUSTAVO RODRIGUEZ, from page 3
goals and articulate a vision at the onset so that the team can all work together to achieve these. It is the role of the design leader to clearly communicate these project goals, vision, and design aspiration, structuring and leading the process while allowing the team to create within those parameters. This collaboration structure needs to leave room for self-expression and for participants to freely explore alternatives, but for it to have long-term success, everyone needs to feel part of the process and have a sense of ownership. If everyone is to have a sense of ownership, then we need to build bridges to team members who may have other ways of thinking, creating, and communicating. The successful incorporation of these diverse viewpoints requires active participation from everyone. We must be willing to hear the ideas of others and be open to having our ideas challenged. It is OK to change your mind, it is OK to be convinced, and it is OK to admit you were not right. DESIGN PROCESS AND FIRM CULTURE. The main takeaway from our investigations at FXCollaborative is that our strength lies in our ability to come together in an open design process that creates room for everyone. But for this to be effective, we need to actively pursue a greater understanding of each other’s differences and commonalities. The way to achieve this will differ depending on the size and culture of your firm, the staffing structure of your teams, and the work that you do. However, in whatever scenario, it is necessary for individual voices with diverse backgrounds and unique experiences to come together in open dialogue. This is where a collaborative process can have the biggest impact on our industry – opening design to those who have historically been left out of the creative act (such as women and underrepresented communities) and bringing fresh insight and different ways of problem solving to our projects, which will lead to more successful outcomes for our clients and industry. Only then can we collectively shape design solutions to the many problems we need to tackle as a profession. GUSTAVO RODRIGUEZ, AIA, CODIA, LEED AP, is a partner at FXCollaborative. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
result of the work of multiple people and interactions. It is my role to be an advocate for the other voices, internal and external, that are not always at the table. However, an open process can easily devolve into a self-reflecting spiral that, at best, produces a compromised solution. Avoiding the perils of “design by committee” also requires a balance between exploration and direction: When is the time for open collaboration, and when is it time for consensus building and decision making? EXPLORING THE PROCESS. In order to truly revamp the design process, we must first look at the different structures at play when it comes to collaboration during the creative process. Who participates? How are decisions made? Essi Salonen’s “A Designer’s Guide to Collaboration,” a great tool to help plan a collaborative project, defines these structures as either open or closed, and flat or hierarchical. So how do you balance open, flat collaboration when leading a design project, which has traditionally required a closed and hierarchical process? Design Core, FXCollaborative’s internal workgroup focused on advancing the firm’s design culture and critical thinking, explored how to balance these seemingly opposing ideas, and how and when to best leverage these concepts in our processes. We conducted internal surveys across FXCollaborative’s design studios to learn how people like to collaborate and organized two design workshops in which we experimented with different ways of structuring the design process. We gathered data on the participants’ engagement in the process and their sense of ownership, and finally evaluated how successful the team was in embodying the original idea in the resulting design. TRANSFORMING THE PROCESS. We discovered that there is generally a preference for open participation and flat decision-making in earlier phases of a project. In later phases where decisions need to be made, and timelines/ deliverables need to be met, the design process can remain open, but should move toward a more hierarchical decision structure. Even though early stages of the process may be open and flat, it is important for someone to clearly set
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THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 11, 2021, ISSUE 1412
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