Southwest Contractor’s Best of 2008 Awards

11th Annual Competition Honors Best of Design, Construction

By Scott Blair, Tom McClure, Polly Sapakie and David M. Brown

The Best of 2008 Awards honors outstanding projects throughout the Southwest in a variety of categories, from green building to transportation.

It was another competitive year for Southwest Contractor’s annual awards competition, with nearly 650 entries received. Of those, just 62 will be receiving awards. Thank you to all of the designers, engineers, contractors, owners and subcontractors who took time from their busy schedules to submit their outstanding projects.

New this year, some winners will be moving on to McGraw-Hill Construction’s National Best of 2008 Awards, where they will compete for top honors among projects from all 11 Regional Publications throughout the U.S. These national winners will be profiled in our March 2009 issue of Southwest Contractor and in Engineering News-Record.

Judging Criteria

Project eligibility was limited to those that were completed between July 2007 and September 2008. Winning projects were chosen on how the following criteria related to the category in which the project was entered: design excellence; quality of construction and workmanship; innovation; contribution to the community at large or the construction industry; and overcoming challenges. In addition, certain categories had other criteria including teamwork, LEED certification, safety and budget.

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A panel of judges was assembled in each state and met in September to select the winning projects. The panel included distinguished representatives from architecture firms, general contractors, engineers, developers, subcontractors and suppliers.

Judges arrived at the winners through discussion and consensus, and were allowed to move projects to another applicable category or select no winner in a category if they agreed that no project met the criteria. Any juror who was affiliated with a project abstained from voting.

Southwest Contractor wishes to thank the following professionals who worked extremely hard to bring you this year’s winners:

Arizona Jury

Linnea O’Dowd, LEED AP, Drewett + Brenden Architecture
Daniel Perez, IAIA, Leo A. Daly
Gary Worthy, AIA, ASLA, DLR Group
Ken Schacherbauer, Perini Building Co.
Brent Leif, Hunt Construction Group
Thomas Rogers, Northern Arizona University
Julie Stanton, Stanton Consulting
Richard B. Usher, Hill & Usher
David Beer, Sun Valley Masonry
Jay Graef, Graef Construction
Ryan Eberle, P.E., Kleinfelder

Nevada Jury

David R. Shields, P.E., Ph.D., University of Nevada, Las Vegas College of Engineering
Eric Strain, AIA, assemblageSTUDIO
Edward P. DeLorenzo, BJG Architecture + Engineering
Pamela Vilkin, LEED AP, Greenview Consulting/Tradewinds Construction
Jim Line, KHS&S Contractors
Tony Illia, construction writer
David Klopp, Turner Construction Co.
Jeff Rensmon, Jaynes Corp.
Frank Martinovic, P.E., Halcrow Yolles

New Mexico Jury

Michael Wm. Malloy, P.E., Gannett Fleming West
William H. Wells, AIA, HDR Architecture
Terrance J. Brown, FAIA, WHPacific
Ken Easley, Flintco Inc.
John R. Lewinger, Grubb & Ellis New Mexico
Melissa Padilla-Gomez, J.B. Henderson Construction Co.
Bruce Higgins, construction writer
R. LeRoy Givens, P.E., Bohannan Huston
Rex Davis, RMCI

The staff of Southwest Contractor would also like to thank the Arizona Chapter of the AIA, the AGC, Las Vegas Chapter and the New Mexico Building Branch, AGC for graciously hosting our juries.

Come Celebrate With Us

The Nevada ceremony will be held on Tuesday, December 9th at the Rio All-Suites Resort. To attend, visit http://construction.com/events/bestof2008/register.asp .

The Arizona awards were held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort in Phoenix on Tuesday, December 2nd.

We are pleased to once again partner with the New Mexico chapters of the ACEC and SMPS to hold the awards luncheon for New Mexico at the Albuquerque Marriott Pyramid on December 16th. Please call Dawn Tibbetts at (505) 263-6835 or Diane Snyder at (505) 888-6161 to register for the New Mexico event.

Each winning project is profiled on the following pages. The project teams were provided by the submitting firm, and we have made every attempt to confirm the information. Due to space limitations, not all project participants could be listed.

All photos are courtesy of the project’s submitter, unless otherwise noted.

Special thanks to Polly Neale Sapakie for helping to organize the entries as well as writing many of the project profiles.