Pavarini McGovern is now at work on the final interior phases of the New York Law School building.

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Pavarini McGovern LLC is a construction firm with a knack for taking on projects that “are a little off the beaten track,” Senior Project Manager Charles Worrell, LEED AP says. “We’ve [had] the opportunity to work on a lot of unusual, challenging projects, and that’s really be­come our forte.”

Based in New York City, Pavarini McGovern is a full-service construction management firm whose services include preconstruction, design/build and program management. Its portfolio includes commercial, residential, educational, hospitality, cultural, healthcare and retail projects.

In addition, 80 percent of the company’s work is for repeat clients. Pavarini McGovern’s success, Worrell says, is largely due to the leadership and vision of President and CEO Eric McGovern.

“He’s assembled a solid core group of teams for the projects we have,” Worrell says. “I think that’s really one of the keys to any construction manager’s success.”

Supporting Growth
Pavarini McGovern is currently at work on a new academic building for the New York Law School. When finished, the building will cover approximately 209,000 square feet and sit on the southeast corner of the intersection of Leonard Street and West Broadway in New York City.

According to Jason Vesuvio, Pavarini McGovern’s director of marketing, the finished building will feature five stories above- and four levels below-grade with a slurry wall bathtub foundation. “The project is a major phase of New York Law School’s expansion program, supporting their planned growth at the Worth Street campus.

“The new building will primarily be a curtain wall and metal panel clad envelope from the second through the fifth floors,” Vesuvio continues.

“Stone cladding provides accents at the south and east façades and at the base of the building.”

In addition, the building’s exterior enclosure will be comprised of a structural glazing system that spans from the second through fourth floor, while a grand stair will connect the entry level to the fifth floor. “A setback at the fifth floor will provide an outdoor dining terrace,” Vesuvio says.

Pavarini McGovern is the construction manager on the project, while SmithGroup Inc. and BKSK Architects are its designers. New York City-based project management and consulting firm VVA LLC is serving as the owner’s representative.

VVA Project Manager Curt Epstein notes this is the first time his company has worked with Pavarini McGovern, and he is impressed with its work. “They’re great construction managers,” he says. “They’re very instrumental in the value engineering of the project.”

A Tight Fit
The New York Law School project has not come without its challenges, Worrell admits. For example, Pavarini McGovern is coping with a tight work site surrounded by pre-1900s era buildings and street frontage that was declared off limits for construction staging or deliveries by the New York City Department of Trans­portation.

The tight space limitations made it difficult for the superintendents to remove “spoils from the excavation work,” while simultaneously erecting structural steel and installing phase one core and shell work, Worrell says. “That was really the biggest challenge,” he says.

For the basement levels, Pavarini McGovern decided on a top-down construction approach. With VVA, the project team incorporated the slurry wall system, which created the concrete bathtub foundation.

After completing the slurry wall, “we poured the first slab, which is on grade, and then excavated down to the next slab elevation and poured that slab,” Epstein says, noting that the project team repeated the process as they built more slabs that braced the slurry wall.

“It was just continuous until we hit bottom (approximately 60 feet).”

This found both Pavarini McGovern and VVA operating four levels below ground, Epstein says. “It’s never been done in Manhattan before,” he says, adding that he has worked in construction in New York City since 1978.

According to Vesuvio, the slurry wall reaches bedrock at a depth of approximately 100 feet. “The existing water table is at a depth of approximately 15 feet, below-grade,” he adds.

“Columns and concrete caissons bearing on rock support the remainder of the building,” Worrell says. With the project’s location near a subway line under West Broadway, the project team has needed to coordinate daily with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

In addition, the contents of the below-grade floors make the building unique, Worrell says. “Typically, with below-grade floors, you’re dealing with parking [garages] and back-of-house space,” he says.

Instead, the lower levels feature a library, a 300-seat auditorium and a rare book room. “[Those are not] items you usually find below-grade in an area where there’s a lot of water,” Worrell says.

Safe and Sound
Keeping safe on the New York Law School project has been “paramount,” Worrell says. He notes that the project is part of a two-year nationwide partnership that Pavarini McGovern, through its affiliation with the Structure Tone organization, has formed with OSHA.

According to Vesuvio, the organization is the only construction manager to have a national strategic partnership with OSHA. “The partnership is a proactive approach to site safety, essentially making OSHA part of the Pavarini McGovern project team,” Vesuvio says.

Within the partnership, there are three major goals:

• Reduction in the number of injuries and illness by 3 percent annually;
• Improvement of the implementation and use of safety and health management systems for trade contractors at partner sites; and
• The development of safety and health outreach tools and/or hazard awareness materials for Hispanic workers.

Epstein says he also is impressed by Pavarini McGovern’s approach to safety on the project. “That is their first and foremost concern,” he says. “Their company’s safety director is personally here at least once a week, if not twice a week.”

Nearing Completion
Pavarini McGovern is now at work on the final interior phases of the building, Worrell says. “We’re looking to turn the building over to the school in the first quarter of 2009,” he says.

The interior program will include instruction space, the 300-seat auditorium, seminar rooms, moot courts and Socratic-form classrooms. In addition, the building will be the new home for the Mendik Law Library, which has a collection of 500 rare books.

Although the West Broadway project will not receive a LEED certification, it will be a green building. Worrell says the School wants to aim for LEED certification in the next phase of its expansion. “The second phase will involve the renovation of three adjacent New York Law School buildings,” he says.

However, as the project team finishes the West Broadway campus, “we want to make sure the quality is foremost,” Worrell says, noting that it is striving to fulfill the visions of its clients and the architects. “They really want [this] to be the flagship building for the downtown campus.”