Bovis Lend Lease’s Atlanta office completed work on the South Georgia Medical Center based in Valdosta, Ga.

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Since Bovis Lend Lease opened its Atlanta office 60 years ago, the company has succeeded in making its mark on this fast-growing Southern city. In 1965, the company built the original Fulton County Stadium, home of the Atlanta Braves until 1996. It built the more-than-51,000-seat stadium in only 51 weeks.

When the Olympic Games came to Atlanta in 1996, the city was changed forever, says Mike Hampton, executive vice president for the Atlanta office, and the company played a key role.

The Atlanta Committee for Organizing the Games hired Bovis Lend Lease and its joint-venture partner to be the owner representative. The company hired architects and contractors and oversaw the design and construction of all Olympic venues.

“All our competitors were working directly for us,” he says. “It’s a project you can’t finish late.  Overall, it was quite an accomplishment with hundreds of millions of dollars in work and 27 different venues.”

Upon completion, Bovis Lend Lease managed $550 million in the design and construction of 27 different Olympic venues, including facilities for track and field, equestrian, archery, water polo, soccer and field hockey events, the Olympic Village and media facilities.

The new Olympic Stadium later became Turner Field, the current home of the Atlanta Braves. “The Olympic Games accelerated Atlanta into the international city it’s become,” Hampton says. “The airport here is a huge driver of the economy – the international terminal was constructed for all the international visitors for the Games.

“We were involved in the construction of concourse E and, most recently, the airport’s 10,000-foot fifth runway.

At the time it opened, it was the most important runway in the United States, relieving congestion across the grid.

“Atlanta is the busiest airport in the world. If it gets congested here, it affects all those people taking flights elsewhere. The airport had four runways and they wanted a fifth, but the land near the airport wasn’t level.

“We had to convey dirt on a $40 million system for two years. We moved 17 million cubic yards of dirt – it was mind-boggling.”  

Bovis Lend Lease has been a construction manager at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport since 1987 and has completed more than 20 different projects.

In 2006, the company completed the fifth runway, which consisted of two bridges that overpass Interstate 285.
    The $1.2 billion project was constructed with minimal disruption to the highway and the surrounding community.

Safety First
Hampton says Bovis Lend Lease takes seriously its core values: respect, innovation, integrity, collaboration and excellence.

“Our industry has been commoditized and it can be hard to differentiate,” he says. “We have the same subcontractor base as our competitors and the same designers. We don’t have a secret weapon, but the one thing that separates us is the way we approach safety.”

The company focuses on creating an incident- and injury-free environment through behavioral training. “We are trying to get away from a culture of enforcing rules to a culture of behavior change,” Hampton says. “We need to get those who are putting themselves at risk – hourly workers mainly – to choose to work safely.

There is no task that can’t be done safely, and yet people get hurt or die every day because they ignore these measures. “Someone wearing a body harness falls to their death when all they had to do was hook off, but they chose not to.

“We are driving that hard through videos and meetings that reinforce these values,” he adds. “Sometimes, it’s directly opposed to what they’re being told by a company – faster, faster, product, product. Any of those companies – if they had a serious accident or fatality – would change their focus. We’re trying to get people to change their focus before something bad happens, but we’re such a small piece of the industry, it’s a daunting task.

“There have been a couple competitors join us, but not nearly enough.”

Before beginning a job, every worker attends an hour-and-a-half safety orientation that teaches the site rules and the Bovis Lend Lease incident and injury free culture, says Steve Ellis, director of safety at the Atlanta office.  

Bovis Lend Lease also provides a supervisory skills workshop for every superintendent and foreman to learn the skills for conducting pre-task assessment, identifying hazards and precautions, how to intervene at-risk procedures and recognize safe behaviors.  

“Our workplace is also unique because we are a leader in sustainable initiatives – socially, economically and environmentally,” the company says. “Our people embody our core values and sustainable principles and bring them to every project they touch. Our clients choose us because they know that the communities we build and the cityscapes we change are designed with the best practices and principles available.”  

Added Value
Hampton says the company strives to provide as much added value to clients as possible, getting involved in projects as early as possible.

“We don’t want to wait for completed plans,” he says. “We can help designers complete their documents and help them draw up only one time by monitoring what they’re drawing and what the client can afford.

“The faster you get a product to market, the better off everyone is,” he adds. “These are unique skills that we have honed over 25 years to take the customer from a napkin concept, come up with a detailed concept, provided a detailed estimate and manage the design going forward. Our design partners like that input. They don’t like to go down the wrong path and have to redo plans at their own expense.”

Five-Star Project
Bovis Lend Lease is building the St. Regis Hotel and Residences in Atlanta. Hampton calls it a “true five-star hotel – that’s not someone blowing smoke.”

The $150 million, 26-story building spans 636,000 square feet of mixed-use space. It includes 53 luxury condominium residences, three levels of parking and eight levels of hotel units. It also features a spa, fitness center, ballroom, outdoor pool with grotto bar, two restaurants and a presidential suite.

“With its elegant style and prime location, the St. Regis welcomes visitors to Atlanta, as well as providing a home to Atlanta residents with an unparalleled approach to service and city living,” says SR Hotel Development, the company developing the project. The project is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2009.

Corporate Organization
Bovis Lend Lease is part of the Lend Lease Group, a leading global real estate services business, having developed, constructed and managed real estate assets around the world for 50 years.

Listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, the Lend Lease Group operates in 40 countries on six continents with a presence in Australia, Asia, Europe and the United States. Bovis Lend Lease offers more than 90 years of experience in the construction industry.

In the past decade alone, the company has provided construction services on over 2,500 projects for 1,100 clients nationwide. Bovis Lend Lease provides a full range of construction services.

These include construction management, general contracting, program management, project management, design/build and consulting services.