Joe Benvenuto spent four years perfecting LIFTbuild’s “top-to-bottom” superstructure construction technology before work began in 2022 on the Exchange, a 207-foot-tall residential building in Detroit. The unorthodox method is based on building completed soil levels on the ground and lifting them into place around the cores, using wire jacks.
“The system is advantageous because it offers a significant reduction in working hours and improvements in safety from building on the ground rather than at height,” says Benvenuto, COO of LIFTbuild, a wholly owned subsidiary of Barton Malow . “Applying the principles of Lean Construction allowed us to utilize the benefits of just-in-time delivery, better design documents and less costly installation of building systems.”
The 16-story project, completed last February, would have been difficult at best to build on its ¾-acre triangular lot, Benvenuto says. It is bordered by city streets and businesses on all sides, and Detroit’s high traffic adjacent to it eliminated the use of a tower crane.
Process efficiencies
Benvenuto was a veteran vice president at Barton Malow with an MBA from Harvard University before taking on the challenge of LIFTbuild. He was keen to incorporate process efficiencies from pre-fabrication and manufacturing methods into his build as well as lift and hired a Lean consultant to track all gains made over conventional delivery.
“I’m always referring to the entire project life cycle,” says Benvenuto of how the building is designed, procured, manufactured and finally erected.
Previous work as a project executive on auto manufacturing jobs in Michigan set the stage for LIFTbuild because they require a similar attention to process, related to production lines. “We try to point out some of the little things that we do from equipment and storage and deliveries that would mimic more of an assembly line, rather than half an acre of layout area,” Benvenuto says.
Joe Benvenuto
Photo courtesy of LIFTbuild
The exchange is a proof of concept. Benvenuto leads LIFTbuild as general contractor and development partner. He helped the company secure 15 patents for both top-down construction and manufacturing processes.
Benvenuto encourages everyone at LIFTbuild to adopt new process-based terminology, such as calling specific cores “spines” instead of cores, because cores serve as a backbone, similar to a human’s. The walls of the spines are 10 inches to 1 foot thick. Each Exchange steel-framed floor deck contains more than 75 tons of steel and 110 m3 of concrete. Eight wire jacks lifted the 11,000 square meter floor slabs, each weighing 500 tons.
Everyone at LIFTbuild “wanted to learn every aspect of it. They treated it as a prototype job where they weren’t going to go out of their way to prove it cost-effectively,” says Mark Tamaro, general manager of the South Central region of structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti. “They’re going to put in the homework to really make sure we were doing it right,” adds Tamaro, saying Benvenuto understood how each trade was affected by the process.
LIFTbuild is talking to developers interested in leveraging the methodology and is helping customers understand that while it’s a different way to build, the safety protocols and many other processes are the same as with any other project, Benvenuto says.
