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The Yellowstone International Airport megaproject has selected a team to design and build its $100 million terminal expansion. Well, not really, as no such airport or project exists.
In fact, it was part of the recent Design-Build Institute of America student competition, which was intended to teach students the project delivery method and simulate bidding on the imaginary project.
A team of students from the University of Arizona, Cardinal Design-Build, won the competition, held at the DBIA conference in Dallas in November.
“It was totally out of the box, but the students jumped on it like a duck on a June bug, as we say here in Texas,” said Bill Hasbrook, DBIA board chairman and competition organizer.
Hasbrook said this was his first year hosting the contest, which in the past has focused on imaginary buildings on student campuses. Instead, this year, Hasbrook changed the game by having teams from eight regions compete to put together a design-build package for the same pretentious RFP. From those regions, the top three advanced to present their bid to a panel of judges at the DBIA national conference.
The RFP sought to obtain the largest scope of work for the $100 million budget, expecting teams to plan for every penny, Hasbrook said. This meant they had to consider how many doors they could fit versus commercial space to generate revenue. The judges and DBIA leaders were impressed with the creativity.
“It’s a continued awe of what the students are able to deliver,” said Salvador Chairez, DBIA’s senior director of constituent relations. “They offer a lot of comfort about the future of design-build.”
Chairez and Hasbrook said the competition aims to continue to spread the word about design and construction delivery methods to future construction leaders, while educating students and providing them with real-world resume-building experiences.
The winning team
Lily Trenkamp, 20, is an architectural engineering major at the University of Tucson, Arizona. A native of Des Moines, Iowa, she hopes to pursue a career in structural engineering in residential construction.
Trenkamp said the competition helped her learn about construction processes she doesn’t get from classroom lectures, such as schedules and cost estimating.
Trenkamp and teammate Lauren Johnson took on the primary design of the airport, using Revit for the blueprints. He said the design was challenging, but he had previously taken classes to learn Revit.
“However, the task of designing an airport from scratch was very daunting at first and the rapid turnaround time of this project made us scramble to finish it,” he said.
Hasbrook admitted that the time from RFP to bid submission was short. The students had three months to put the bids together.
“If we had that much time to bid in real life, it would probably pass because it’s too short,” he said.
Reuel Florendo, a University of Arizona junior and team captain, had competed in the DBIA event before, but said he learned a lot from the last competition.
“In the first phase of the competition, the RFQ phase, teams were asked to demonstrate relevant experience in three previous projects. Our team used this opportunity to research real-world airport terminals and determine which characteristics of these terminals we would like to include in ours,” said Florendo. “The challenging part of this project was not having an existing terminal to base our expansion on, but we were able to work together as a team to come up with a creative solution.”
The five-person team was made up entirely of women. Trenkamp said it was “encouraging” and has made her more confident.
“I hope our story inspires groups that are underrepresented in this field to embrace challenges as opportunities for growth,” added Florendo.