Episode 1

How to Build a Skyscraper?

Transcript

Speaker1: From Loyola University's Quinlan School of Business. You're listening to the Q Talks podcast. 

Maciek Nowak: Thank you Al for joining us today, for what I think will be a very interesting podcast as we talk about your career with Power Construction and some of the really, I think, interesting projects that you've done around Chicago, particularly those focused on Loyola. And what I'd like to start with is, I guess, looking backwards at a long and and storied career. What would you say were the some of the key points in that career that got you to to where you are today? 

Al Gorman: Well, the career goes back almost 60 years. It'll be 60 years next February, I guess the key points were in the early years surviving as a business. We were a very small business. Our only office was about 12 foot wide and 40 feet deep, a storefront in Oak Park. And in those years, we survived by building small public school buildings, Junior High School K through eights, et cetera. Essentially, it was a highly competitive business. [If] you were a low bidder you got the job assuming you had the bonding capacity, et cetera. And the early years were very difficult, very challenging. We almost didn't make it a couple of times and then market improved. We were able to get better margins. And then the next challenge was "how do you build a real business as opposed to just an extension of your personality, of who you are?" And that is–Dr. Rooney and I were chatting about it today–that's a real challenge in business is do you want to just earn a decent living, have a nice life and then when you retire, close the business up essentially or sell it to somebody? Or do you want to build something that offers a career, a life opportunity for a lot of other people? And that happened about, oh, maybe 15 years after I got in the business, so it was in the early seventies and I made the decision that it wasn't going to be just the family business. I encouraged the key people to become partners in the business and look for people that could take over the responsibility of day to day management of the business and finding clients and jobs. And that meant changing the company from a hard dollar bid company, if you will, to a company that got repeat clients such as Loyola, Advocate Medical, Northwestern, IIT. So the challenges a) were surviving and b) changing the company from a personal business, an extension of myself, into a company that would survive without me and prosper. 

Maciek Nowak: Yeah. And I think that challenge or that transition, I would imagine, is really difficult for a lot of family businesses. I know with our Family Business Center that we I think that's one of the things that they work with a lot of these companies on a lot is making that decision and that  transition. So, very interesting. So I think a lot of people may be familiar with a lot of the work that you've done over the years and may not realize that it was Power Construction. And and some of the most interesting include the the Apple Store that's on the riverfront. Lurie Children's Hospital, which I thought was really neat, it included the installation of an eight-ton MRI magnet, the surgical demolition at St. Electious Medical Center, the new business school, Kellogg's New Business School up in Evanston. What was of all these projects, what were some of the most challenging issues that you came across? 

Al Gorman: Uh, Block37. If you're familiar with the building in downtown loop. That was a four-story building across from City Hall. That was a four-story building, had been originally designed to be about a 40-story building. But when it hit the recession, they stopped construction at the fourth floor, put a roof on it and said, "Let it sit for a while." And the building project went into receivership and developers from the West Coast bought it and contacted my son John, who has a business education and engineering, and started to talk about the prospect of a thirty-five-story building on top of a four-story building in the loop. And the architects were the same architects on the building that we are sitting in: SCV. And one of the big challenges was that the top floor of the existing building had no interior columns. It spanned about a half a city block, and they wanted to build an apartment building on top of it. Well, you can't build an apartment building with about a hundred-foot, hundred and twenty-foot free span, with no interior columns. So the solution was to build these monstrous trusses that were, I think, 15-20 feet high and ship them in from Wisconsin, put those trusses on the building, and then you had a slab on top of those trusses that could support interior columns. 

Al Gorman: Well, it turns out that in order for those trusses to be built, the only steel available, that was rolled, in the whole world was in Luxembourg, and they only rolled these sized members every two or three months because there was very little call for them. So the entire schedule then depended on getting the steel from Luxembourg shipped over to Wisconsin, where they would pre-assemble these trusses and, of course, they couldn't bring 120-foot truss from Wisconsin into The Loop, so they had to break the truss down into three or four sections. Bring them in, assemble them on the roof of the building, and then put them in place. The next challenge was that you can't close traffic in The Loop between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think it's November 15th or so. So if the crane wasn't done erecting the trusses by, say, November 15th, you had to pull everything out and come back after New Year's. Huge challenge. At the end of the day project was completed on schedule, owners were thrilled. I don't know, there are four or five hundred apartments in the building, and that was a challenge. 

Maciek Nowak: So essentially, it's like you built a bridge on top of the building and then built a building on top of that bridge. 

Al Gorman: Yeah, that's I think three or four of those trusses, and I stood under one of them. Someone took a picture. I mean, this truss exactly like a bridge. 

Maciek Nowak: That's incredible. So, I'm particularly fascinated by it because I've had this eight-ton MRI magnet. Oh, okay, that was just, yeah. And I mean, these other items that that you've done, it's really amazing and I think that the Power name probably is again, might not be familiar to maybe as many Loyola listeners without realizing that just about every building on our campus, whether it's Water Tower Campus, Lakeshore Campus, and out in Maywood. All of those, if it's a new, newer building or even we were talking earlier, going back several decades back to Maguire. And so and I know this may be a very hard decision, but did you have; does anyone stick out as a favorite of all these? 

Al Gorman: Oh golly, the building we're in, I think, was probably one of the most beautiful buildings we've ever built. Truly, not just the architecture outside, but the space, the interior space. Walking through today to see the students congregating, studying, meeting whatever. Everything about this building is just unique. 

Maciek Nowak: And to clarify for those in the real land, we're talking about Schreiber, right? The Schreiber School of Business Building 

Al Gorman: And the double glass wall to the south side of the building. The south elevation was extraordinary. From an engineering standpoint and very challenging from a construction standpoint, 

Maciek Nowak: Can you speak more to that? Because I find that to be really interesting? 

Al Gorman: Well, what it does is it provides an air shaft so that air actually comes up between the inner wall and the outer wall and actually helps reduce the amount of energy you need, both for heating and cooling the building. Very simplistically, that's what it is 

Maciek Nowak: And is there. And I think you were kind of mentioning this again before when we were talking that the technology is even going past that now in an even newer direction, 

Al Gorman: Some of the newer buildings were building, particularly office buildings. The glass has an electrical connection to the exterior glass. So as the sun hits it, the tint inside the glass darkens, so to block the sun. So if you're in a building and you're on the west side in the afternoon, those windows would become dark to protect from the sun's rays. But if you're on the east elevation, they're bright because there's no sun on that side. We've done two or three buildings like that now. 

Maciek Nowak: So one question that just came to mind in thinking about Maguire being your first project here, and Schreiber right across the street, one of your most recent and this kind of just going across the street and spanning about 50 years, potentially. In those 50 years, what would you say from a construction perspective has been from a technology, I guess, construction perspective is there. Is there anything that stands out as what has changed the industry and what you're able to do in terms of construction as you make that walk across the street from one side or the other? 

Al Gorman: Well, no question. The work is far more efficient, the kind of equipment we have today. Very simply, you want to nail something the old days you had a hammer and a nail. Now you got an air-activated hammer that shoots and nails in. You want to screw something in. You have a battery-operated screwdriver instead of standing there forever. When I started in the business, you had a crane with a bucket, dumping the ready mixed concrete into a hopper and you had laborers, maybe 30-40 laborers with two wheeled buggies wheeling the concrete over to the other side of the deck because the crane couldn't reach that far. And if you poured 100-150 yards of concrete in a day, it was huge. Across the street at One Chicago, when we went to pour the mat 60 feet down in the below grade. The mat, I believe, was about 10 foot thick. And we poured 4,000 yards in one day. Using four pumps now on a regular day, even going up 50 60 floors we'll pour three or four hundred yards in a day with maybe seven or eight laborers, so there's fewer workers, but they have a much better standard of life. Their pay is much higher. They're not dead at the end of the day. Conditions are much safer than they ever were years ago. We used to have an accident rate that today you wouldn't even live with because of safety standards and procedures. So technologically, the buildings are better. They're built faster and the workers are paid more and it's safer. 

Maciek Nowak: So you mentioned the One Chicago project, and I think for anyone out there who's noticed this very tall building coming up a block away from from Schreiber at the corner of State and Chicago, it's one of the tallest buildings now in Chicago. Seventh tallest. And I know watching it, it being built and seeing the foundation for that being poured. And we were speaking earlier and I just found this so interesting the techniques that you are using to be able to build that foundation and also be working on other parts of the project simultaneously in a way. Can you speak to that? 

Al Gorman: The building has four levels of underground parking, so the lowest level is about almost 60 feet below grade. If we were to go, conventional construction would have dictated that you excavate all the way down. You put in earth retention 50 to 60 feet deep to keep the adjacent sidewalks. buildings and street from encroaching. It would have taken about six or seven months to get down and then come back up, pouring four slabs below grade. And then you would start the superstructure because we had the completed design for the superstructure. We chose a different, non-conventional way of building this building instead of going down and then building up. We poured a slab one level below grade and then using that to support the framing and the assembly to hold the slab up before it's built; the cages, et cetera. We actually started the superstructure before we went down below 12 feet below grade. By doing this, it took the excavation and these lower level slabs out of the critical path so that the building could proceed above grade almost to the top. We went up 30 or 40 floors before we finished building the fourth level below grade. It's a technique not used too often called up-down construction because it requires that you have the entire building designed before you begin construction. And many times that's not the case. Many times the designers aren't ready with the total building so that they're able to design the upper part of the building while you're working on the grounds. That was not the case here, we were able to take advantage of the fact that they were complete with their working drawings. We could have the permits. We could finish the building six, seven months ahead of schedule by doing that. And in fact, the building just started occupancy. The first building, the 50 story, this month, three months ahead of schedule. The building's almost a thousand feet high. I went up with my wife on the outside elevator. She has no fear of heights. And there were no windows up at the top and we're at the top of the building. A very interesting thing about the building. You have buildings that tall. That narrow. One of the biggest problems is sway. Well, how do you balance the sway? Well, you can either beef the building up, but that costs a lot of money and takes up a lot of interior space that you can't sell or rent. What they did on that building was the center of the building is a concrete enclosed call it a room, maybe 20 by 20. And they have two floors of this. The top floor and the floor below that, they fill those rooms with water. And then, when the building starts to sway, the water counterbalances and mitigates the sway on the building. Well, why do you have two floors? Well, if you have to go in and service it, if there's a leak or there's a problem. You can empty out one of the floors and maintain the integrity of the building. There was another challenge you get a sloshing effect. The building starts to move. You don't want the water to be exacerbating the problem. The water is there in order to mitigate the problem. They have these enormous tubes mounted horizontally inside the rooms. Tubes of maybe 12 inches in diameter all around the room. In that way, the water is contained. Most of the water is contained inside the tubes so that even though some of the water is free inside the big concrete room, a lot of the water is contained in the tubes, so you don't get the sloshing. The rooms are filled about eight or 10 foot high with the water–the rooms maybe 12-14 foot high–there's a porthole when you have to maintain the room to do some service work, you actually have to climb in through this porthole. The other use of this water is connected to the fire suppression system. So if the sprinklers go off, it uses the water out of these tanks in order to put out the fire or whatever... 

Maciek Nowak: And it keeps the water pressure high enough. 

Al Gorman: Sure, the 

Maciek Nowak: Water tanks you've got, yeah, that's brilliant. 

Al Gorman: Have a water tank, but it's inside the building instead of on top of it. Yes, that's 1000 feet high. 

Maciek Nowak: You dispelled me of a misconception that I have, and so I wonder how many people listening may have this, that the fact that Chicago is has been built on some swampland and that may make digging foundations challenging. But even that isn't as much of an issue as something else from our Chicago history that is a challenge as you run into. 

Al Gorman: In down in downtown Chicago, you still have the remnants of the Chicago Fire. So if you go down 10 or 12 feet, it's contaminated soil because you have old timbers and charred bricks and mattresses or whatever down there. So you have to get through this rubble from the Chicago Fire and it has to be disposed of in a very special way, expensively. 

Maciek Nowak: So yeah, I would imagine. That's yeah, you wouldn't necessarily think that that's still a problem one hundred and fifty years later. So, I'm a supply chain guy, so I look at all the supply chain issues that we are having these days post-COVID and a lot of folks, I'm sure, have heard the stories of challenges getting, you know, semiconductors or different products. Has this impacted the construction industry? Have you seen that  it's challenging to get certain materials that might slow things down? 

Al Gorman: Yes. But when we were building One Chicago and other big buildings, most of the raw materials and supply chain issues were not evident then. We actually got all the windows and steel, et cetera, before the supply chain challenges came about. Now we're starting to see the issues with the supply chain, and we're now seeing that more of the product like windows, et cetera, of being manufactured locally. To some degree, some of the components are coming in from overseas. But a lot less of the pre-assembled units are coming from overseas. 

Maciek Nowak: Interesting, so I'm assuming that that's increasing costs to some extent. 

Al Gorman: One of the big surprises was the cost of containers. Containers were given at $5000 a unit for shipping. Now they're up to 15 to 20 thousand dollars a unit. So if you're shipping in prefabricated units that take a lot of space, the cost is astronomical for the shipping. If it's coming in, you know, as glass or steel or aluminum, it doesn't impact that much. 

Maciek Nowak: Interesting. And did COVID impact? Has it impacted construction in other ways, like in terms of crews available, things like that? 

Al Gorman: Great question. We were very, very fortunate. The leadership in the state and in the city designated construction as an essential industry. So we had almost zero lost time on the major jobs. The only areas that we saw an impact because of COVID was if we were doing remodeling inside a building and the building was restricted because of COVID. But outside work or new construction. Absolutely. We had zero impact on the completion rate and we had very little... The workers were outstandingly observant of masking and distancing, and we had almost no COVID cases. Certainly, I don't know of a single death due to COVID and very, very few hospitalizations, considering a total workforce in various jobs as probably 1500 to 2,000 workers. 

Maciek Nowak: You mentioned that One Chicago is a few months ahead of schedule 

Al Gorman: The building open for occupancy this month, and the final occupancy will be sometime January February, way ahead of schedule. 

Maciek Nowak: All right. Wow. Ok, well, this has been really, really fascinating. I've I learned a lot and I really appreciate any opportunity like that. So, so to hear from you, a legend in construction, really appreciate that and thank you very much for taking the time to chat today. 

Al Gorman: You're welcome. 

Speaker1: This has been an episode of the Q Talks podcast where we seek to marry the wisdom of the Quindlen community with the issues of today. Special thanks to our guests, as well as Marczak NOAC, interim dean of the Quinlan School of Business, for his continued support of this podcast. Matt Shealy, our student producer for editing this episode, as well as Loyola's School of Communication and WW for the continued collaboration. Before you leave, take a minute to support us by sharing with friends or writing and reviewing our episodes to help expand our reach. Thanks for listening, and we hope you join us next time.