Grand Performance on Best Projects

Photo by Dan Poyourow Photography

The new Ford's Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C., won an award of merit in the renovation/restoration category.

Based on this year's award-winning projects, top design and construction teams around the region certainly deserve to sing their own praises.

At the top of the bill is the $48.5-million Lenfest Hall for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. The team deftly balanced design, engineering and construction demands to create a facility worthy of a world-class music conservatory. Uncompromising demand for proper acoustics helped drive nearly every aspect of the project, providing students with greatly expanded and enhanced rehearsal spaces.

Lenfest Hall is one of several remarkable Philadelphia-area projects honored in this year's awards program. The 93,000-sq-ft Barnes Foundation project involved the sensitive relocation of the largest private collection of post-impressionist and modernist artworks in the world. The designer and contractors had to build a virtually exact replica of an existing gallery, hanging art within millimeters of its original location.

This year's call for entry also drew some impressive health care projects, including the 2.3-million-sq-ft Fort Belvoir Community Hospital in Fort Belvoir, Va. It is the largest U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project of its kind to use an integrated-design-bid-build delivery method.

As part of the competition, ENR inaugurated a safety awards category this year. "Safety has always been an important area of ENR's coverage because it is so important to our readers," said Janice L. Tuchman, ENR editor-in-chief, in a September announcement. "It has been one of the Best Projects competition's criteria from the beginning, but we think it deserves this special recognition."

Our first Best Safety Project is 815 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Forrester Construction, Rockville, Md., led construction of the project, which updated this 1964 building near the White House. Throughout the 533,227 man-hours logged, the project had no OSHA recordable incidents or lost time.

Read on to learn more about the grand performance of these award-winning projects.

ENR Mid-Atlantic Project of the Year

Curtis Institute of Music - Lenfest Hall, Philadelphia

Civil Works/Infrastructure

Best Project: Little Patuxent Water Reclamation Plant Addition No. 7, Savage, Md.

Award of Merit: Abingdon Water Treatment Plant Expansion, Abingdon, Md.

Cultural/Worship

Best Project: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Government/Public Building

Best Project: NOAA Center for Weather & Climate Prediction, Riverdale Park, Md.

Award of Merit: William O. Lockridge/Bellevue Library, Washington

Green Project