George W. Bush, the 43rd U.S. president, made his mark in Texas earlier in his career through oil exploration. Now under construction, the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas seeks to become a landmark of energy efficiency. Dedicated to preserving the artifacts and history of the Bush presidency, the $250-million library complex is designed to achieve LEED Platinum certification, a rare honor in the state. Related Links: Engineering News Record Architectural Record "We opted to go for platinum, partly because we wanted to do it as a challenge and due to the high profile

There's a new giant in the No. 1 position of ENR Southeast's annual Top Design Firms ranking this year, and even though it's the firm's first time atop the charts, the company's success is anything but a big surprise. AECOM Technology Corp. soared past its Southeast competition in 2011 by grabbing a big share of the major projects throughout the region. Related Links: Perkins+Will Envisions New Future for Design More Southeast Firms While many other Southeast firms struggled over the past year to eke out a mild increase, or else suffered a decline, AECOM surged, posting a gain of roughly

Even as government agencies appear to be showing more austerity in their construction budgets, public projects are still making up the vast majority of big new projects in the region. Public projects outnumber private work 2-to-1 on the ENR Texas and Louisiana Top Starts ranking for 2011. More than $12.1 billion worth of projects, each valued at more than $50 million, broke ground in 2011, an increase from 2010. Many contractors reaped the rewards. "In Texas, we are having the best year we've ever had," says Gary Nauert, regional manager in Texas for DPR Construction Inc., Austin. He says DPR

Hurricanes and the sail effect dominated the thinking of the design team for the nation's first retractable-roof baseball park engineered to withstand 146-mph winds. To keep the lid on the 36,000-seat new Miami Marlins Ballpark during severe storms, without adding too much extra weight, the roof's structural engineer called for parking the roof panels 10 ft apart, in an almost-closed position. The gap-mode strategy, which reduces the sail effect, lightened up the roof by some 1,000 tons of steel, the engineer says. "Putting a big sail on top of this stadium in a hurricane-prone region was the [project's] biggest challenge,"

For the $239.3-million University of Texas MD Anderson Albert B. and Margaret M. Alkek expansion, McCarthy Building Cos. raised the roof—figuratively and literally.

Dedicated to good stewardship of its resources, the nonprofit Cook Children's Health Care System in Fort Worth, Texas, turned to integrated project delivery (IPD) to deliver a planned medical office building, putting its faith in a team of contractors and design firms to produce the facility more efficiently. Rendering courtesy of Cook Children's Health Care System Cook Childrens is using integrated project delivery to build a general office building and parking deck on its Fort Worth campus. Photo courtesy of Cook Children's Health Care System The Cook Childrens project team discusses design of the general office building. Related Links: Main

The first year of construction on the $80-million Legg Mason World Headquarters/Four Seasons hotel project in Baltimore was spent below grade, excavating and then building the upscale development's 1,200-space underground parking garage.

So far so good for ambitious improvements to a 10.5-mile stretch of Interstate 595 in Florida's Broward County. Approaching the midpoint of its construction schedule, the $1.8-billion contract—the Florida Dept. of Transportation's first use of a design-build-finance-operate-maintain contract and its highest-dollar project ever—is on schedule and on budget for a June 2014 completion. Related Links: Top Start: I-595 Corridor Improvements “Everything on this job is unique,” says Paul Lampley, FDOT's project manager for the I-595 Express Corridor Improvements Project.FDOT opted to use a public-private partnership to bundle what had been more than 15 projects into a single job supported by

The $3.7-million, 12,227-sq-ft Bread for the City expansion project in Washington, D.C., delivered needed space for a nonprofit organization providing food, medical care, legal advice and other social services to low-income residents.