Project Info

Project of the Year & Winner of Office/Retail/Mixed-Use: Novartis East Hanover Campus Transformation, East Hanover, N.J.

An office complex in the suburbs is seldom the setting for highly rigorous site logistics, team collaboration and design management efforts. But the sweeping 1.2 million-sq-ft construction program Novartis Pharmaceuticals undertook in East Hanover, N.J., was no ordinary suburban affair.

The $548-million campus transformation that brought together marquee architects with 400 contractors and 5,000 tradespeople—which created three distinctive office buildings, new roadways, a 1,700-space parking garage and a LEED-Gold visitor reception building—called for major project coordination.

ENR New York’s awards jury noted that effort in naming the undertaking the region’s Best Project of 2014. “This was an amazing project in complexity … an enormous job,” said one judge. “Coordinating 400 contractors for the site is a huge challenge.”

Located on a 230-acre campus 24 miles west of New York City, the bustling six-acre construction zone had an urban feel, with structures rising within 65 ft of each other, says Randy Dias, head of Novartis’ global design and construction management team.

Large Scale, Fast Track

The project team didn’t have a blank slate to work on. Novartis had 4,500 people on campus commuting in thousands of cars when the project broke ground in 2011. But Turner came on the job early, Dias says. “We brought Turner in to review schematic design and design development documents for constructibility,” he says.

Besides traffic management, Turner leased a site off campus to coordinate materials delivery, staging, worker parking and other logistics. The various projects required management of large quantities of materials, such as 5,200 pieces of steel, 990 chilled beams and the garage facade’s 8,000 bamboo poles.