Name: Martyn Woodhouse
Employer: Bovis Lend Lease
Project: The Curve Theatre, Leicester
Contract: JCT
The collaborative spirit gets a lot more lip service than actual implementation, but for Martyn Woodhouse there was simply no alternative to creating a total team for the five years it would take to design and construct this fiendishly complex project.
Martyn laid on team building events right through the half-decade spanned by the project. His imparting of a strong sense of partnership, collective action and shared responsibility is even more striking given the very large number of specialists and stakeholders involved at one time or another. His team shared offices with the client, design team and subcontractors, and the no-blame culture and open discussion of issues laid the foundations for project success.
Armed with an extensive knowledge of theatre construction and projects, Martyn prioritised the selection and appointment of the specialists. Their early engagement helped drive the one-team approach, integrating the key trades with the design well before site start.
Martyn devoted a huge amount of time and effort to understanding the highly technical structure and equipment. He deployed his insights to great effect by sharing them with the critical subcontractors through workshops, presentations and tutorials. It ensured they thoroughly understood the complicated nature of the structure – a 130m long by 22m high inclined and curved facade was suspended from a floating roof and finished 5m off the ground connected to a floating mezzanine – and built it perfectly.
And at the same time as he delivered the superb quality, Martyn achieved the cost certainty that allowed the project to go ahead by thoughtful value engineering. He revised the facade’s transom design so that it could be flipped, substantially reducing the supplier’s tooling costs and product run times, saving the project over £100k and the programme four weeks.
And he replaced the weight-prohibitive traditional materials in the never previously attempted L-shaped theatre shutter configuration with modern lightweight elements. It cut nearly £400k off the costs and reduced installation time by five weeks.
Value: £60m