Name: Pat Thornton ACIOB
Employer: Parkeray
Project: The Imperial College London Central Library Phase 2, South Kensington Campus
Contract: NEC 2
Most projects meet with a potentially disastrous turn of events sooner or later, but few encounter calamitous discoveries and setbacks on the scale that threatened Pat Thornton’s.
Hearts must have sunk when huge ground obstructions were encountered during the piling. Knowing that the size of the foundations meant something substantial and recalling a historic photo of the area, Pat headed for the college archive. There he discovered that the piling had hit the footings of the Imperial Institute, demolished a half-century earlier and by some fluke missed by the precontract drilling of test holes.
With time of the essence and the piling rig rebooked for 14 days later, Pat ruled out probing with the rig to find a way through. He put forward his own solution: to grub up as much of the footings as possible, cart off the spoil and redesign the piling around what was left. Just as importantly, he successfully communicated the sense of urgency to the design team to undertake a breakneck redesign to maintain the programme.
Then Pat’s design workshops threw up the painful fact that the specified fan coil air conditioning would be far too noisy in a library lacking an acoustic ceiling. With the design concept already far advanced, introducing one would scupper the refurb’s architectural integrity.
Issuing a ‘dig deep’ memo to everyone to come to the project table next day with solutions, he drove the team towards a viable consensus that the fan coils should be omitted and an air-handling unit installed. Easy enough to decide, certainly, but it only happened because Pat had the golden relationships to make such a change work.
The designers worked round the clock on the redesign, and the subcontractors offered the installation buy-in. Most crucially of all, Pat solved the intractable location issue – the roof was too small and the new service tower unable to accommodate the four huge units required – by directly negotiating with the client to install them in the basement.
And these were merely the highlights of a storming performance. Pat carefully orchestrated the varied suppliers of the many bespoke fittings. He resolved complex problems promptly and with considerable ingenuity (he invented a custom book chute and realised the heat build-up in the basement could be exploited to heat the building). And he introduced a snag-free culture.
Value: £6.9m