Malls are not a rare breed in the United States, but they certainly
have peculiarities that set them apart when it comes to building
them. In last year’s article, contractors isolated the key challenges
these large structures present.
For existing structures, either reducing noise and protecting from
dirt and damage, or working around mall hours and cleaning up
before the start of each shopping day.
On new construction, the challenge was meeting a schedule based
more on wishful thinking or economics than practicality.
That then led to challenges keeping other trades on schedule while dealing with
the diverse and often changing requirements of tenants.
This year, the contractors echoed the same general points, although
a Hawaiian did come up with a new regional, possibly national, challenge to production goals and safety on remodeling work: “Head-turning—it results in dropped materials and tools, broken fingers
and so on because the men are distracted constantly by all the beautiful women in the mall, especially here in Hawaii.”
So this year, we thought we’d provide those contractors an opportunity to discuss specific projects, and either show off their craftsmanship
or highlight problems encountered and solutions that had
worked for them.
Time Is Money Is …
Steve Forbert of Kenpat USA (formerly E&K of Orlando) adds a
new wrinkle to the scheduling issue “because obviously time is money, and these mall people need to have their deadlines met. The problem is,
many of them are ‘build as you design.’
They include many ornate designs to
make their mall a little bit different from
every other mall, so, unlike most other
buildings where the plans are the plans
that you follow, in malls the drawings
often aren’t finalized until you’re building—
sometimes even the architect isn’t
sure how it’s going to turn out.”
Expanding on this view, Forbert continues,
“Right in the middle of the job,
the anchor stores would let and so we
had crews running five different projects
within a project, each one with its own
requirements. The ceilings at Sears were
a Level 5 drywall, for instance, and
ornate in terms of stair-step soffits,
etc.”
This experience was shared at Lotspiech
Company of Miami. “Because
not all stores are leased when mall
construction starts, changes result as
tenants are secured, with each tenant
having different criteria. In addition,
Dolphin Mall was over a million
square feet based on a set of drawings
that had been pulled off the drawing
board too soon, so the project was
loaded with changes, which is an inefficient
way to do a job. Despite this, the
mall opened on time.”
Todd Middleton of BEK Inc., Aiea,
Hawaii, says that “Malls are not as lucrative as most other jobs because the owner
allows tenants to come in early to start
their build-out, adding pressure on us to
complete before they arrive, and then
seeing to their requirements and change
orders. On most projects you deal with
one person; in a mall situation, you deal
with many.”
Again, this view was
echoed by Tom Johnson
of Raymond Interior
Systems North,
Concord, Calif. He
says, “Time is money
to them: ‘We want it
open before the holiday
season.’ In the case
of two malls we did,
Oakridge Mall and
Valley Fair, a single
company is owner, architect, developer
and leasing agent. When they recruit
tenants, they promise move-in dates that
then resulted in time crunches for the
contractor. In Valley Fair, tenants had
moved into 80 percent of the stores
while the smaller contractors were doing
their job and we were still finishing the
main mall. It was a zoo!”
Keith Parker of Circle B Company in
Indianapolis adds his voice to the chorus:
“Everybody is always in a hurry:
‘Let’s get it over with and start making
the bucks!’ It has always been this way
with malls because they are driven by
holidays and shopping seasons. We just
accommodate it with manpower, shift
work, etc.”
From Apples to Vertigo
The following might not generate much
sympathy from contractors in the Big
Apple and other big-city environments,
but Forbert mentioned one other challenge
met during construction of the
Orlando Outlet Mall. “The 70-foot
towers were challenging—several people
refused to work on them after they
began climbing up the scaffolding—
even our safety director was scared to go
up! The towers were very narrow, so the
scaffolding was basically a straight-up
ladder like on a water tower.”
Johnson adds other challenges to mall
work: “Then there was the time we had
just about completed an area when
somebody broke a sprinkler pipe and
damaged all our drywall. We were just
barely on schedule as it was, and then we
had to find a way to make it anyway!
This goes on all the time. What affects
us similarly is the underground work.
‘We have decided we need a drain right
through here,’ so they cut the concrete
and dig a long ditch. When we need to
get in our framing, it’s ‘Sorry about
what’s below you!’
“What tends to happen is the GC will
use us to push the job. ‘Okay Mr. Electrician,
you have a week to get your stuff
on that wall, and then I’m going to tell
the drywall guy to hang it.’ Now, if he
doesn’t complete it in time, his work will
be much more expensive for him as he
works around us. Hopefully the guys in
the field coordinate, but we’ve been told
before to hang the drywall, even though
it causes the electrician problems—in
the hope that the electrician will put in
extra time on his nickel, or add a crew
sized to get out in front.”
Focusing on a particular ceiling in a Big and
mall, Greg Brumo of Howard Pingston Bigger
in Michigan says they “just completed
two Apple Computer stores with really
unique ceiling systems. These required
tolerances in the millimeters on the
seam with all-aluminum, sheet-metal
type bevels that locked together to create
a continuous flowing surface. The
diffusers, lights, etc. had to be tied
together in the tolerances of this ceiling,
and a manufacturer’s rep came out and
insisted there be no gaps and everything
was perfectly level! On top of that, they
wanted a Level 5 finish on all the walls,
which means you almost have to plaster
the walls. It really does look beautiful,
though.”
Big and Bigger
“It was just the sheer magnitude of the
job—three-quarters of a mile from end
to end,” says a Floridian contractor of
one mall project. That was Parker’s take,
too. “The Circle Center mall stretches
over several city blocks and is four stories.
At the same time, it was tied into a
very large, glass-enclosed structure that
spans the two major streets in Indianapolis
to form a canopy, a four-story,
glass-enclosed arts garden for performances.
That then tied into an existing,
high-class hotel, so many different parts
had to be brought together.”
When it comes to big, perhaps no mall
tops the Mall of America, a $10 million
drywall contract from 12 years ago. “We
installed all the interior drywall for corridors
and dividing walls and the ceilings
in the common areas,” explains Tom
Panek of the Minuti-Ogle Company in
Oakdale, Minn. “It came to 2.5 million square feet of
SHEETROCK, including one wall that was half a mile long and
90 feet high.”
Stacked in one pile, the SHEETROCK would reach over 3,000
feet into the air; they used almost 6,000 frames of scaffolding
that stretched over 3.5 miles, and steel studs and tracks that
stretched close to 900 miles if stacked end to end. OK, so it was
h-u-g-e by any standards. Understandably, Panek notes a key
challenge was “Physically moving the materials from one end
of the mall to the other, because it was so big.”
Working the Mall of All Malls
“Having lived through the project, the biggest thing that stands
out in my mind,” Panek adds, “is the complexity of the organization
that brought it all together by a fixed date already made
known well ahead of time through marketing and signage. The
biggest challenge was trying to orchestrate everything in
sequence to get the job done in that time frame.”
Minuti-Ogle spent the first six months planning and then
working very tightly with all involved, once the work began.
“One of the marvels that came out of the project for me was
the need to organize between the architect, the owner and the
general contractor and my forces on a weekly basis. We didn’t
have the luxury of a time frame that included an RFI to the GC
to relay to the architect while we waited. So we instituted Thursday
meetings with the decision makers to review progress during
the prior week and plan the next week, including identifying
the obstacles and resolving them so we could move forward.
“We divided the project into four sub-projects with four lead-foremen
in charge of each. An overall superintendent and safe-ty
superintendent were also on the jobsite. We met with these
key people every Tuesday so we’d know what the problems were
at the jobsite level and could address them at the Thursday
meetings.
“This system and the willingness of the owner, architect and
GC to meet on these terms and make decisions was the number-
one reason for the timely completion of the project. These
Tuesday and Thursday meetings generated a quickie schedule
that helped us know where we had to be and where we had to
go, and we were able to keep the schedule happening instanta-neously,
instead of trying to project something out.
“We also engineered all the scaffolding on the entire project,
with a dozen employees dedicated to moving the scaffolding
continuously. Then we brought crews in and trained them on
how to build scaffolding and tear it down, and that really
worked out well,” especially as Minuti-Ogle then allowed all
the trades to use the same scaffolding rather than wasting time
erecting and taking down their own for each area.
‘Another plus from the project,” explains Panek, is that “we
have acquired a great deal of scaffolding and even set a standard
for the elaborate plastering and drywall
industry, on building scaffolding in a
safe manner. We’d learned a lot from
OSHA so they knew when we put up
scaffold, it’s done right the first time!
“The idea of building the largest shopping
mall in the United States brought
many talented people together who
wanted to work on it. We had 128 or
more people on site for over a year. As a
result of the project, what we learned
and the exposure we received, we have
tripled in capacity since then. We have
had several companies from abroad contact
us to do work, but I know what it
is like to do business in foreign countries—
it is not as romantic as it sounds,
so we decline.
Malls, They are a’changing
“The mall environment has changed in
the last decade,” Panek adds. “GCs have
more compressed schedules and want
work done substantially faster. I understand
owners want their construction-loan
money to be limited out there
because it’s non-productive. So GCs are
putting an incredible amount of liability
on the subcontractors that is uncalled
for. They want us to take responsibility
for some of their actions because of lack
of work in the industry, so it’s dumped
on the subcontractors or trade contractors
as much as possible.
“Building malls today, we’re finding the
Malls, They base contract is to build the structure
Are a’changing itself. Tenant build-outs are usually now
handled by smaller GCs looking for the
cheapest route. So their team contractors
are either unqualified or partially
qualified, and the GCs are throwing
them in to build quickly and keep the
numbers down. As a larger drywall and
plastering firm that is totally union and
pays benefits that the non-union do not,
we are quite often not competitive in
this market.
Brumo, another union contractor, has
run into the same issue: “The unfortunate
thing is it all boils down to the dollars.
We’re a union contractor and we’re
bidding against so much non-union out
there, it’s an uphill battle. Our numbers
are going up on an hourly basis because
our people always have some kind of
raise every year. We’re going against pre-vailing
wages and guys who are totally
non-union and don’t even bother with
prevailing wages. We are all competing
in the same market. There used to be
union malls, but not anymore. For a
union, it costs $53 an hour, and maybe
these guys are paying $35 per hour with
slimmer benefits to these guys who are
non-union. Our guys right now have to
do that much more work and get that
much better in order to make up the difference.”
Despite this, Panek states that “We did
make a profit on the Mall of America
and continue to do so on mall projects.
We were the lowest bid by $1 million on
the Mall of America, coming in at $11.4
million. Our approach to bidding a project
is not to take advantage of its size
and gouge the owner or the general contractor,
which some people will try to
do, thinking ‘we’re one of the only few
companies that can build this.’ We
know our costs very well and add a reasonable profit and then try to manage it,
and therein lies the key. If you can manage
a project extremely well, there are
ways to get dollars out of it just simply
by being able to push labor, buy the
materials tighter and implement controls
in building the project, as opposed
to simply putting a big number on it
and hope it turns out.”
While we are analyzing the success, let’s
also include another traditional aspect of
this company: It has a large core group
of people, many of whom started their
careers as apprentices with the company.
Every year, one to three people retire
who have spent their entire careers with
the company—this could be why Minuti-Ogle celebrated its centennial recently,
and gets to build the mall of all malls.
When all is said and done, the focus of
this article has been on challenges and
problems. The end result, however—
come hell or high water, sweat and intelligence—
is the often magnificent structures
that contractors around the
country have teamed up to build, and
some of which are pictured above.
So next time you are shopping in a mall,
folks, walk tall!
About the Author
Steven Ferry is a free-lance writer based
in Clearwater, Fla.
