SOM Hosts West Point Cadets
New York, NY - November 17, 2009 - On Thursday October 22, 2009, Skidmore Owings & Merrill hosted sixty-six cadets from West Point Military Academy. The engineering students traveled to New York to visit two SOM job sites with their structural engineering instructors Majors Adam Chalmers and Jeff Braun. Frank Ruggiero of SOM and Jason Stone of Leslie E Robertson Associates showed the cadets the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Eleventh Avenue between West 58th and West 59th Streets, which is currently under construction.
The cadets traveled to the SOM’s New York office and over lunch, SOM Managing Partner T.J. Gottesdiener and SOM Director Ken Lewis, the project manager of Tower One, presented the history, challenges and design of World Trade Center in general, and Tower One in particular. The issues included building a super high-rise over active tracks of the PATH system; the complexity of working with high strength concrete that in some parts reaches 8’ in thickness; and working with extremely high wind loads.
The cadets then walked through the center of the WTC site in several small groups. In addition to Tower One, the cadets saw the nearly completed excavation of the East Bathtub, the new East Bathtub slurry wall, the ongoing construction of the Memorial and Museum, Tower Four, reconstruction of the PATH tracks, the PATH Station, and underpinning operation below the subway box. The core and shell elements of the roughly half a million square feet concourses and below grade spaces is nearing completion. From the street, the form of the Tower One base is clearly visible. Cadets witnessed welding and bolting operations, examples of the immense coordination within the exposed rebar, and the EFCO self jacking lift system used to construct the massive core walls. They also saw the two Manitowoc crawler cranes, the larger one with a 835 US ton lifting capacity, the largest crane ever used in Manhattan.
About SOM
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) is one of the leading architecture, urban planning, interior design, and engineering firms in the world, with a 75-year reputation for design excellence and a portfolio that includes some of the most important architectural accomplishments of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since its inception, SOM has been a leader in the research and development of specialized technologies, new processes and innovative ideas, many of which have had a palpable and lasting impact on the design profession and the physical environment. The firm’s longstanding leadership in design and building technology has been honored with more than 1,300 awards for quality, innovation, and management. The American Institute of Architects has recognized SOM twice with its highest honor, the Architecture Firm Award—in 1962 and again in 1996. The firm maintains offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Brussels.
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