2003 AGC Washington Contractor Award Nominee

The St. Mary’s Rockville project is an example of successfully utilizing a general contractor to integrate "constructability" and "economic analysis" into all levels of the planning and building process. These elements were employed during the concept, master plan, design, and construction phases of the St. Mary’s project. The use of these elements proved that common restraints in the building of structures for private, non-profit institutions with limited budgets can be overcome. John C. Grimberg Company provided the expertise throughout the planning and building of St. Mary’s to create a facility that met the needs of operational personnel, matched the aesthetics of the existing structures, and optimized new aesthetic features, all with an excellent cost-benefit ratio.

During the concept phase, John C. Grimberg worked with St. Mary’s Parish to provide cost analysis for different expansion options, taking a list of desired spaces and narrowing it to include only “must have” spaces. Grimberg’s involvement in this project clearly prevented unnecessary design services for building spaces that the Parish budget could never realistically include.

During the master plan phase, John C. Grimberg Company worked with the Parish to divide the expansion into phases in such a way that the initial phase could be performed within the available budget.

Grimberg also worked with the Parish to plan the additional phases so that the final design allowed the possibility of future expansion. Furthermore, various prerequisites such as the need for more space, the parking requirements, the pastor’s desire for “Class A” expansion and for possible future expansion were all complicated by the fact that the Parish is surrounded by the Metro and two State Highways. All these restraints had to be overcome for even the initial phase of this project to succeed.

During the design phase, Grimberg worked with the Parish to surmount the “space-aesthetics-budget” restraints. Preliminary estimates were performed and changes were made to the design in order to balance these restraints.

During the contract pricing phase, Grimberg solicited numerous bids for each file and also requested “value engineering” ideas from the trades that would meet the quality and aesthetic restraints at a lower cost. Through competitive pricing with the trades and by introducing the value engineering concepts, Grimberg was able to obtain the lowest price possible to meet the space-aesthetics-budget goals.

During the construction phase of the project Grimberg continuously worked with St. Mary’s to eliminate or change any design features that the Parish had decided were unnecessary after the design phase. Grimberg also worked with St. Mary’s to make design changes on account of changes in their space needs. By watching for potentially unnecessary design features throughout the construction process, Grimberg was able to perform over 10% of the desired changes without any increase in contract price and without any compromise of the project restraints.

John C. Grimberg sees this as a successful model of a construction company assisting a private, non-profit institution through every phase of the planning/building process in order that the institution (1) does not cancel a project due to seemingly insurmountable obstacles and (2) is able to overcome its space-aesthetics-budget restraints.