Ave Maria

New University and Town Makes for Unique Project for Contractor Team

By Debra Wood

Rising in the middle of Southwest Florida’s rich agricultural land, Ave Maria University and Town fulfills one man’s dream to create the first U.S. Catholic university built in more than 40 years and develop the state’s newest town. 

“It’s a great opportunity for anyone in the construction business,” says Skip Doyle, field operations director for Ave Maria. “There aren’t many people who can say they started with a tomato field and built a whole new town.”

Thomas S. Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza and Ave Maria University, provided the initial funding to kick start the roughly $250 million project, located on a 10,000-acre site near Immokalee, Fla. The university now operates at an interim campus in North Naples and will move to the new campus in August.

“Mr. Monaghan had a great vision,” says Keith Alf, vice president with Cannon Design of Grand Island, N.Y., which designed the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired campus. Alf says that rather than strictly following Wright’s style – a favorite of Monaghan’s – he brought together a number of stylistic pieces, such as large overhangs and copper roofs.

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The Vision, The Project

The first phase of the construction includes a 96,000-sq-ft, three-story library; a three-story science, math and technology building; a 77,000-sq-ft, two-story student activities center; three residential buildings totaling 204,000 sq ft; recreational facilities; and a central energy plant with two chillers but room for five. Future plans calls for a student recreation building, performing arts center, another academic building and an administrative building. The master plan includes a graduate complex, more student housing and a football stadium.

A campus green connects the academic center with a European-style town center, which features retail, offices, commercial space and residential condominiums, being built by Opus Corp. of Minneapolis for Ave Maria Development, a partnership of Barron Collier Cos. of Naples and Ave Maria University.

The town center may increase in size to 1.2 million sq ft of commercial and retail space as the market demands.

The 24,000-sq-ft Oratory of Ave Maria, a 1,100-seat sanctuary, sits in the center of the town, serving as a 100-ft-high focal point and the symbolic heart of the university. Pulte Homes of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., has begun construction on the first of 11,000 planned residential units.

Suffolk Construction Co. of West Palm Beach and Sarasota teamed with Kraft Construction Co. of Naples in 2003 and obtained the university preconstruction contract. Rex Kirby, president and general manager with Suffolk, says that after his company made the short list of firms under consideration, it approached Kraft to joint venture, which brought in experience with local subcontractors.

“We were hired for preconstruction services with no commitment for construction at the time,” says Mike Beaumier, vice president of Suffolk’s West Coast operations.
Suffolk/Kraft worked with Cannon Design, the university architect and the school’s staff for two years prior to the start of construction to develop pricing, project schedules and site logistics for the entire project.

Travis Coulter, senior vice president of Kraft, estimates that each firm had more than a dozen high-level employees working on the project. In addition to value engineering, the teams concentrated on how to divide and sequence the work, ultimately deciding to hire several subs for the various trades, each working on a different building. 

“The ability of having multiple subs (for some of the trades) gave us the flexibility to know that they could bring people in from different places,” says Coulter.

During the course of preconstruction, the project changed from concrete block and brick to precast tilt-up construction. Also, the team scaled back the oratory’s size and the initial scope of phase one.

“When this (change to tilt wall) was initially proposed, we wanted to do some of the buildings in tilt and some in masonry to assure that we could have a diverse workforce of masonry and tilt-wall contractors on different buildings,” Beaumier says. “The eventual change to all tilt buildings made it harder to get the subcontractors we needed on the front side of the project.”

The challenges would be even greater than that.

Just as the project shifted to tilt-up construction, Hurricane Wilma came through and two of the planned tilt-wall contractors pulled out to work on other projects needing repair closer to home.

In the end, a single firm was able to handle most of the tilt-up work itself. According to Beaumier, South West Construction of Fort Myers “stepped up to the plate” and constructed six of the seven tilt-up buildings.

Also, says Beaumier, “We now knew that we had to make sure we had sufficient manpower on the downstream (post-tilt-up) activities. So we subcontracted our work to multiple drywall contractors to assure that we could man the project through the finish phases and complete the work.”

Suffolk/Kraft finally began site work in summer 2005 and construction of the buildings later that year. Site preparation included construction of a 3,500-ft-long seawall adjacent to a canal, which marks the edge of the campus, and installation of utility lines, some of which are 13-ft below ground.

Crews then layered in water, sewer, stormwater and propane gas lines and an 18-in chilled water loop.

The rising cost of materials caused the project team to find ways to lock in pricing. The team worked with Revere Copper and Firestone Unaclad to obtain a copper options contract to purchase the coil stock to be used to produce the copper roofing. Crews are using a patina process to speed oxidization of the cooper, so they will match Monaghan’s Domino Farms in Michigan. 

 Four plants, operating during a 24-hour period, supplied concrete for the oratory’s mat slab foundation. At 7,000 tons, it was the largest mat slab pour in Southwest Florida.
Suffolk/Kraft released the oratory’s steel fabrication contract nearly a year before construction began. Cives Steel of Thomasville, Ga., fabricated the project’s structural steel and shipped the material to the jobsite and erected.

“The steel is just incredible. You almost don’t want to cover it up. It’s a work of art,” Kirby says.

New Mexico travertine will grace the east and west exterior oratory walls. The balance will be clad with standing seam metal and aluminum. A skylight runs the full length of the building. The oratory is on schedule for a December 2007 opening.  

Suffolk/Kraft Joint Venture also received the design-build contract for a 48,000-sq-ft, two-story K-12 private school for the university in Ave Maria town. Suffolk/Kraft is working with SchenkelShultz Architects to design and build the school, which will accommodate 400 students when completed.

Between 700 and 800 craftsmen work on the project daily, with 40 supervisory personnel from Suffolk/Kraft. Joe Stamp of Suffolk anticipates when the job is complete it will tally up to 1.2 million manhours.

The slowing housing market has made it easier to attract drywall techs, carpenters and carpet layers, but not people familiar with sophisticated mechanical or electrical systems.

Excitement continues to build as the university inches closer to completion.

“I’ll probably never have this kind of opportunity again,” Kirby says. “You don’t get this kind of opportunity but once in a lifetime.”