The company won class 3 project of the year honours at the Steel Erectors Association of America, and Bosworth project leaders Jim Avery, David Sweeney and Kevin Ritchey won the 2008 Craftsmanship Awards from the Washington Building Congress.
The 41,888-seat stadium is the new home park for the Major League baseball team, the Washington Nationals ( http://www.nationals.mlb.com ) and the centerpiece of D.C.’s billion dollar, multi-use riverfront development little more than a mile away from the U.S. Capitol. The ballpark opened officially March 30 with the home team winning the season opener 3-2 against the Atlanta Braves.
Financing for the $611 million plus project was approved in December 2004. Steel erection on the stadium began in October 2006. The skeletal design and construction was divided into nine stages, a procedure that allowed the production and installation of one section of steel framework while engineers designed the next. The last crane pulled away on June 30, 2007. At 23 months, Nationals holds the record for the shortest duration build ever attempted for a major league baseball stadium.
“We had tremendous schedule pressures and the logistical challenges of building from the inside,” said Bosworth of his company’s work on the stadium, “but we completed the job on time to the day.” Bosworth credits the union ironworkers who worked 60-hour weeks to erect the more than 7,800 tons of structural steel that shapes the limestone and glass form of the stadium. At the peak of the project, a team of 45 ironworkers worked with two heavy lift cranes (a 330-ton and 300-ton) to put the steel structure in place in record time.
Bosworth is president of the Ironworkers Signatory Contractors Association affiliated with District Council of Texas and the Mid-South. The District Council is part of IMPACT — the Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust. Bosworth is a third-generation union ironworker himself.
General contractors for Washington Nationals Baseball Stadium were Clark/Hunt/Smoot, a joint venture between Clark Construction Group, LLC of Bethesda, Md., Hunt Construction Group of Indianapolis and Smoot Construction of Washington, DC. The sports architecture firm, HOK Sport and Devrouax & Purnell Architects/Planners in a joint venture were lead architects and designers on the stadium complex. Engineers were Thornton Tomasetti/ReStl, a joint venture. Steel fabrication was done by Banker Steel Company, LLC.
