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Let’s flip back the pages of time and look at what happened in late 2001:
• Enron Corp. filed for bankruptcy.
• Hamid Karzai was sworn in as the interim leader in Afghanistan.
• Christiaan Barnard—the South African surgeon who made medical history in 1967 by performing the first human heart transplant—died at age 78.
• Shell Canada Limited’s Athabasca Oil Sands Project was still months away from starting.
• The Detroit Red Wings were into a season that would see them eventually face the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup finals, giving Scotty Bowman his ninth Cup win.
• Alberta Construction Magazine published its first issue recognizing the year's top construction projects.
It’s no accident that last bullet point was included. This is a milestone issue, marking the 10th anniversary of Top Projects.
Who could have predicted what would have happened between late 2001 and now? The boom. The bust. The labour challenges. The spike in oil prices and what that has meant for Alberta. The growth in population for the province. The amount of construction the industry has taken on.
The first Top Projects feature singled out 20 projects that then-editor Darrell Stonehouse wrote “showed off the creativity of Alberta’s design community and the inventiveness of the province’s builders.”
Reviewing the 38 projects submitted for that first Top Projects issue “offered an opportunity to see where Alberta’s construction industry is headed in the future, and many of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead,” Stonehouse noted. Among his observations:
• For commercial projects, there would be growth in building renovations.
• In the institutional market, designers and builders would be doing more with less.
• On the industrial side, logistics would become paramount as more emphasis was placed on modular construction.
• In civil construction, new project delivery methods would allow value-engineering to cut costs where opportunities presented themselves.
Pretty accurate. Certainly things have changed since we published the first Top Projects Awards a decade ago. But as the projects chosen by the 2011 judging panel of Randy Kraft and Jacob Coonan of KPMG LLP—the event sponsor of the inaugural Alberta Construction Magazine Top Projects Awards gala luncheon where these winners were announced—Stonehouse (yes, we convinced him to help judge) and myself illustrate, the creativity of Alberta’s design community and the inventiveness of the province’s builders is still going strong.
Congrats to all those a part of the 13 Top Projects chosen this year. May your best years be still ahead.
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