Kiwi lends know how to resort giant

Tony McKee, Beca director, oversaw the lifting of more than 7000 tonnes of steelwork to build the Marina Bay Sands SkyPark. Photo / Supplied

I am a Kiwi engineer, now director, of Beca project management in Singapore. I joined Beca as a graduate structural engineer in 1995 and had working stints in Indonesia and Macau with Beca in the 1990s.

I then left to do my OE in London for a couple of years, working at Canary Wharf and for Buro Happold, engineers of British Museum and London Dome fame.

I returned to New Zealand in 2003 and joined the Beca project management group in Auckland, working on Auckland International Airport expansion, Auckland showground's redevelopment and the Eden Park redevelopment.

I was project manager at Eden Park until resource consent was obtained - then the project went quiet as it became political. Then a former colleague of mine mentioned the Marina Bay Sands project in Singapore.

My wife, Nikki, and I stopped over there in 2007 following some hard decision-making. Five weeks later I had transferred to the Beca Singapore office and was working on the Marina Bay Sands, embedded into the project management team.

Initially I was the design manager of the exhibition and convention centre, then in 2007 I was promoted to lead the SkyPark. Nikki joined me six months later and our son was born in Singapore.

I joined the S$1.3 billion hotel and SkyPark project - within the overall S$6.8 billion development - when piling was under way. The three hotel towers are impressive buildings in their own right and I assisted with some of the technical structural issues.

Working 24 hours a day, the team managed to get the construction down to a four-day floor-to-floor cycle.

Marina Bay Sands wanted me and my team focused on the SkyPark and the challenges involved in lifting more than 7000 tonnes of steel work and building a first-of-its-kind sky-high resort with pools, gardens and a sculpted hull cladding.

Right from the beginning there was a lot of pressure to solve the technical challenges, refine and simplify the design and make sure we could build the SkyPark safely and in less than a year so it didn't delay the opening of the casino, hotel and other buildings below.

During the early stages in 2007-08 we didn't know how to clad the hull and build the SkyPark pools across the movement joints. While we had a few heavy-lifting options to get the superstructure up, the exact solution was an evolving process. So I guess you could say my technical background developed with Beca on projects in New Zealand and overseas - such as the Macau Tower - gave me the tools to challenge the Arup engineers and manage the process on a project that was not quite a building or bridge but a bit of both, and visible in terms of its success and progress.

Beca had seven full-time project managers on the project for the last three years. Only two of them had not worked for Beca previously.

Marina Bay Sands went to five alliance partners to source experienced project managers to get the mega project under way in 2006. They were looking for 40 to 50 senior project managers. Marina Bay Sands was an ambitious, almost impossible, timeframe for an architecturally spectacular project with a gross floor area of 600,000sq m.

The SkyPark construction had many challenges. The right contractors had to be selected for the work and technical challenges involved using prefabricated structure to quicken the process.

The structural design was by Arup in Hong Kong and the documentation architect, Aedas, was based in Singapore.

Concept architect Moshe Safdie was based in the US so we had regular video conferences during the design process and used the web-based management document system Aconex.

We encountered a few difficulties along the way. During the first heavy lift, an earthquake in Sumatra caused enough shaking to make the 400-tonne segment sway more than 1m; it scared the operators so much they evacuated the heavy-lifting frames. Singapore is not a seismic zone.

Tenderers didn't know how to access the facade so we identified a specialist scaffold company in Britain, which we partnered with the cladding installers. For the prefab pools, we carried out mock-up testing of the underwater movement joint in the US.

MARINA BAY SANDS

* $7 billion Singapore building.
* 57 levels with pool on top.
* 2561-room waterfront hotel.
* 24-hour casino.
* Glass shopping and nightclub pavilions.
* Expo and convention centre.
* Rooftop SkyPark size of three rugby fields.
* SkyPark project managed by Kiwi.
* 150m infinity pool.