Gateway Project – Olympics 2002, Salt Lake City, Utah

by Gwen Marker

The Gateway project is the 300 million-dollar, 30-acre development of downtown Salt Lake City in anticipation of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. The Gateway Project not only encompasses the planning, design and construction of many of the 2002 Olympic Function Sites, but it also serves at a city rejuvenation project, reinvigorating the industrial downtown area previously occupied by the historic Union Pacific’s railroad yards.

In total, there are 700,000 square feet of entertainment (7 square city blocks) facilities, which include:

The “Olympic Plaza” and “Central Courtyard”

A 14 Plex Cinema

Over 50 retail facilities (650,000 square feet)

Various cultural museums (over 100,000 square feet)

A 300 room hotel

A health club

700 residential units (to be occupied by press and athletes during the games)

A large-scale parking structure (over 400 spaces)

450,00 square feet of office space

There are over 50 structures to be built and approximately 1,944,000 bricks to be laid for the project. All to be completed by September 2001 – before the winter 2002 Olympic Games.

In addition to these challenges, consider a team of over 20 architects, 10 engineers, and 40 contractors, who all must work together from across 5 different states. There are over 15 firms that must all collaborate to deliver the Olympic Function Sites with over 100 individual collaborators, on over 2000 drawings (or 1.2 Gigabytes of information).

In the past, managing this process alone has been an Olympic project. Today, ReviewIt is helping the Gateway team by leveraging the Internet to bring it all together.

The Gateway team is using new Internet collaboration software called ReviewIt from Cubus Corporation, a San Francisco Internet Company started by former Autodesk Engineers. The software allows architects, engineers, and everyone else involved on the Gateway project to collaborate with one another – all via the Internet. The software allows the Gateway team to share and mark-up large blueprints electronically, instead of printing them on large-scale printers and shipping them to other team members for review and approval.  The software also allows the users to communicate with one another 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and includes electronic forms needed to expedite the construction process. The software also contains sophisticated alerting and tracking features allowing all team members to stay abreast of the project.

At the on-set of the Gateway project, The Boyer Group, a $100 million-dollar building development company and the project owner, knew what it would be necessary to complete the project in just 30 months the old-fashioned way. Discussion was already underway to lease 25 high-end computer work stations, 3000 square feet of downtown office space, with the expectation that it would require 6 hours of office time per day and daily collaboration meetings for all project team members.

After discussing alternative options, it was determined that utilizing the Web would not only speed up the collaboration of the project, but would make things much easier for such a large team collaborating from all over the country.

Six months into design and only one week before the construction began in Salt Lake City, there were approximately 120 individual collaborators, each spending roughly 2 hours logged into ReviewIt every day, as opposed to the same number of people spending 6 hours of mandatory time in the central office location, as in the original plan.

Gwen Marker is Marketing Manager for Cubus Corporation. She may be reached at gwen.marker@cubus.net, 415-905-9035.