Construction Tours Have Been a Unique Feature of CWA Meetings for Nearly a Decade
November, 2007
Annual meeting tours go back to the spring of 1999, when members toured the Newseum in Arlington, VA, on Thursday afternoon. Members had arrived early to attend a Thursday morning discussion organized by Ron Worth, 1999-2000 CWA president, of ways trade associations could work together for the good of the construction industry. This was the first of a series of Thursday morning education sessions that have expanded both the annual and midyear meetings into two-day affairs.
2003 tour of the unfinished Millennium Park site
Annual meeting construction tours began in 2000 when Gordon Wright, who was CWA president in 2000-1, organized a tour of the US Capitol Building with the Architect of the Capitol, who discussed renovation of the Capitol dome and the planned visitor's center project.
Tours that followed included: a visit to the offices of the architect/engineering firm Smith Group in 2001, a tour of the recently-renovated US Botanic Gardens at the Capitol in 2002, and a hard-hat tour of the under-construction National Museum of the American Indian in 2003. We had two tours in 2004 – a bus trip to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and a walking tour of the US Capitol Visitors Center project.
In 2005, we visited the Robert F Kennedy main building of the Justice Department to see recent renovations and the department's art collection. In spring 2006, CWA members were privileged to climb up the scaffolding of the Air Force Memorial to see a spectacular view of the District of Columbia. In 2007, we had a mini-tour of the National Association of Realtors building (a green building) and also toured the new House of Sweden, the Swedish consulate and multi-purpose building.
Construction tours were inaugurated in the fall of 2000 in Chicago, also under the leadership of Gordon Wright. Our first tour was to the North Bridge mixed-use construction project on Michigan Avenue. We toured the Upper and Lower Wacker Drive reconstruction project in 2001 and the new USB Tower on Wacker Drive in 2002. In 2003, we took a cruise on the Chicago River to view Chicago architecture from that vantage point.
In 2004, we visited Chicago's newest tourist attraction, Millennium Park. We visited the newly-renovated SR Crown Hall, designed by Mies van de Rohe and home of the school of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in 2005. In 2006, we had -a behind-the-scenes tour of O'Hare Airport and learned about new runways planned there. In the fall of 2007, we visited the Lakeshore East development on the Chicago River east of Michigan Avenue, including the Aqua Building.
Construction tours are now a well-established feature of CWA meetings, and invitations for tours are always well-received.