Kiewit’s Michael Svoboda wins inaugural Bowen Prize for Great Builders
BY NICK FORTUNA
Bob Bowen was looking at a museum exhibit recognizing doctors who had won the Nobel Prize for medicine when a thought occurred to him. For all the construction industry’s rich history and accomplishments, it lacked a signature award honoring its most talented and dedicated boots-on-the-ground leaders – the project managers who shepherd large projects from start to finish.
Driven by a desire to give back to the industry, Bowen worked with the AGC Education & Research Foundation to establish the Bowen Prize for Great Builders. The annual award was given out for the first time this spring, with Kiewit project manager Michael Svoboda selected from a pool of a dozen nominees.
Svoboda, 35, was honored for spearheading a $71.8-million bridge replacement in downtown Nashville, an ambitious project that involved closing a major thoroughfare for eight weeks. Under his leadership, the project was completed two weeks ahead of schedule with an impeccable safety record of zero incidents over 110,000 work hours.
“I think that young man is tremendous,” Bowen said. “We had 12 candidates for the prize, and it was tough to pick the winner because all 12 are Heisman Trophy finalists. These guys are the best in the business. We looked not only at construction expertise but stewardship, team building, customer service and complexity of the project, and this was a really great project.”
Svoboda said he was “shocked and happy” to win the award, which he received at the AGC 2025 Convention in Columbus in April. Months prior, a district manager at Kiewit had asked him for information about the project so he could nominate Svoboda for the award, but after that, Svoboda didn’t think too much about it. As a project manager, you tend to focus on the task at hand, he said.
“This may be an individual award, but to me, it’s recognition for the entire project team and all the teamwork and collaboration that was involved, especially our staff and the crafts who worked so hard to get it done,” Svoboda said. “This project certainly had a lot of technical complexities, but when you look back at projects, you tend not to think about those challenges. You remember all the people you worked with and what you accomplished together as a team, so it was rewarding to be a part of it.”
Educating the Next Generation
The Bowen Prize for Great Builders includes a $50,000 donation to the construction education program of the winner’s choosing, and Svoboda selected the construction management program at his alma mater, the University of Wyoming. A native of Casper, Wyoming, Svoboda graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering in 2013 and joined Kiewit right out of college.
“I serve on the Industry Advisory Board for the University of Wyoming, and when I went to school there, they didn’t have a construction management program, so I studied engineering because it was the closest thing,” Svoboda said. “In the past five to seven years, they’ve set up a construction management program, and it’s really cool to see it thriving.”
Bowen, 85, is chairman of Indianapolis-based Bowen Engineering, a self-performing general contractor specializing in water, wastewater, energy and industrial projects. With seven satellite offices, the company works on major projects throughout the eastern United States.
An Indianapolis native, Bowen studied civil engineering at nearby Purdue University, got some industry experience working for Purdue alumnus Bill Lyles in California and returned to his hometown to found Bowen Engineering in 1967. The company’s first project was a wastewater treatment plant in Brookston, Indiana. Today, the company is run by Bob’s son, President and Chief Executive Officer Doug Bowen, and has more than 275 fulltime employees.
“The business has never gone better,” Bob Bowen said, “so I figured, ‘Let’s celebrate and share our good fortune.’ Nobody recognizes contractors, and we have the greatest industry on the planet. We have great leaders building great projects, and we need to celebrate them.”
Bowen approached Steve Sandherr, then the AGC’s CEO, about establishing an award for the top field leaders in construction and pledged $1 million to fund annual donations to educational institutions. Bowen said he envisioned calling it the AGC Prize, but Sandherr, recognizing Bowen’s generosity, suggested it be named after him.
A committee of industry professionals evaluated each nomination and named Svoboda the inaugural winner.
“I’m thrilled that we had a top company like Kiewit win it, but they had to earn it,” Bowen said. “There were no gimmes. The project managers provide the ingenuity, creativity and leadership in the field. Without them running the job, you’re not going to be successful. They have to be multifaceted, they have to be talented, and they have to be great leaders.”
Celebrating a Major Project
Replacing Nashville’s aging Broadway Bridge was no easy task, but Kiewit earned high marks from local stakeholders.
The company used accelerated bridge techniques and alternative delivery methods to shorten the project to one year rather than the standard three to four years for a project of this magnitude, according to Butch Eley, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Transportation. The job was completed Oct. 31, 2023.
“This is a shining example of how alternative delivery works when applied to the right projects,” Eley said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony reopening the bridge to traffic. “It was a complex job with many stakeholders and needed to be done quickly.”
The project along State Route 1 (U.S. 431) involved replacing the 1940s-era bridge, which crosses over 11th Avenue and five CSX railroad lines. The existing structure, measuring 700 feet long and 98 feet wide, was comprised of structural steel beams and support columns. It had three car lanes in each direction, a 12-foot center turn lane and 10-foot-wide sidewalks. The bridge also housed fiber-optic communications infrastructure that was critical to serving downtown Nashville.
To minimize disruptions, Kiewit built the substructure for the new bridge while the existing bridge remained in use. Low-headroom drill rigs were used to install micropiles as footings for the new bridge columns. The crew built everything it could up to the pier caps underneath the existing bridge while it was still active.
The bridge was closed to vehicles and pedestrians from July 7 through Sept. 8, 2023, but railroad operations were uninterrupted. During that time, Kiewit’s team worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, using both traditional and precision demolition techniques to remove the existing bridge. Workers panelized the bridge, taking off two girders and the bridge deck at a time, “kind of like puzzle pieces, pulling them off the existing substructure,” Svoboda said.
Instead of pouring concrete to build the bridge deck, Kiewit used precast concrete panels to accelerate construction. Workers also used lightweight cellular concrete to fill in unused space below the bridge, effectively moving the abutment inward and shortening the new structure.
A significant challenge involved transferring the communications infrastructure from the existing bridge to the new bridge without disrupting service to city residents. That required waiting to demolish that last section of the old structure until the corresponding section of the new bridge was complete.
“It was a very step-by-step process to relocate those utilities because we couldn’t have any kind of outages during construction,” Svoboda said.
Kiewit rose to the occasion every time. Workers even limited construction activity during a four-day stretch in July so as not to disturb the Southeastern Conference’s annual Football Kickoff Media Days. With coaches being interviewed by throngs of reporters at a hotel right next to the project, demolition activity threatened to drown out all the good quotes.
Svoboda said he was proud of the way his team responded to challenges.
“We had a very thought-out plan for how we were going to do things, but as challenges came up, we were able to work together and overcome them,” he said. “SEC media days are huge for the South, and our bridge was basically touching that hotel. It was already a tight schedule to get everything done during that eight-week closure, but our team sat with TDOT and came up with some solutions.”
The new bridge features wider sidewalks, which allow for planters that separate vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Svoboda said completing the project ahead of schedule was immensely satisfying.
“You think of all the people who contributed to this job, and those relationships probably will last a lifetime,” he said. “It took a lot of people, and I was fortunate to work around some really great builders on that job.”
A Trophy to Cherish
Entering its second year, the Bowen Prize for Great Builders may lack the prestige of the Heisman Memorial Trophy, but given Bowen’s history of building big things, just give him time.
“It went great this first year, and I couldn’t be more pleased,” he said. “I’m just thrilled to be a part of this thing because you’ve got to give back and help the industry. My hope is that this prize will create some excitement and encourage young people to raise the bar and achieve the same results. Michael Svoboda is only 35 years old. What a success story!”