Skanska won big at the Build America Awards, its years-long Lynnwood Link L300 Extension taking home the grand award. But, says its project executive, it was the faces behind the impressive facts and figures, those who prioritized the community that would benefit, who made it all possible.
BY AMY DREW THOMPSON
The adjectives and modifiers and numbers, come fast and furious as one tries to summarize the grand award-winner at this year’s Build America Awards, sponsored by The Baldwin Group: the Lynnwood Link L300 Extension.
It is a dual-track light rail project, nearly 3.8 miles long, that meanders through three cities and two counties. It has about 2.3 miles of elevated guideway with roughly a mile and a half at grade.
The project, which clocked in at $930 million, required about 120 staffers to support field operations, which employed up to 800 more people in the field per day at the height of the build.
There are 37 large-scale retaining walls. It has a 1,640-car garage. And the complexity and accuracy required to build it could be described as surgical, with something like a quarter inch, plus-minus, for the profile, line and grade.
Since it opened for use by the public on August 30, 2024, the Lynnwood Link L300 Extension has carried an average of 7,800 passengers each day, with numbers steadily climbing.
Skanska Project Executive Thorvaldur Konradsson, an Iceland native who has called the Seattle area home for 16 years, the the has worked 15 of them for Skanska and has been a part of this project since its pursuit phase in 2015. And though he was greatly humbled when it was named the grand award winner at the 2025 Build America Awards, he didn’t hesitate when asked what he thought drove judges to choose this project over all the other worthy candidates.
“I am absolutely convinced that what won this award was the people who par.ticipated in constructing this project,” Konradsson told Constructor.
Indeed, young engineers, tradespeople and other professionals who started out green emerged seasoned as the first pas.sengers stepped onto the platform for their commutes. After a decade-plus, he says, it’s gratifying, and even a little surreal.
“I have to admit that the first thought I had as I was walking up and down the alignment was that I wasn’t quite sure where it was going to fit,” he said, chuckling, “because it’s all very narrow.”
They made some room, roughly 5.5 acres worth, clearing steep slopes and narrow shoulders along Interstate 5. This included the removal of many, many trees; 25,000 plants were installed in their place. But landscaping was hardly the project’s biggest challenge.
The sequencing and planning alone were extremely difficult.
“Access was challenging,” he said. “It required a lot of utility relocations. It required some extensive temporary construction, with retaining walls to create accesses for the large cranes that build shafts for all the foundations.”
Four phases were planned, each with mind-blowing logistics and roughly quarter-billion-dollar budgets. Eight hundred people in the field at peak. Six hundred different permits. Four major adjacent stakeholders outside of the owner with which to coordinate. Cities. School districts. More.
“It’s a challenge for any megaproject, but this one was exceptional in terms of the collaboration required to have all the access we needed.”
Then there was the region’s unique geology, which threw up some unexpected and quite critical obstacles that Konradsson says tested every member of the team: “owners, designers, con.tractors, workers – everybody.”
A soil nail wall failed.
“We encountered what we call ‘hour.glass sand,’” Konradsson explained. “It’s very, very powdery sand … and the depth of the vertical elements in the wall were not quite sufficient.”
As such, cracks began to form.
The response, which was immediate and round-the-clock, required all hands-on deck to stabilize the wall and chart a new course. An initial and acute three-day impact to the project allowed them to course-correct over another three months, “but everybody had to come together and make a potentially bad situation go away very quickly.”
It speaks to how the entire team, all its people, says Konradsson, engaged together to soar over hurdles.
“It was a common theme on this project,” he said. “We surely didn’t go without obstacles, but the mindset, always, was, ‘Let’s keep building. If there’s a brick wall, we’ll run at it ‘til we go through.’”
And they did.
An undertaking such as this was always going to have issues. Every project does, he says, “and we learn lessons with everything we do … but to the owner’s credit, to the designers, to everyone’s … we define ourselves not on the issues, but on how we acted on them.”
Through them all, and through COVID as well, Skanska and its part.ners still managed to complete a project that went nearly 10 years and nearly one billion dollars on time, and on budget.
The two are inexorably linked.
“We had the good fortune of having super-qualified people who knew that no problem gets better by waiting to address it,” he said. “But, at the end of the day, what drives things over budget is time.”
Speed in decision making, a collaborative owner, solid commercial man.agement on all fronts and talented tradespeople were a collective perfect storm of efficiency, each united in their desire to please who he calls “the true end-client”: the public.
“They’ve been waiting decades for this,” he said emphatically. “And we saw how important it was for us to deliver on our commitment. It was the overarching message we took to work with us every day.”
A decade has passed. And part of the success of Lynnwood, says Konradsson, is that those who cut the teeth of their careers on this project all have new gigs to crush.
“This was our first really big job in the region,” he noted.
The northwest market was a new one for Skanska, which had pursued several projects in the region before landing this one in 2015.
Konradsson calls it “the crown jewel.”
“It showcased well what we’re capable of and allowed us to anchor our opera.tions up here and build to a bigger market presence.”
Next up are two more design-builds, big ones: an $836-million interchange in the I-405 corridor and a $1.4-billion under.taking to replace the Portage Bay Bridge.
Half the engineering team on Lynnwood movedto the formerabout a year and a half ago, he says. Several months later, the other half leapfrogged to work on the bridge.
“The green engineers from Lynnwood are now leading segments of these new jobs. The careers keep growing.”
The incredible complexity of the project notwithstanding, this remains what it’s always all about: the people – those whose lives were improved by the Lynnwood Link L300 Extension. and, especially when it comes to the reasons why it took home the grand award, the people who came together to make it happen.
From end to end, there was a team spirit between everyone from the foundational planners to the frontline workers. People rallied together with a high level of dedication and focus and remained undeterred by the obstacles encountered along the way.
“We build the people who are capable of delivering megaprojects like this through megaprojects like this,” he said.
We are on the phone, but somehow, I can hear him smiling.
“People grin at me when I say it,” he said, “but on any given day, Skanska builds people more than we build bridges.”