Nation builder

Fletcher Construction this year completes its century, during which it has built more of New Zealand’s infrastructure than any other company – and to a standard that’s second to none.  BY GAVIN RILEY

As anyone who reaches a great age will tell you, it’s not how long you live but the shape you’re in that matters.

Fletcher Construction would share that sentiment. One hundred years old this year, it is far more interested in remaining at the top of its game than in receiving the congratulations that come the way of centenarians.

The company has recorded its achievements and what it thinks of itself in a handsomely presented hardback profile, Pride of Place.

A century of achievement is summed up in the book’s emphatic opening sentence: “More of New Zealand’s built environment has been created by the Fletcher Construction Company than by any other firm.”

Though the people whose skills and efforts have driven that claim over the years have changed, staff quality at any given time has not. Fletcher has always recruited only the best.

“Ultimately we succeed through the innovation and ingenuity of our people and their commitment, integrity and drive,” says the book.

“We are down-to-earth people who thrive on meeting new challenges. We are team players and embrace the new contractual frameworks that demand collaborative effort.  And we are proudly straightforward engineers, passionate about overcoming the odds to safely and successfully deliver.”

Other major constructors could sound a similar fanfare about their staff, but in Fletcher’s case such self-appraisal is backed time and again by praise from clients and notable professionals in neighbouring disciplines.

It seems that in their pursuit of excellence over a century, successive Fletcher people have almost over-achieved in striving to adhere to founder James Fletcher’s basic golden rule: “Never build something you have to run past.”

Fletcher (who died in 1974) never did. Born in Scotland in 1886, the sixth child of a Strathclyde builder, the young stonemason-joiner arrived in Dunedin alone in 1908 and the following year founded a small building partnership. Though canny, he was courageous, highly ambitious and innovative, and the company flourished.

To ensure supply of materials, he acquired sawmills and quarries and expanded into most areas of the building industry. Within 10 years he was operating at both ends of the country. Because he refused to specialise, his teams gained widespread construction experience. Sometimes he took on projects before working out how to build them. He employed good people – and he backed them.

In 1919, by which time James Fletcher had been joined in business by his brothers, Fletcher Construction was set up as a limited liability company with a capital of £50,000. From the outset it tendered for large public works and built the Dunedin municipal swimming pool and St Kilda Town Hall.

The company expanded through its reputation for reliability and advanced techniques. Always looking to adopt or adapt ideas from abroad, James Fletcher employed electric hoists for bricks, introduced ready-mixed concrete in association with George Winstone before it was available in Australia, brought tubular steel scaffolding into this country, and pioneered collaboration with American contractors to undertake major civil and marine projects.

In 1925 Fletcher Construction moved its headquarters to Auckland, where its early projects included the Civic Theatre, the first inner-city luxury high-rise apartments, and the Auckland University College arts building. It also extended its interests to large timber mills, brick-and-tile manufacturing, marble-quarrying and steel merchandising.

It built the luxurious and splendidly modern Chateau Tongariro, the impressive Wellington Railway Station, the prestigious Dominion Museum in Wellington, the nation’s first state houses, then replaced the capital’s burned-down Social Security Department building in just six weeks – a feat that both astonished and delighted Prime Minister Michael Savage.

When James Fletcher was appointed commissioner of defence construction and later controller of shipbuilding in the War Administration in 1942, his 27-year-old accountant son Jim became managing director of Fletcher Holdings (floated as a public company in 1939) and Fletcher Construction. Both men were eventually to receive knighthoods, James in 1945 and Jim in 1980.

Fletcher’s postwar expansion included forming a Samoan-based South Seas operation, moving into Australia, and joining forces with the Government to found Tasman Pulp & Paper. In 1953 it completed the 354-metre-long Jellicoe wharf in Auckland in a joint venture with US contractors Merritt-Chapman Scott and Raymond Concrete Pile Co, using the latter’s patented purpose-built pile-driving rig ­– which attracted fascinated crowds. The same consortium constructed the Tasman mill.

By the early 1960s Fletcher Construction’s civil-engineering division was building tunnels and motorways in Auckland and Wellington, and (with Kaiser Construction) Christchurch’s 2.6 kilometre-long Lyttelton tunnel, which involved laying 1.5 million tiles. In 1965 the company embarked in a joint venture with Wilkins & Davies and Bechtel to construct the Marsden Point oil refinery.

During the following decade Fletcher ventured into shopping-mall development, acquired significant property interests, focused increasingly on construction management and design-and-build, and acted as a developer in its own right.

In 1981 the formation of Fletcher Challenge saw the construction business become one of six highly diversified divisions within what was now New Zealand’s largest public company (reconstituted in 2000 as Fletcher Building, minus the energy and paper divisions). Acquisition of three US contracting firms followed, in Hawaii, Seattle and San Francisco, plus purchase of the remainder of the Winstone group – its quarrying and drywall-manufacturing operations.

The past quarter century has seen a continuing and emphatic Fletcher imprint on provision of this country’s infrastructure. The long list embraces schools, universities, hotels, hospitals, clinics, ecclesiastical buildings, apartments, sports stadiums, airport runways, power-generation and wastewater projects, process plants and materials-handling facilities, factories/storage, bridges and roading.

A grab-bag of notable achievements in the past 25 years might well include (in no particular order) the Sky City complex and its 328-metre tower, Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, Westpac and Jade stadiums (and in 2011 the Eden Park upgrade), America’s Cup Viaduct Basin, second Manapouri tailrace tunnel, three-berth deepwater port at Marsden Pt, Manukau wastewater treatment plant, Pohokura gas-treatment plant (which established Fletcher as a serious player in this sector), Tauranga harbour crossing, Grafton Gully and Central Motorway Junction, and the Northern Busway.

About two decades ago Fletcher Construction significantly increased its armoury and versatility by acquiring Brian Perry Civil, which from initially being a pipeline and foundations contractor has over the years developed multi-award-winning skills in most aspects of water and wastewater treatment and delivery.

As with all constructors, however talented, not everything Fletcher touches turns to gold. At Manapouri, 30 years after the initial tailrace project, the Fletcher-led international consortium encountered rock conditions and water penetration levels which, located under a mountain in a remote World Heritage Park, had the potential to become an environmental catastrophe.

Fletcher recognises how narrowly its reputation for certainty of delivery triumphed over possible abandonment of the contract – and it’s philosophical about such a near-run thing.

“Sometimes more can be learned about an organisation by considering times of adversity than by simply looking at trouble-free success,” says the company’s Pride of Place book.

“Fletcher is proud of a long history of accepting Herculean challenges and offering certain delivery. It values its reputation for being good to deal with; this is more important than tenaciously protecting contractual positions.”

“Being good to deal with” is a reality that echoes repeatedly in the measured comments of clients and neighbouring-industry professionals who have worked alongside Fletcher staff.

Prime Minister Michael Savage said in 1937 that Fletcher’s performance in replacing the burned-down Social Security Department building in Wellington in a mere six weeks was the greatest triumph in craftsmanship and organisation he had seen.

Some 60 years later Sky City managing director Evan Davies said Fletcher’s performance on the casino complex and tower, in terms of volume and quality of construction to pre-determined targets, “exceeded by a significant margin any previous project performance in New Zealand”.  

Gordon Moller of Moller Architects, commenting on the same project, said of Fletcher: “They have extensive skills and experience, and coupled with excellent management they are, in my view, the pre-eminent construction firm in New Zealand.”

Anthony Beverley, managing director of AMP, which partnered Fletcher on the construction of the Price WaterHouse Coopers tower, said: “When the going got tough, Fletcher hung in there and continued to deliver – they did this with a great deal of resolve…excellent stuff.”

Dr Keith Turner, chief executive of Meridian Energy, said of the Meridian Building’s five-star environmental rating: “The standard construction-industry approach of not recognising the importance or value of this aspect of environmental responsibility [waste minimisation] has now been superseded by a new Fletcher-set industry benchmark.”

Graeme Shadwell, director of the Te Papa Museum of New Zealand project, said: “I have been involved with contracts and contractors for around 40 years and believe Alan Gray’s site-management performance at Te Papa ranks with the best I have witnessed.”

Despite operating at an Everest-high level and being accustomed to accolades emanating from the stratosphere, Fletcher is well liked in the foothills of the civil-construction industry for supporting what goes on at grassroots level. Only a few years ago Graham Darlow, now one of Fletcher Construction’s big five as general manager engineering, served on the Contractors’ Federation council, and recently engineering-division operations manager David Jewell became the federation’s president.

Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, age cannot wither Fletcher Construction nor custom stale its infinite variety as it prepares to glide smoothly – and confidently – into its second century.

“For nearly 100 years we have delivered iconic projects to develop infrastructure throughout New Zealand and the South Pacific,” says the Pride of Place book.

“But it is how we have done that and the ongoing succession of talented people that have achieved those feats that will keep Fletcher at the leading edge of infrastructure delivery in the 21st century.”