Nima Shahi, 32
Virtual design and construction manager at Turner Construction
Nima Shahi jokes that real estate is “in his DNA.” Both his parents went into mechanical engineering after meeting in an English-as-a-second-language class in New York, where they emigrated from Iran shortly before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
But Shahi was feeling blasé about his mechanical engineering major at Carnegie Mellon University.
It was there that he had his first encounter with his future employer, Turner Construction. Shahi knew the company was going to be setting up camp at a civil engineering job fair, and he set his mind on attending. There was only one problem: no mechanical engineers allowed. So he asked one of his teammates on the football team to get the recruiter’s information for him, and that small favor changed Shahi’s life.
“I think they admired my hustle,” he said. “I let them know up front that I grew up in the suburbs of New York and that’s where I wanted to be.”
He got an offer from Turner later that semester. The first project Shahi worked on after graduating was the 41-month renovation of Madison Square Garden — his dream job, he said. Construction crews got the majority of the work on the massive $1 billion project done over three “dark summers” — the off-seasons for the New York Rangers and the New York Knicks — from 2011 to 2013.
“I learned a lot in a very short amount of time,” Shahi said.
It was during the MSG project that Shahi met one his longtime mentors, then-project manager Luigi Morfea, now a project executive at Turner’s One Times Square renovation. Shahi is leading the virtual design and construction (VDC) for One Times Square, a task he described as “building the job digitally before we build it in the field.”
Turner’s VDC team has 31 members, the largest of any general contractor in New York, and possibly the world, according to Shahi. The team has lately been test-driving its new laser scanner, which Turner invested in last year to be able to assess existing conditions in-house.
The adoption of this technology is partly why Shahi was drawn to VDC.
“You want to have as much information at your fingertips as possible in order to analyze a situation,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any role within the construction industry that gives you more access to information than VDC.”
