The Daily Reporter – WI Construction News & Bids Wisconsin's Construction Authority
Innovator of the Year –
Pierre Rideau, Findorff
Pierre Rideau is always looking for ways to improve.
“Just because you’ve been doing something one way for a while doesn’t imply you’ve been doing it right,” said Rideau, senior project manager in the Science and Technology Division at Findorff. “Just because something works does not mean it has reached peak efficiency.”
Rideau studied civil and structural engineering in college in Paris. After graduating in 2009,
he worked on various projects in the French capital, ranging from schools and high-rise luxury apartment buildings to a music and dance conservatory.
In 2016, Rideau and his wife moved to Wisconsin, where he joined Findorff. Within a year of moving to the U.S., Rideau convinced the company’s leadership team to invest in an imported European spiral modular staircase system for temporary use during construction. The goal? To replace and improve upon ladders and clunky scaffold-type temporary staircases standardly used on job sites.
This investment resulted in major safety benefits and rapid productivity gains on Findorff job sites.
One of the next innovations Rideau brought to Findorff was born out of necessity while managing structural work on a quality level-1 nuclear facility. All ACI and Nuclear Regulatory Commission quality requirements, as well as the myriad of associated ramifications of nuclear construction, can be daunting and overwhelming to review.
Despite this, Rideau digested all of this information and transformed it into an easy, step-by-step concrete installation flow diagram that was widely used by the field crews for that project. After the success of this specific flowsheet, he then made an applicable version for standard concrete construction available for the entire company.
Some of the most notable projects that Rideau has worked on while at Findorff are the Epic Storybook Campus, Exact Sciences Discovery Campus, the Shine Medical Radioisotope Production Facility and the University Research Park Element Lab building.
