Award-winning, 50-year-old Canberra construction and management company Project Coordination is in voluntary administration.

On Tuesday morning staff were dismissed from its Canberra and Wollongong offices.

“A quarter of our staff have been with us for 15 years or more, with many over 20 years,” say chairman Paul Murphy and managing director Gavin Murphy in a directors’ statement on the Project Coordination website.

“We recognise this single decision affects many, including our subcontractors and suppliers, many of whom have been faithfully working alongside us for decades.

“Despite seeing other construction companies collapse around us over the past year, we never thought we would be one of them.

“We thought we had the means, forward order book, capability and industry goodwill to get through this. Each of us has put substantial amounts of personal money into the company in an attempt to manage escalating labour, material and borrowing costs on fixed-price contracts with very tight margins.”

The directors say that on Friday they we exhausted a range of capital raising options, and despite having $120 million worth of projects in the field and a further $90 million ready to start, they could not secure external investment.

Chairman Paul Murphy, 72, described himself as being “devastated’’.  He was one of the original employees of Project Coordination when it started in Canberra in 1975.

“The economic and regulatory environment that building companies are working in now is more challenging than any other I’ve experienced in the past 50 years – worse than the recessions in the 1980s and 1990s and the Global Financial Crisis in 2007/2008. Nothing has been as bad as this,’’ he says.

Jonathon Colbran, Frank Lo Pilato and Brett Lord from RSM Australia Partners have been appointed administrators.

Project Coordination has delivered more than 900 projects worth more than $2.5 billion across every state and territory in Australia, predominantly in the ACT and NSW. It managed the delivery of well-known buildings including: National Arboretum Visitor Centre, the CSIRO Discovery Centre and completed more than $100 million worth of work at the Canberra Hospital.

Over its 50 years it won more than 100 excellence in building awards and donated more than $2.5 million in cash or in-kind support to community initiatives, charities or groups, including local sporting clubs