PODCAST Part II: McCarthy Breaks Ground on Stanford Hospital

STANFORD, Calif. — In early May, Clark/McCarthy, a joint venture of McCarthy Building Companies Inc. and Clark Construction Group – California LP, broke ground on the new Stanford Hospital, located on the Stanford University Medical Center (SUMC) campus. The 824,000-square-foot facility will enhance capacity, as well as accommodate new medical technology and meet updated seismic safety requirements.

The $2 billion hospital is being designed by New York-based Rafael Viñoly Architects in association with Lee, Burkhart, Liu Inc., with offices in San Francisco, and will connect to the existing hospital via bridge and tunnel. It is part of the SUMC Renewal Project, which also includes the expansion of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, the renovation of Hoover Pavilion, the Welch Road Utility Project and the replacement of School of Medicine facilities. Scheduled for completion in 2017, the hospital is expected to open for patient care in early 2018 but remains operational.

Greg Schoonover, vice president and project executive for McCarthy, said that a large part of the project’s success thus far is a result of collocation. The project team consolidated offices in Palo Alto, Calif., in the latter part of 2012 and will be mobilizing to an office across the street from the job site in August. “This project made me realize the importance of collocation,” he said. “If we had a coordination problem, we could just walk down the hallway to get it resolved by the [design team].”

The facility will include a flexible pavilion design with oversized windows allowing for natural light and views from the 368 patient rooms, which will total 600 patient beds on site after the addition. The project also features a new Level 1 Trauma Center — three times the size of the current emergency department — with 58 treatment bays; surgical, diagnostic and treatment rooms; a central courtyard; and rooftop gardens. It will also be built to withhold the effects of and remain functional after an 8.0 magnitude earthquake.

Schoonover described the project as unique because it is base isolated and has a duel-glazed curtain wall system. Plus, it has a displacement ventilation system. Another standout feature is that the patient towers are being built in four separate pods that connect to a podium level, which makes up the first four levels of the building. “When you look at the project after completion, these pods will look independent buildings with a central atrium area as the focal point,” he said.

Compared to other projects he completed in the past, Schoonover said that the project team enhanced the level of modeling for the job, and McCarthy’s use of BIM as a whole continues to advance with each project the company completes.

“We are setting out to not have any deferred approvals at all,” Schoonover said. “Constructability reviews and coordination are incorporated into the drawings already. That allows us to have a more successful time in the field as we’re proceeding to go ahead with construction. Much of that is due to collocation and all the technology we’re using, which helps streamline the process and will make the job run much more smoothly.”

McCarthy earned a Celebration of Engineering & Technology Innovation (CETI) Award earlier this year specifically, for using BIManywhere software on the Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center replacement project, which is currently in Phase III of construction. Schoonover said that the Stanford construction team plans to use the same software as they move further along in the construction process.

Because of McCarthy’s expertise and innovative approach to construction for the health care sector, HC+O News interviewed Jim Mynott, vice president of design management for McCarthy’s Newport Beach-based Southern California office, and Chris Pechacek, director of virtual design and construction for the company’s Northern Pacific division, based in its San Francisco office. In this second part of the two-part interview, Mynott and Pechacek discuss how BIM software can help the operation of a facility.

To listen to the first part of the interview, click here.