Milestone Reached on Colorado Hospital Expansion
AURORA, Colo. – The joint venture team of McCarthy Building Companies and Gerald H. Phipps celebrated a milestone recently with the topping out of the 10-story East Tower at Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colo.
When completed in late 2012, the 355,000 square foot tower will connect to the existing 1.4 million square foot, 298-bed hospital and provide an additional 200 beds and be home to cancer care, heart and rehabilitative medicine and an advanced maternal/fetal medicine center.
The same team built the Children’s Hospital just three years ago in conjunction with design partners H&L Architecture and ZGF Architects LLP.
But unlike the initial project on a greenfield site, Phipps/McCarthy Project Manager Justin Peterson says this expansion requires detailed coordination to minimize disruption to ongoing facility operations while still keeping pace with the fast-track schedule.
“We hold weekly meetings and project walks with the hospital’s construction, epidemiology, facilities and safety teams to keep everyone up to date,” says Peterson. “We also have detailed processes in place to ensure all are aware of what activities are happening in the hospital on a daily basis, helping the construction team to adjust our schedule and construction to best fit the needs of staff and patients.”
Adds GH Phipps Preconstruction Director Gary Constant, “From the earliest stages of the project, the team knew efficiencies could be achieved by moving the detailing and coordination process for the building’s embed plates, anchor bolts, reinforcing steel and formwork systems upstream and, thus, bypassing the traditional shop drawing and submittal process.”
Phipps/McCarthy contracted structural engineer S.A. Miro, Inc. to provide detailing services and complete the advanced work concurrently with design deadlines. This enabled the team to pre-plan many difficult elements of construction, including the building’s climbing, concrete formwork systems that will be the foundation for some of the buildings new components.
Additionally, to save further time and dollars, the team worked together to create rated construction separation walls to be used as temporary enclosure walls when peeling the existing building façade off to gain access for the expansion tie-ins. By creating a rated, weather-tight wall, impacts to the hospital were limited to one time at each tie-in location. These walls were then able to remain in place to become part of the permanent building.
In order achieve LEED certification when completed next year, the team is also coordinating aggressive material tracking and the recycling of demolition and construction materials and completing full energy modeling of the East Tower addition to ensure that the most advanced building enclosure and efficient mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems are being implemented.