[July 14, 2011]

Team on Children's Hospital Colorado Expansion Using Cutting-Edge Technology Tools to Keep Project on the Fast Track

Construction on the new $230 million East Tower at Children's Hospital Colorado (www.childrenscolorado.org) in Aurora, Colo., reached a notable milestone this week with the topping out of the 10-story structure. The expansion is being constructed by the joint venture team of McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. and Gerald H. Phipps, in conjunction with design partners H+L Architecture and ZGF Architects LLP under an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) tri-party agreement.

The new East Tower will connect to the existing 1,440,000-square-foot, 298-bed Children's Hospital Colorado facility built by the same team, which opened to patients just three years ago.

"When it came time to select a team for our expansion, I thought of our past experiences - and I immediately thought of Phipps/McCarthy," explained Leonard Dryer Jr., Children's Hospital Colorado senior vice president and CFO. "Their superior performance on the original hospital instilled faith in their abilities to complete this project. The idea of a tri-party agreement is relatively new for construction teams and the hospital especially. But, with a team that has worked together successfully before, the experience and trust we have in each other made for a great tri-party team and a perfect match for our expansion project."

Construction of the new 355,000-square-foot addition is currently on schedule to complete in late 2012. Upon completion the facility will connect to the existing hospital on the north face of the outpatient building and the east face of the hospital building. The facility will have the capacity to provide an additional 200 beds and will be home to cancer care, heart and rehabilitation medicine, and an advanced maternal/fetal medicine center. In total Children's Hospital Colorado's main facility at the Anschutz Medical Campus will then have a footprint of 1.8 million square feet.

The East Tower project is LEED Registered through the United States Green Building Council and will pursue LEED certification upon completion. The team is currently coordinating aggressive material tracking and recycling of demolition and construction materials and completing full energy modeling of the Eat Tower addition to ensure the most advanced building enclosure and efficient mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.

"Unlike the initial project on a greenfield site, this expansion requires careful coordination to minimize disruption to ongoing facility operations while still keeping pace with the fast-track schedule," noted Phipps/McCarthy Project Manager Justin Peterson. "We hold weekly meetings and project walks with the hospital's construction, epidemiology, facilities and safety teams to keep everyone up to date. 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."

A variety of innovative design and construction solutions are also being implemented to help manage these complex issues.

"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," commented GH Phipps Preconstruction Director Gary Constant.

Phipps/McCarthy suggested contracting directly with the project's structural engineer of record S.A. Miro, Inc. out of Denver to provide these detailing services. Working closely with the Phipps/McCarthy team, S.A. Miro, Inc. maintained separate in-house design and detailing teams and completed the advanced detailing work concurrently with design deadlines. This early effort enabled the team to pre-plan many of the most difficult elements of construction, including the building's climbing formwork system and also to more precisely define the scope of work when the project was put out for bid resulting in much tighter bid spread.

To save time and dollars, the team also 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 and these walls were then able to remain in place to become part of the permanent building.

With construction underway, the team is using Bluebeam® document control for collaborative document management and is utilizing innovative mobile kiosks in the field to enable all field staff to have access to this information in real time. Unlike the use of only tablet PC's and iPads, these mobile kiosks are available to all personnel on the jobsite when they need it. Rapid changes are tracked and documented as they are developed with the design team and implemented in the field to minimize rework and improve overall project efficiency.

For more information on members of the team, visit their websites:

McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. www.mccarthy.com

GH Phipps Construction Companies www.ghphipps.com

H+L Architecture www.hlarch.com

ZGF Architects LLP www.zgf.com

Children's Hospital Colorado www.childrenscolorado.org

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