Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Through August 16, 2011
The building boom continues to, well, boom. Somehow, the construction crane has become
the official bird of the Anschutz Medical Campus. A few of the new university buildings are nearing
occupancy, while most of the UCH, Children’s Hospital Colorado and even VA buildings are about
to get even higher off the ground.
Everywhere one turns, another hard hat
The Campus Building Shifts into
an Even-Higher Gear
By Todd Neff
Some of the most prominent names around the Anschutz Medical
Campus these days are Haselden, Phipps, McCarthy, Sanders,
Kiewit, and Turner. They’re not star surgeons, clinicians or medical
researchers. They are construction companies.
The New UCH Tower
Turn a random corner, and chances are you’ll find a chain-link fence
penning in heavy equipment and hard-hatted men (they do tend to
be men). The UCH community is familiar with the new inpatient
tower project and the University of Colorado Cancer Center
expansion. As monumental as these endeavors are, though, they
represent only a portion of the construction happening – or about
to happen – on the campus at large.
Builders are either hard at work or about to start on projects for
Children’s Hospital Colorado, The University of Colorado’s Anschutz
Health and Wellness Center, the CU School of Dental Medicine,
and the Veterans Administration.
The build-out also includes the recently completed CU School of
Pharmacy building, which first welcomed occupants in March; and
a forthcoming addition to the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority’s
(FRA’s) Bioscience Park Center on Montview Boulevard (Insider,
June 9). That 60,000-foot-structure’s westward expansion, needed
to accommodate laboratory and office space for startup companies,
is slated to start in September and finish in summer 2012, said Lyle
Artz, the FRA’s site manager.
To check the pulse of development around campus, the Insider took
a few snapshots of the most visible construction projects.
Things are changing fast behind the green-clad chain link surrounding
the space west of the Anschutz Inpatient Pavilion. Workers are
removing the western face of the Critical Care Wing in advance of
connecting the existing building’s steel latticework with that of the
new structure (Insider, July 20). Workers already have begun erecting
the steel framing in what will be the future building’s basement.
Continued
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Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Through August 16, 2011 | Page 2
They’ve also started electrical conduit work (see shot taken from
tenth floor of the Leprino Building, bottom of preceding page).
Once complete in late 2013, the 12-story tower will add 144 beds
(with shelled-in space for 132 more beds later) and double the
capacity available in the Emergency Department today.
Koechlein said, with the foundation already in place. When the
first phase is complete in March 2012, the structure will be four
stories tall and hold 1,400 cars. But that’s only the beginning.
At final build-out, the 11-story structure will accommodate
4,000 spaces, he said.
The Children’s Hospital Colorado Expansion
Children’s Hospital Colorado’s new 10-story, 350,000-squarefoot tower project broke ground a year ago and has grown into
a formidable steel latticework. Todd Koechlein, manager of
construction for Children’s, said crews are working up the exterior
walls to put a skin and a roof on the steel skeleton, and intend to
seal the building in the next six months.
The $230 million project, scheduled for completion in late 2012,
will add 124 beds and three floors of shelled space for another 72
beds. When it is fully operational, Children’s would have more than
500 beds and 1.79 million square feet of space.
Then there is the expansion work happening on the second through
fourth floors of Children’s western flank (above). Children’s is
expanding its second-floor staff lounge to accommodate its growth,
adding six new pediatric intensive care units on the third floor,
and constructing 16 new neonatal intensive care units (NICUs)
on the fourth floor.
As with the UCH expansion, parking is an important part of the
Children’s expansion picture. The first phase of a new parking
structure at 17th Avenue and Victor Street is well underway,
Moreover, the hospital is converting rooms for 12 “pinwheel beds”
(these have critical services central to two circular arrays of six
beds each) in the 4th-floor NICUs into private rooms, Koechlein said.
Continued
Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Through August 16, 2011 | Page 3
The UCH Patient Parking Garage
Construction of the three-level, 662-space parking structure for patients
and visitors on the northwest corner of Aurora Court and Colfax Avenue
is proceeding steadily, with completion scheduled some time this fall.
The single floor of below-ground concrete is filling in, though it’s yet to
be shadowed by the surface- and above-grade floors.
When the spaces in that garage are combined with the 1,749-space
employee and faculty parking structure on 17th Avenue just south of
the Leprino Building– construction has yet to start on that one, but
it’s scheduled for completion in fall 2012 – the hospital believes it
will have plenty of parking for the foreseeable future.
In May, however, hospital leaders recommended – and the UCH
Board of Directors approved – investigating the possibility of
adding a two more stories of space to the employee/faculty garage
to accommodate growth farther into the future. Doing the work
before the garage is occupied would be more economical and less
disruptive, they argued, than adding space after the structure is
finished. No decision about whether actually to add the floors,
however, has been made.
The expansion’s steel framework will begin to rise this week, said
Catherine Reeves, a UCH expansion project manager. For now, the
towering stair and elevator core (above) remain the most prominent
part of the five-story, 40,000-square-foot project, which is slated to
finish late this year or early next year. Workers will install girders
to frame out the structure as soon as the concrete work for a linear
accelerator is complete, she said.
Reeves said the Radiation Oncology remodeling work in the
existing Cancer Center is nearly finished, and staff will be able
to begin moving in within a month.
The Anschutz Outpatient Pavilion Expansion
The Anschutz Cancer Pavilion Expansion
The Anschutz Outpatient Pavilion is not immune to the
building boom. The building’s south facade is growing some
4,700 square feet to accommodate one of just two Gamma
Knife machines in Colorado. The machine, which is used for
noninvasive brain surgeries, weighs 42,000 pounds. It comes
Continued
Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Through August 16, 2011 | Page 4
from a practice formerly at St. Anthony Hospital, which decided
to relocate its massive virtual scalpel to UCH when it moved from
Denver to Lakewood in June. The Gamma Knife’s new home should
be ready by the end of 2011, hospital officials reported.
The Anschutz Health and
Wellness Center Construction
Silsby said he expects construction to wrap up in February 2012,
with occupancy in April.
The University of Colorado School
of Dental Medicine Renovation
The University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine’s $10.5 million
renovation, which includes a 20,000-square-foot addition, started
in January and is scheduled to wrap up in early 2012, according to
Dean Denise Kassebaum, DDS, MS. The work will add 20 percent
to the building’s footprint and 66 dental chairs to the 170 the school
had when the project began, she said. The added chairs will help the
school accommodate the more than 80,000 patient visits each year
at the Anschutz and community clinics, she said. The new clinical,
office and lab space will also open up dental-education opportunities
to more students, Kassebaum added.
The VA Hospital’s “Project Eagle”
Development
Glass installation began last week at CU’s $28 million Anschutz
Health and Wellness Center. By Labor Day, the 94,000 squarefoot structure at Montview Blvd. and N. Quentin Street will be
completely enclosed, said Brad Silsby, interim chief planning officer
for UC Denver at the Anschutz Medical Campus. The majority of
interior framing is done, he added, and drywall on the first two
floors is nearly finished. Racine Street, which has been closed
east of the construction site for months, should reopen August 15.
Continued
Volume 5 | Issue 3 | Through August 16, 2011 | Page 5
Last but not least, the Veterans Administration is beginning its
Project Eagle, a brand-new “Replacement Medical Center” on 31
acres near the Anschutz Medical Campus that is expected to open
its doors in June 2014.
The $824-million project will include 1.1 million square feet of
solar-panel-bedecked space for inpatient, outpatient, research,
spinal cord injury, and education services, as well as a 2,300-space
parking structure and an “energy center” utilities building.
Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman Jordan Schupbach said
the VA is in final contract negotiations with Kiewit-Turner, the joint
venture leading the project.
The first step is the remodeling, now underway, of the former
University Physicians, Inc. building at Colfax Avenue and Wheeling
Street. When that is complete, the building will be rechristened
Clinic Building South, and will house VA mental health clinics on
the first and second floors and administrative space on the third
and fourth floors. To check out a video “fly through” of the new
center, visit http://goo.gl/QSptH.