A project that has been thought about, designed and worked on for more than two years now is getting some well-deserved attention for the way it has focused on a very lofty goal: securing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold rating for an 878,000-sq-ft hospital complex.
Even before the December 2010 groundbreaking for the massive University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, the design and construction team brought all key players together and laid out their plan to make the UCSF Medical Center project a success and realize the goal of LEED Gold. If that happens, it will be one of the largest LEED-certified hospital complexes in the world.
We have written about UCSF Medical Center before – it served as an ideal webinar project, demonstrating the use of BIM and alternative project delivery. In this recent article by ENR California, author Robert Carlsen discusses how an aggressive green strategy was devised, what type of advance work was done to keep the project on budget and meet the operational requirements laid out for the new complex by the hundreds of UCSF faculty and staff who would work there. The team is working toward a 2015 completion date for the 289-bed center that includes three hospitals (a children’s hospital, women’s specialty hospital, and cancer hospital). The complex also will include a 200,000-sq-ft medical office building, a 36,000-sq-ft utility plant, a helipad, a parking garage, and support services.
According to Carlsen’s article, Stuart Eckblad, director of design and construction for UCSF Medical Center and Integrated Center for Design and Construction leader says he considers two factors responsible for giving the project a decided sustainability advantage. In his words, they are “integrated use of building information modeling and significant research on less toxic construction materials”.
The virtual model of the UCSF Medical Center was begun in ARCHICAD by Tyler Krehlik, associate principal at Stantec/Anshen + Allen, San Francisco, the project’s architect of record. It has since expanded to other platforms, including the Navisworks system controlled by the general contractor, DPR Construction, Redwood City.
Published by Graphisoft Blog at http://blog.graphisoftus.com/graphisoft/archicad-provides-integration-foundation-for-ucsf-medical-center