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McCarthy Building Cos., based in St. Louis, has completed a key project in his own backyard.
The contractor completed construction on the new Plaza West Tower, an expansion of cardiac and vascular patient care, as well as radiology, at the city’s Barnes-Jewish Hospital, according to a news release sent Dec. 3 to Construction Dive. McCarthy declined to share the cost of the project, citing his client.
According to the press release, the 16-story, 660,000-square-foot Plaza West Tower features 224 private inpatient rooms and 56 private intensive care unit rooms alongside modern clinical spaces. Design and pre-construction began in December 2019 and construction officially began in November 2021.
The addition is in the site of the old Queeny Toweraccording to a statement from the Washington University School of Medicine. Barnes-Jewish Hospital serves as a major referral center in the Midwest and is the fifth largest hospital in the country, according to the university.
The project is part of the BJC HealthCare Campus Renewal, a long-term plan to transform the university’s medical campus through new construction and renovations. To date, phases of the Campus Renewal Project have generated nearly $2 billion in economic impact, according to the school.
The team’s effort was homegrown: Most of the project’s partners, including architect CannonDesign, hospital network BJC HealthCare, BR+A Consulting Engineers and civil engineer Castle, are based in St. Louis, according to McCarthy. Thornton Tomasetti, the structural engineer on the job, is based in New York City.
Working in a hospital comes with challenges. To meet the facility’s demands for efficiency, quality and minimal disruption, McCarthy had to take advantage of a prefab strategy that saw the builder use 280 patient room bathrooms built by St. Louis-based TJ Wies Contracting. Louis, according to the statement. The fully finished bathroom pods, which included plumbing, electrical, tiling, fixtures and finishes, were fabricated off-site and delivered to the tower.
Once delivered, cranes lifted the pods into their floor-by-floor locations. McCarthy said the approach shortened installation times, minimized on-site congestion and provided superior quality assurance compared to traditional field methods.
The contractor also had to contend with pedestrian and vehicular traffic as the tower is located in one of the busiest corners of the medical campus. Construction activities needed coordination to be successful, according to the release.
“Working on a landlocked site in the heart of a major medical center forced us to rethink every step of the construction process,” said Kris Mannen, McCarthy’s senior superintendent, in the press release. “Through prefabrication, creative logistics and close collaboration with our partners, we were able to deliver a world-class facility while minimizing the impact on the hospital’s daily operations.”
However, not everything has progressed smoothly: BRK Electrical Contractors, one of the project’s business partners, filed a mechanical lien against the project on Oct. 4 for a total of $819,692, local channel First Alert 4 reported. McCarthy told Construction Dive he was aware of the lien, but declined to comment further because the matter is ongoing.
