Construction Starts on $456M Cardiovascular Institute

LA JOLLA, CA-McCarthy Building Cos. has started construction on the $456-million, 383,000-square-foot Scripps Cardiovascular Institute and adjacent 26,000-square-foot central energy plant on the Scripps Memorial Hospital campus. Construction completion is targeted for January 2015, with an anticipated tenant move-in date of April 2015 at the facility, which is at 9888 Genesee Ave.

Scripps Health retained McCarthy as the design-assist general contractor in early 2009 and, since then, the firm has been working on preconstruction for the new facility. Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. is serving as the construction management firm on behalf of Scripps Health. HOK Architects is the project architect.

The Scripps Cardiovascular Institute is the first of three new towers planned at the Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla campus as part of its 25-year master plan, unveiled in November 2010. The new towers, which will eventually replace the existing hospital, will meet state earthquake safety mandates. The campus also will include research and graduate medical education facilities, an outpatient treatment center and medical offices.

The new institute will serve as a destination hospital for cardiac care on the West Coast. The facility will offer the cardiology programs of Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, Scripps Clinic/Scripps Green Hospital, and Kaiser Permanente to provide patients with cardiovascular diseases the most advanced treatment options available, while also serving as a center for medical research, clinical trials and graduate medical education. Scripps and Kaiser recently agreed to a 10-year extension of their 30-year partnership.

The brick and glass, steel-framed tower will include 10 levels, including a basement, intermediate mechanical level and rooftop mechanical level. The building will accommodate 60 beds on two ICU levels, 108 beds on three medical surgery levels, six state-of-the-art operating rooms, four CATH/EP labs, one sterile processing department and one imaging department. A tunnel will be built to connect the basement and ground levels to the existing hospital.

The building design, which incorporates numerous sustainable design principles, was developed with input from physicians, nurses and clinical staff. Situated 1,600 feet away, the new central energy plant will be a cast-in-place concrete structure on three levels, with two of the levels located below grade. The energy plant will provide air conditioning, heating, medical gas, steam, fuel storage, waste storage, and emergency generators for the hospital.

Steve Van Dyke, project director for McCarthy, notes that the location of the projects, right at the Genesee off-ramp on I-5 and in the middle of a crowded hospital campus, "will pose logistical issues in terms of material deliveries and general access by workers." Another significant challenge the project team faces is the distance of the energy plant from the new tower. A utility corridor is being built to facilitate connection to the operating systems one-third of a mile away.

Van Dyke went on to explain that the exterior building skin system that utilizes brick and extensive curtain wall will be another important aspect of the project. A mockup was built and is currently being tested at Smith-Emery Laboratories in Los Angeles to ensure that the building materials and methods withstand specific weather conditions.

KPFF Inc., is the structural and civil engineer, X-NTH is the mechanical engineer, and MWPA is the landscape architect.