Subs Help Inject Cost-Savings Into Hospital Project
When the project team for Winthrop University Hospital's new research building approached J&A Concrete about foundation work, the subcontractor was happy to provide a quote—along with an alternative proposal for a much different foundation package that shaved $2 million off the cost.
When Winthrop's team chose that route, the five-story, 95,000-sq-ft project became Nassau County's first to use an innovative foundation based on an underground stormwater storage system.
The experience validated Winthrop's decision to implement design assist, up-front payments to subcontractors for contributions during the planning stage of the $80-million project based in Mineola, N.Y. Winthrop's engineering department chose this path in 2010 because of its potential to combine value engineering with "value adding," says Joseph Burke, the hospital's vice president of engineering and facilities.
In April 2012, after naming Perkins Eastman the architect and Lend Lease the construction manager, the project team invited eight prime subcontractors to participate in the process and submit bids.
Team Lineup
"We had a team from every one of those eight subcontractors working side by side with our design team," Burke says. They met weekly and "each one of those subcontractors [helped build] the model … making smart decisions on constructibility of all the different elements, materials and methods."
The representatives from foundations, structural, mechanical and plumbing, fire protection and other trades would sit around a conference table with their laptops and contribute to the shop drawings, Burke says.
"You've got these people with tremendous depth of knowledge in their specific fields, and you make them part of the team," says Evan Weremeychik, associate principal at Perkins Eastman.
Inside and Out
Winthrop's team wound up selecting bids from all eight of the prime subcontractors in the design-assist process, in no small part because they knew the project inside out, Burke says.
The project team broke ground on the center in December 2012 and topped out in September 2013. The team is on target to finish this December even as it steers through significant challenges such as a tight jobsite and intricate features that include custom millwork and a multi-textured facade with glass curtain wall, cast stone and masonry with punched windows.
When it opens in January, the reinforced concrete and steel structure will house 15,000 sq ft of wet laboratories, a simulation center with high-tech mannequins that act out medical conditions, a 7,500-sq-ft vivarium, a 350-seat amphitheater and 35,000 sq ft of below-grade parking.
The extensive up-front planning helped the project advance smoothly, says Weremeychik, who started on the design with Winthrop's original architect, Columbus, Ohio-based Karlsberger Cos. Karlsberger went out of business in 2011, and Weremeychik moved to Perkins Eastman, which took over the design job.
The design aims to foster contact across laboratories for researchers, across clinical trial offices for doctors, across classrooms for medical students and across programming space for the community as they all work together to treat obesity, diabetes, premature infants, perinatal conditions, cardiometabolic disorders, chronic disease as well as Alzheimer's disease and arthritis.
Intellectual Collisions
"The idea is all about collaboration," Weremeychik says. "There are certain spaces within the building that are designed to get people to crash into each other. We call them 'intellectual collisions'—to create those spontaneous moments where you hear information and put your thinking on a different trajectory that [can lead] somewhere exciting."
The project won approvals from Mineola authorities in 2011 and received a $1-million grant from the New York State Long Island Regional Economic Development Council in 2012. It also has strong support from state and local officials, including Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano, who praised the center for creating new jobs and enhancing the local economy.
However, despite community support, the project team faced a major local hurdle in the form of a Mineola ordinance that requires new buildings to manage all rainwater drainage on site. With the building footprint covering nearly the entire site, the team needed to build drainage capacity underground, Weremeychik says.
The team considered a conventional approach of digging nine 30-ft-deep dry wells with 10-ft-dia tubes. This route, however, would have required the team to drive piles and conduct an extensive excavation.
The team interviewed several foundation subcontractors under the design-assist approach. "One of them came in and said, 'Here's my price for the way you guys have it drawn at this point, and here's $2 million less for the way I would suggest doing it,'" Weremeychik says.
J&A's proposal called for the use of R Tanks, milk crate-size structural cubes that can hold excess water from a storm. Weremeychik says this turned out to be a great fit, working well with the mat and spread footings foundation plan.
The team stacked about 3,000 of the cubes two to three high across the entire foundation. It then covered them with a landscape fabric and built the basement slab on top.
The cubes, which sit amid a gravel bed and allow piping to run between them, connect into smaller, shallower dry wells. The system enables the building to handle volume from even a large hurricane-level surge in which stormwater would accumulate and then drain out.
"It was a product that we wouldn't have been exposed to, but the subconsultant had come across it before," Weremeychik says.
The stormwater system also allowed the team to raise the foundation's footings, says Joe Whalen, Lend Lease project manager. "It saved a tremendous amount of money on the project."
The design-assist process played a constructive role in shaping the exterior as well, encouraging several different subcontractors to partner on the planning and erection, Weremeychik says. Island International and Erie Architectural Products entered a joint venture contract for the job under W&W Glass as the lead subcontractor. That ended up helping the design team streamline all of the connection details between Island's panelized wall system and Erie's curtain wall, he says.
That collaborative approach has also extended to regular meetings between the hospital's facilities staff and the construction team to ensure a smooth handoff, Burke says. The process helps to avoid a common snag of facilities teams often being out of the loop until they take over a newly constructed building.
"Once this place is commissioned and opened up and the keys are turned over, they will have been seamlessly on board the whole way and know the facility inside out," he says.
Tight Squeeze
Besides challenges below ground, the site has its share above grade; it is located next to a busy Long Island Rail Road station on a main Mineola thoroughfare. It is also across the street from Winthrop's emergency department. The building's footprint left little spare room on the one-acre site, Whalen says.
"Our staging was limited to a section that was about 60 ft by 30 ft—or about 1,800 sq ft—and other than that we had to use the roadway," he says. "It made it tremendously difficult when you're building a job right outside of an existing [emergency department] and you have to keep the lanes open—and you have the train station for Mineola."
The site logistics were complicated further by roadways that are only the size of residential streets. This called for careful scheduling for jobs such as hoisting materials and making deliveries. It also meant that extensive coordination with neighbors was critical to minimize traffic impact and disruption to the community, Whalen says.
Setting the Stage
The owner opted not to use a tower crane, which led Lend Lease to instead select a 130-ton crawler crane and a creative approach to staging. "We actually had to design the steel to hold the crane to erect it so that we didn't actually take up the whole street," Whalen says. This allowed Winthrop to still be able to use the street as egress for the emergency room.
When the building opens, it will be one of the most sustainable structures on Long Island, Weremeychik says. That starts with the onsite stormwater management system, but includes other features such as planted green roofs, reflective white roofs to reduce heat-island effect, exterior sun shades and a motion sensor system tied to lighting as well as to mechanical systems regulating air exchange for the laboratories, he adds.
The building is also "cranked about 10 degrees off the street grid to better align it with the east-west compass axis and make it more solar efficient," Weremeychik says.
Those features tie into the project's greater achievement of accomplishing many goals in one design. "It's such a mixed-use building, it's hard to talk about it on one plane," Weremeychik adds. "Flexibility was definitely the theme throughout."
