A milestone project. That’s what McCarthy Building Companies took on when overseeing the construction of a 609,00-square-foot neuroscience facility at the St. Louis campus of Washington University.
Plenty could have gone wrong with this project. Construction started in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. McCarthy faced supply chain issues and labor shortages. The price of materials had soared. And the project was a large one, one that would tax the abilities of construction managers even if a pandemic wasn’t sweeping the country.
But today? Those challenges have long been overcome. And McCarthy Building Companies recently celebrated the opening of the Jeffrey T. Fort Neuroscience Research Building for Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The secret of McCarthy’s success? Plenty of planning combined with a willingness to pivot when supply disruptions threatened to knock the project off schedule.
And officials with Washington University are looking forward to the positive impact that this project will bring to the region.
“The Fort Neuroscience Research Building will allow us to increase our impact,” said Steven Sobo, executive director for strategic projects at Washington University School of Medicine. “Importantly, Washington University intends to capitalize on our neuroscience research for commercialization and innovation to bring new treatments to patients and to lower the cost of health care. As we move forward, the Saint Louis region can become a hub for new neurotechnology companies.”
Designed to boost the research of Alzheimer’s disease and brain tumors, the facility currently accommodates 1,000 faculty and staff members, including 95 research teams. The facility is flexible, though. Washington University can build out enough square footage in the future to accommodate another 350 faculty and staff members, including about 145 research teams.
The $616-million, 11-story, 609,000-square-foot facility is one of the largest neuroscience buildings in the world. In addition to McCarthy, which oversaw construction, the team behind this project included the architecture firms of CannonDesign and Perkins+Will.
Located at 4370 Duncan Ave., the building is located within the Cortex Innovation District on the eastern edge of the Washington University School of Medicine medical campus.
Pandemic-era challenges
When construction began in the spring of 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project immediately faced several challenges, including labor and supply chain concerns. Despite this, the team kept the project on budget and on schedule. Effective pre-project planning and the use of sophisticated lean construction techniques contributed to the project’s ultimate success.
“Early collaboration played a pivotal role in the success of this project,” said Andy Poirot, Vice President and Project Executive at McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. “We successfully realized the client’s vision, delivering a cutting-edge research facility poised to enhance lives for generations to come.”
After breaking ground, the teams working on this project were directed to work from home, with the exception of the onsite builders, Poirot said.
This was a challenge. But McCarthy’s team members quickly adapted.
“While learning to work remotely, we also quickly advanced our electronic planning and meeting methods,” Poirot said. “Ultimately, we were able co-locate with the design-assist teams in a thoughtful way and were able to advance the design to stay ahead of construction because of our strong relationships with our trade partners.”
Site logistics also were challenging, Poirot said. To meet the final completion date, the garage, link and building all had to be built concurrently, requiring the entire team to work together creatively. In addition, both the building and garage footprints grew through design development to maximize project site build-out/utilization. On-site laydown area was extremely scarce.
Poirot said that about 90% of the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems were prefabricated and pre-tested in several local prefab shops before they were delivered to the jobsite for installation. Detailed 3D modeling and early coordination enabled team members to understand the spatial constraints and generate fabrication drawings they could follow in the shop.
McCarthy also used Takt planning to determine the numbers of craft professionals needed to complete the project and manage peak manpower needs. Takt planning is a lean construction scheduling tool that visually documents all work activities scheduled to take place every week throughout the project’s duration. Takt planning helped accelerate the installation of mechanical and electrical system components, which represented the largest scope of work in the research building.
Because construction took place during the pandemic McCarthy faced long lead times for materials. It even dealt with plant shutdowns, making it especially challenging to get some materials to the site.
Again, careful planning and scheduling allowed McCarthy to work through these challenges, Poirot said.
“McCarthy worked with our design partners to complete sections of design necessary to finish on time,” he said. “AHUs, electrical gear, stainless steel, they all had long lead items that could have impacted the project.”
Sharp cost increases sometimes required McCarthy, the design team and Washington University School of Medicine to be flexible and consider changing products.
“The team worked together to make sure we were able to hold the budget throughout the project,” Poirot said.
A major undertaking
The facility is made up of a research building and an 1,846-vehicle parking structure equipped with bicycle racks and electric-vehicle charging stations. A 1,000-square-foot elevated pedestrian connection spans 360 feet, linking the new building to an existing parking garage and surrounding structures to maintain campus connectivity.
Additionally, a two-story, 24,775-square-foot utility plant was constructed, one that houses five 1,250-ton chillers, five cooling towers and two 3,000-kilowatt emergency power generators.
In addition, the building’s façade, featuring a unitized curtain wall, was also prefabricated. This includes 141,707 square feet of grey unitized metal wall panels accented with customized Washington University-red metal panels. The north elevation curtain wall comprises 57,142 square feet of high-performance Low-E coated vision glass, custom color spandrel glass and 16,454 square feet of ultra-clear low-iron glass for the dramatic three-story high lobby wall.
The project is designed to achieve LEED Gold certification, focusing on reducing energy, noise and the overall carbon footprint.
While this was an important project, Poirot says that he expects McCarthy to take on several new life-sciences jobs in the future. The demand for these facilities is only rising, he said.
“McCarthy is continuing to see a growing demand for life-science facilities,” Poirot said. “Many institutions are investing in these facilities to attract researchers and the accompanying grant funding. We expect this trend will continue as research becomes more specialized.”
A new vision for research
Sobo said that the project’s open lab design fosters interaction between researchers. This creates opportunities for collaboration and helps researchers form new perspectives, he said.
With neuroscience, aging and brain science as the primary areas of research, the Jeffrey T. Fort Neuroscience Research Building brings together research teams from across the university, including moving labs from 11 building locations that had previously been organized by department instead of research theme. The new facility allows Washington University to bring together teams in one location for research synergy and collaboration in neuroscience.
“This melting pot of ideas will generate new discoveries and innovations for our patients and the broader community,” Sobo said.
Sobo said that key areas on each floor of the facility are designated for specific purposes to encourage collaboration. Researchers from multiple labs will perform experiments side-by-side in these areas, a setup designed to maximize cross-lab communication and collaboration. Smaller rooms with shared equipment for specialized scientific techniques encircle the central research areas on each floor.
Researchers will use ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers to store chemicals, enzymes, bacteria and other samples. About a third of the laboratories in the facility will have the most energy efficient ULT freezers on the market, which use only half the electricity of standard ULT freezers. An average ULT freezer consumes as much energy as a single-family home.
In addition, labs are designed to be open, flexible and fluid, allowing for expansion and contraction between the sciences and themes as well as long term space flexibility, Sobo said.
The project at Washington University is just one of many new life-science facilities rising across the country. The demand for these projects is increasing, and the trend doesn’t look likely to slow soon.
“Research infrastructure is aging across the country, and some of the demand is driven by the need to replace these buildings,” Sobo said. “Additionally, the new prevalence of collaborative, team science and the rapid introduction of new research technologies has created demand for state-of-the-art buildings like the Fort Building.”