Industry News

Kaiser Permanente is engaged is construction of the new 1,002,528-sf Downey Medical Center and parking structure in Downey, Calif. Constructed by McCarthy, the facility will replace the hospital portion of the existing Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center, which will be converted to an outpatient facility. Being built in accordance with state seismic requirements, the 352-bed, full-service hospital will include inpatient and outpatient services and will house 82 departments as well as an 85-room emergency department.

Rice University recently completed a 3,000-sf renovation/remodeling project on its Houston campus to create the Nanofabrication/Cleanroom Lab Facility in Abercrombie Hall. Constructed by McCarthy, the new facility is comprised of Class 100 and Class 1000 cleanrooms, office, and lab support space. It will provide researchers with the clean-air environment needed to study minute mechanisms the size of only a few atoms.

The $42-million Lakewood Ranch Medical Center in Bradenton, Fla., recently admitted its first patients. The 3-story, 120-bed facility houses a women's center with labor/delivery rooms, ER and intensive care units, and a surgery center with five OR suites. Three feet of structural fill over the site's 180,000-sf footprint needed to be placed and graded before construction began. The project architect was HKS of Dallas with McCarthy as general contractor.

St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica will soon begin site work on the $137.6-million Keck Diagnostic and Treatment Center. Constructed by McCarthy, the Keck Center, which will be built using base-isolation technology to mitigate the effects of a seismic event, will be tied into an existing adjacent structure that is also base isolated. The site for the 275,000-sf, 4-story tower (with two basement levels) is surrounded on all four sides by existing hospital facilities.

Presbyterian Hospital has completed a major vertical expansion of its Albuquerque facility. The $45-million project - a joint venture between McCarthy's Southwest and Midwest divisions - involved a three-story expansion on top of the hospital's existing four-story east wing, as well as utility infrastructure improvements and seismic upgrades. The expansion adds 160,000 sf to the acute care hospital to house pediatric intensive care, neonatal intensive care, cardiac, and labor and delivery units.