Industry News

University College Cork in Ireland has selected Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott to design a 50,000-sf expansion of its existing 100,000-sf library. The $21 million project will improve access and create additional space for users, campus collections and archives, as well as expanding study and instructional facilities.

Alta Bates Hospital will launch a consolidated women and infants center at its Berkeley campus in July of 2004. Replacing the Oakland Summit campus maternity ward (which will become a cardiovascular services center) the $15 million project will include new labor, delivery, post-partum and recovery rooms, 90 percent of which will be private. The facility will also house a new women’s resource center. 

Kaiser Permanente opened its new $20-million emergency department and decontamination unit in Walnut Creek in mid-November, 2004. Tripling the size of the existing ER, the expansion increased the number of emergency rooms from 31 to 52, with a cardiac monitor and computer in each room. The 32,000-sf facility includes a small lab station for blood or urine samples which channels the samples through a tube at sixty miles per hour to a lab in the medical center within two seconds. The permanent mass decontamination unit includes eight decontamination showers.

Infineon Technologies North America Corp. has opened a new 100,000-sf facility in Cary, N.C. Infineon, based in Munich, Germany, will use the space to accommodate semiconductor chip design and management operations. The company plans to invest a minimum of $8-million in the facility over the next five years.

Silicon Valley Power recently broke ground on the $165-million Von Raesfeld power plant sited on 2.86 acres in Santa Clara, Calif. Locally owned and operated, the 147-megawatt gas-fired plant is expected to reach completion in late 2004.