DPR Construction, one of the nation’s top technical builders focused on highly complex and sustainable projects, today celebrated the topping out of the $1.5 billion UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, signifying completion of structural steel erection for the 878,000-gross-square-foot project. DPR is the general contractor for the new medical center, which is the first in San Francisco to be built from the ground up in decades and is scheduled to open in 2015. A live stream of the topping out ceremony will be available online at http://www.missionbayhospitals.ucsf.edu at 11:30 a.m. (PDT).

The 289-bed UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, which is targeting LEED gold certification, will include three hospitals:

• The 183-bed UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital featuring urgent care/emergency department and pediatric primary and specialty outpatient care.
• The 36-bed UCSF women’s specialty hospital featuring cancer care, specialty surgery, a birth center and select women’s ambulatory services.
• The 70-bed UCSF cancer hospital.

The UCSF Medical Center will also feature a 200,000-square-foot medical office building and 36,000-square-foot energy center, helipad, parking and support services.

“While we are celebrating a very traditional construction milestone, UCSF Medical Center is far from a traditional project,” said George Pfeffer, project executive for DPR Construction. “From the start, UCSF Medical Center wanted to combine an integrated team process with the latest building information modeling tools to produce a much higher level of predictability around the budget, schedule and quality for this project.”

For example, UCSF Medical Center co-located more than 100 members from 19 different companies on-site at the Integrated Center for Design and Construction (ICDC) in May 2009, 20 months prior to groundbreaking, to virtually design and construct the new medical center. The project was broken down into 25,000-square-foot segments, and teams, including the architect of record Stantec, and Arup as the engineer, began working in parallel to virtually create the detailed building information model (BIM). According to Pfeffer, this process and use of BIM helped save approximately $100 million from the project’s budget.

“By using the latest technology through a collaborative and integrated process to design and build our new hospital complex, we’re developing the medical center of the future,” said Stuart Eckblad, director of Design and Construction for the UCSF Mission Bay Hospitals Project. “The combination of children’s, women’s and cancer services at Mission Bay means patients will have high-quality, seamless care at a state-of-the-art facility.”

In addition, the detailed BIM allowed the team to extract material quantities early on in the project with a higher level of certainty. Following are some of the quantities of materials being used in the construction of UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay:

• 11,000 tons of steel, which is enough to build approximately 7,500 cars.
• 5 million sq. ft. of drywall, which is enough drywall for more than 700 homes averaging 2,000 sq. ft.
• 12,451 light fixtures, enough for 1,000 average size homes.
• 210 miles of conduit, enough to stretch along 3,360 San Francisco city blocks.
• 1,125 miles of wire, enough to round the bases at AT&T Park (home of the San Francisco Giants) 16,500 times.
• 85 miles of piping, equivalent of approximately 50 Golden Gate Bridges put together end to end.
• 1,783,000 pounds of ductwork, approximately 300 Ford F250 trucks (or the same as three empty 747 airplanes).
• 1,069,665 cubic feet per minute (CFM) of air supply, enough capacity to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in five seconds.