...which was used for ongoing steel erection during the week. “Tower cranes were our only option for hoisting due to the extremely limited lay-down area around the site and the ‘landlocked’ orientation of our building,” says Corrado.

Unit installation went so smoothly that it got ahead of the curtain-wall installation. “There was an ironic disadvantage,” says Dayton’s Coyle. “We set bathroom pods so quickly, followed by wall framing, that we were months ahead of the closing up of the exterior shell,” he adds.

“We had to wait an extended period of time to hang interior drywall,” he says.

Members of the team gleaned several lessons from this first-time prefabrication effort, which they all hope to apply to future jobs. The first lesson is timing: Start planning the process from the onset of the project, not midway through design development, they chorus. Also, time the prefab production so product can be shipped to the site just in time, to avoid the cost of more leased warehouse space.

Corrado would like the design team to finalize the unitized curtain wall earlier in the process, so that, even though prefab units were designed to be able to get wet, the prefab installation does not leapfrog over the curtain-wall installation and delay finish work. “We need earlier decisions on glass and on finishes and on who can produce and install units properly,” he says.

On future jobs, both Skanska and NBBJ hope to expand the prefab operation to more types of components. The opportunities for improvement include parts of examination rooms and post-op and pre-op bays as well as the many single-patient toilet rooms embedded in diagnostic and treatment areas.

Skanska has not yet used multitrade prefab on any other jobs, but it intends to use prefabrication techniques on institutional projects when it is practical. “We are starting to make schedule commitments based on the MVH experience,” says Corrado, who also thinks prefab can give Skanksa a competitive edge on bids.

The final lesson: For multitrade prefab, no firm stands alone. “We all had to buy into this process to make it work,” says Fishking.