The $5-billion renewal of the Stanford University Medical Center in highly seismic Palo Alto is rich with the demands of all health care facility expansions. There are staging limitations, logistics issues, scheduling challenges and safety concerns. There is the need to steer clear of patients, medical professionals and administrative staff. But Stanford Health Care’s decision to build the New Stanford Hospital on base isolators—with the goal of having the 824,000-sq-ft building survive a major earthquake virtually unscathed—added yet another dimension to the difficult NSH job.
Approaching substantial completion, the roughly 13-acre NSH stands as the most ambitious of the five not-so-easy pieces of the development on the 66-acre campus of the Stanford University Medical Center. Base isolation is tantamount to “adding another [complicated] story at the base,” says Greg Schoonover, project director for the new facility general contractor Clark/McCarthy—a joint venture of Clark Construction Co. and McCarthy Building Cos.