Built in 1925, the Chinese Hospital, the birthplace of martial artist Bruce Lee, was demolished to allow for a seismically sound tower. The eight-story, 100,000-sq-ft building was constructed on a compressed site in San Francisco’s Chinatown and completed while the 1979 extension remained fully operational. Deliveries to one-lane Jackson Street were tightly restrained to a small laydown space. The crane had to be placed within the building envelope to avoid conflicts with neighboring businesses; aides fluent in Cantonese directed foot and vehicle traffic. Inside, floor-to-floor heights had to match those of the 1979 building, requiring innovative design and highly collaborative modeling. Because of the tightness of the floor areas, partitions at back-to-back patient room locations required careful coordination to avoid utility conflict at the headwalls.

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