Talk about a tight squeeze. The contractor for the $616-million Washington University School of Medicine’s new neuroscience research building in St. Louis was handed a big challenge: fitting the 11-story, 609,000-sq-ft building and parking garage into a relatively small space of 4 acres.
And that wasn’t the only hurdle that McCarthy Building Cos. and the university faced. Another, bigger challenge was to construct the building’s structure in a way that prevents exterior vibrations from affecting the facility’s neuroscience research center and delicate instruments used in the study of such diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.