When the University of Rochester Medical Center, hemmed in by an airport and a cemetery, went shopping for a site to expand its orthopedic department, it ended up buying a vacant single-story Sears store at the Marketplace Mall, two miles away from the main campus in Rochester, N.Y. The decision to adapt the 242,000-sq-ft big box store cut more than six months off the schedule of the $227-million conversion, compared with starting from scratch on a virgin site.
“We saved six to eight months ... compared to a greenfield site,” says Kevin Hoffman, vice president of LeChase, the project’s construction manager-at-risk.