Located in Curicó, about 200 km south of Santiago, the hospital is described as “the largest and most modern health project” in Chile’s Maule region. The 109,152-sq-m hospital, which includes 12 surgical wards and 400 beds, replaces a facility that was destroyed in Chile’s magnitude-8.8 earthquake in 2010.

Consequently, two of the hospital’s nine floors have seismic isolators to protect the building from future quake damage. But during construction, the team ran into a snag caused by delivery delays of the isolators, which were being shipped from France and Spain. To speed the isolators’ arrival, the owner and the structural engineer rescheduled them to arrive by air. And instead of waiting for all of the isolators to arrive, the team built the first four floors without them. As a temporary substitute for each isolator, crews inserted a metal cube as a “placeholder,” and later swapped in the isolator.