That ambitious goal also created major construction challenges for the CO Architects + Hensel Phelps design-build team, which worked in close collaboration with UCI Health. In September, the team reached substantial completion on the project and officially handed the ceremonial master key to UCI Health leadership.

The new facility will offer a 350,000-sq-ft specialty hospital, a 220,000-sq-ft ambulatory care center (ACC) and parking structure, but the star of the show is the massive, 31,848-sq-ft central utility plant that supplies power for the entire facility.

Working with the central plant’s air-source heat pumps was challenging because they took up about 6,000 sq ft of space, says Gina Chang, principal and health care team lead with CO Architects. To make things fit, the team had to extend the roof surface area on the central plant and add on a 60-ft extrusion to accommodate all the air stacks.

The energy demand of the hospital’s all-electric systems exceeds a standard facility by 10%.
Photo courtesy Hensel Phelps

A Higher Power

By their nature, hospitals are energy-intense buildings. Aside from the fact they are always open, they must meet higher standards in areas such as airflow, requiring energy-gobbling systems. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, health care buildings accounted for 4% of total commercial floorspace, but these buildings accounted for approximately 9% of energy consumption in commercial buildings.

Pratt says the UCI project required a 12-kV service from Southern California Edison (SCE). “A 22,500-kVA all-electric hospital has an electrical load roughly equivalent to 13,000 to 15,000 single-family homes, depending on home energy usage and local climate,” says Pratt. “The electrical load is approximately 10% larger than that of a traditional gas-fired boiler and chiller central plant supporting a hospital.”

A major issue in going electric was ensuring that SCE, the electrical provider, could handle the capacity, the resiliency, the reliability and the green power. “So the first hurdle was the utility,” Pratt says. “We worked for almost two years with them to sort of build confidence among both sides that this was achievable. And Edison was a team player and excited about the prospect,” says Pratt.

 

This Year’s Model

Brian Maximuk, operations manager at Hensel Phelps, says he saw great value in the way UCI presented the progressive design-build model for the project and in the collaboration of this delivery method.

“We were able to go through, I think, 208 cost trends that were developed in collaboration with UCI and the users to refine the budget and develop the scope and to know what the end users really wanted in this project,” he says. “So we were able to validate and refine the program of the project early with accurate cost information that enabled them to make the decisions to allow things to move forward. And it was really all tied to this progressive design-build model that was very collaborative.”

Pratt says they hosted a progressive design-build competition, and teams vying for the contract took the UCI concept and in about 14 weeks they effectively designed the hospital that is being built now.

He says one of the defining and contract-winning features that the CO Architects team came up with is a long, shared surgery platform that runs under both buildings. The platform, located on the garden level, connects the outpatient operating rooms of the ACC building with the hospital’s inpatient operating rooms. “The platform flows as one set of ORs, and there’s great economies and sterilization and humidification,” says Pratt.

The other advantage is that you’re actually saving a lot of steel weight because the columns and beams are not as heavy as the moment frame system, and there can be less of those frames as well, says Fabian Kremkus, a principal with CO Architects. “ So I think it was 15% weight savings, which also lowers the largest embodied carbon contributor, which is steel and concrete.”

The central utility plant’s chillers allow the hospital to meet the high air flow standards required of the facility.
Photo courtesy CO Architects

Gaming the System

Chang says the interconnected megafloor platform running between the buildings is one big department and one big sterilization process.

“We had never done that before, so we built it in the computer on a gaming engine called Unity,” she says. “We have a digital technology group here who does AI-generated computer simulations, and our digital designer, Nazli Tatar, designed it like a video game.” Chang says characters in video games are called agents, and the agents designed by her team know how to look for doors to walk through and how to find bathrooms and perform other mundane tasks.

“So we built it and we ran multiple simulations over a year to find breaking points. Nazli [Tatar] modeled how fast surgeries have to be for the surgery platform to fail, which happened at 30 minutes per surgery. And 30-minute surgeries will never happen, and the modeled failure wasn’t even a big catastrophe.”

Because of the importance of hospital seismic safety, the team went with buckle-restraint brace (BRB) frames instead of moment frames, which would typically be used in a facility like this, says Pratt.

“We did this because of resiliency after a major event. Accessing moment frames, and the kind of failures in moment frames, are much harder to deal with than brace frames,” says Pratt. “So after a major regional earthquake, by using brace frames we believe [the hospital] will be up and running more quickly than we would be if we had used moment frames due to the kind of investigation you need to do to ensure seismic safety.”

Kremkus says after a seismic event, BRBs, which are like shock absorbers, “can be easily dismounted and new ones installed. Then you have a building back to performance. For a moment frame, you would have to cut out sections of the beams. It’s a much more invasive thing, and you would probably be out of commission for a year rather than a few months. So that’s a big advantage.”

The hospital features energy-efficient features like self-shading strategies and solar panels on top of the parking garage.
Photo courtesy Hensel Phelps

Energy Efficiency

In addition to it’s all-electric status, the project boasts a host of sustainable aspects. Targeting LEED Platinum and LEED Gold ACC building status, the project integrates energy-efficient features like self-shading strategies, solar panels on top of the parking garage and high-efficiency glazing and fritting on windows that will reduce solar heat gain by 85% and also protect against bird strikes.

To incorporate the project’s location next to the San Joaquin Marsh ecological preserve, the team studied bird-strike mitigation and provided glass that is bird-strike friendly and also built an 18-in.-high turtle fence to protect a threatened turtle species from leaving the marsh and entering hospital grounds.

Pratt says they also worked extensively with UCI marsh administrators to capture stormwater runoff.

“For runoff, we thought that they would be absolutely against any running into the marsh, but it was quite the opposite,” he says. “The marsh is thirsty for water, so they wanted our runoff, but needed it to be treated appropriately. And so we did that. It runs off into the marsh after being treated, and it feeds and replenishes the marsh.”

In total, integrating all the various elements required by the facility created enormous challenges but also enormous opportunity.

“This landmark accomplishment, delivered through the first-ever progressive design-build project at UCI, showcases how innovation, collaboration and dedicated teamwork can redefine what’s possible in health care construction,” Maximuk says.