A team of McCarthy Building Cos. and Jacobs completed construction on the Children’s Hospital of Orange County’s Southwest Tower in Orange, California, according to a June 16 news release from CannonDesign, the New York City-based engineer on the project. McCarthy acted as the general contractor, with Dallas-based Jacobs as the construction manager.
St. Louis-based McCarthy broke ground on the nine-story, 300,000-square-foot facility in 2022. The cost of the project was estimated to be around $373 million in 2023, according to the Orange County Business Journal. It was designed to complement the hospital’s Bill Holmes Tower, which McCarthy completed in 2012 with CannonDesign as architect.
“This facility enables McCarthy Building Companies to leverage our deep well of expertise in the healthcare sector that will have a positive impact well beyond the scope of this project,” said Jim Madrid, president of the Southern Pacific region for McCarthy, in the groundbreaking news release.
The new tower houses a number of pediatric outpatient services that include, according to the news release:
- Five floors of specialty clinics.
- A research institute for clinical trials and pediatric research.
- Oncology infusion services.
- A comprehensive imaging center.
Craig Cherf, a senior preconstruction director who worked on both the Southwest and the Bill Holmes towers, has a personal connection to the hospital. Cherf’s son Jackson, then 4, was diagnosed with and treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the hospital’s Hyundai Cancer Institute, according to a blog post from the hospital. Jackson is now cancer-free.
“I love working on children’s hospitals,” Cherf said in the 2024 blog post. “It’s my favorite thing to do.”
Alongside the opening of the outpatient tower, CHOC opened a 24-bed cardiovascular intensive care unit and a 28-bed neuroscience unit within the Bill Holmes Tower to meet increased demand for these high-acuity services, according to CannonDesign.
