St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. has finished a key project in its own backyard.
The contractor completed construction on the new Plaza West Tower, an expansion of heart and vascular patient care, as well as radiology, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the city, according to a Dec. 3 news release sent to Construction Dive. McCarthy declined to share the cost of the project, citing its client.
The 16-story, 660,000-square-foot Plaza West Tower features 224 private inpatient rooms and 56 private intensive care unit rooms alongside modern clinical spaces, according to the news release. Design and preconstruction began in December 2019, and construction kicked off officially in November 2021.
The addition sits on the site of the former Queeny Tower, according to a news release from the Washington University School of Medicine. The Barnes-Jewish Hospital serves as a major referral center in the Midwest and is the fifth-largest hospital in the country, according to the university.
The project is a part of BJC HealthCare’s Campus Renewal, a long-term plan to transform the university’s medical campus through new construction and renovations. To date, the phases of the Campus Renewal Project have generated nearly $2 billion in economic impact, per the school.
The team effort was homegrown — most project partners, such as architect CannonDesign, hospital network BJC HealthCare, BR+A Consulting Engineers and civil engineer Castle are all based in St. Louis, according to McCarthy. Thornton Tomasetti, the structural engineer on the job, is headquartered in New York City.
Working on a hospital comes with challenges. To meet the facility’s demands for efficiency, quality and minimal disruption, McCarthy had to leverage a prefabrication strategy that saw the builder use 280 patient room bathrooms built by St. Louis-based T.J. Wies Contracting, per the release. The fully finished bathroom pods — which included plumbing, electrical, tile, fixtures and finishes — were manufactured offsite and delivered to the tower.
Once delivered, cranes lifted the pods to their locations floor-by-floor. McCarthy said the approach shortened installation schedules, minimized onsite congestion and provided superior quality assurance compared to traditional field-built methods.
The contractor also had to contend with pedestrian and vehicle traffic, as the tower sits on one of the medical campus’ busiest corners. Construction activities needed coordination to be successful, per the release.
“Working on a landlocked site in the heart of a major medical center required us to rethink every step of the construction process,” said Kris Mannen, senior superintendent for McCarthy, said in the news release. “Through prefabrication, creative logistics, and close collaboration with our partners, we were able to deliver a world-class facility while minimizing the impact on daily hospital operations.”
However, not all has progressed smoothly — BRK Electrical Contractors, one of the trade partners on the project, filed a mechanic’s lien against the project on Oct. 4 for a total of $819,692, local outlet First Alert 4 reported. McCarthy told Construction Dive that it was aware of the lien, but declined to comment further because the matter is ongoing.
