Squeezing Research Center Into Tight St. Louis Site
Date Posted: September 14, 2022
Posted In: Projects,
From ENR: Talk about a tight squeeze. The contractor for the $616-million Washington University School of Medicine’s new neuroscience research building in St. Louis was handed a big challenge: fitting the 11-story, 609,000-sq-ft building and parking garage into a relatively small space of 4 acres.
And that wasn’t the only hurdle that McCarthy Building Cos. and the university faced. Another, bigger challenge was to construct the building’s structure in a way that prevents exterior vibrations from affecting the facility’s neuroscience research center and delicate instruments used in the study of such diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The research facility will bring together 96 research teams and nearly 800 employees from various fields who will study the body’s nervous system. In addition, space in the building can be built out in the future for another 40 research teams.
To give an idea of the scope of the project, McCarthy reports that the building is using enough steel to stretch 2,125 miles, enough drywall to cover 31 football fields, sufficient concrete to fill 16 Olympic-size swimming pools, more than 6,700 tons of rebar and post-tensioning cables, 511 miles of electrical wire and 300,000 ft of mechanical, utility and plumbing piping.