Kaiser Building Boom

Hospitals Rise in Antioch, Vallejo

By Greg Aragon

Two new Kaiser hospitals totaling almost $600 million and more than 1 million sq. ft. are taking shape in the East Bay with a goal to open in the next two years.

The first to be completed will be the $240 million Deer Valley Medical Center in Antioch, which is located on the banks of the San Joaquin River in Contra Costa County. Designed by a partnership between Chong Partners Architecture and Smith Group, both of San Francisco, the medical facility is being constructed by Harbison-Mahony-Higgins Builders Inc. of Sacramento.

The 637,000-sq.-ft. project consists of one four-story building with 340,000 sq. ft. of hospital space and 297,000 sq. ft. of medical office space. The hospital will feature 150 patient beds; eight delivery rooms; an emergency department; full imaging services with CT scanner, nuclear medicine and MRI; 12 operating rooms; and a 2,500-sq.-ft. "healing garden," with a fountain, trees and a cafeteria beside it.

Another Deer Valley highlight is that it will be a template hospital, one of three that Kaiser currently has under construction in California. The other two are located in Modesto and Sand Canyon, which is near Bakersfield. Template design is a program that establishes standardized models for design and construction of hospitals.

"To create a building template that is going to be replicated numerous times across the state is absolutely exciting," said architect Michael Wilson, Chong associate partner. He said the process of designing the template took about six months and required intensive meetings with Kaiser and the design team.

Wilson said the three key elements of the new facility's template blueprint are a central "spine" or corridor, for pedestrian circulation and way-finding; expandability, so that the hospital can someday add another patient tower; and patient room flexibility, so that the areas can be easily and swiftly changed from patient rooms to ICU use.

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The project, which broke ground in September 2004, is scheduled to open in November 2007. The building has been fully enclosed, with interior infrastructure, framing and drywall under way.

"Right now it looks like a complete building on the outside, but it's going to be a lot of blood and guts on the inside for the next 10 months," said Michael Monaldo, Kaiser project director.

The other Kaiser hospital underway is the $350 million Kaiser Vallejo Hospital, located in Vallejo, 30 mi. north of San Francisco. The 457,000 sq. ft. project includes a five-story hospital building; 750-space, four-story parking garage; and 33,363-sq.-ft. central utility plant.

The facility will replace an existing hospital that is structurally deficient based on SB 1953, a 1994 law that requires all general acute-care inpatient hospitals in the state to either be retrofitted or rebuilt by 2008 to meet earthquake life-safety standards.

"We are building smack in the middle of an operating hospital campus," said Robin Burr, Kaiser project director for Vallejo. "We have a 29-acre site and we are building the new hospital on two surface parking lots, which have all the utilities of the existing hospital running underneath. Before we could build, we had to relocate every utility serving the hospital without shutting the hospital down."

Kevin Westphal, McCarthy project manager, said that weekly planning meetings are key to keeping construction going and the existing hospital functioning. "The megajob adjustment is maintaining the interproject communication," he said.

AThe hospital was also designed by Chong Partners Architects and is being constructed by St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. Inc. Steel was completed in March and crews are halfway through with concrete and beginning to put on the exterior skin. Completion is set for November 2008.

The new hospital building will be defined by two nursing towers, connected by a central core, which will stimulate pedestrian circulation. There will also be 188 patient beds, an inpatient rehabilitation unit, three courtyards and a dining area.

The exterior of all new structures will exhibit precast concrete panels, which will match existing hospital buildings.

"The precast is a material that will tie all the building together," said Bill Pearson, Chong senior project architect. "It is a common theme to the campus because it was a dominant material for the existing campus."