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Best of 2006 Awards
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Interventional Operating Room Platform
AWARD OF MERIT: Health Care and Hospitals
 When Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center set out to expand its interventional operating room capacity, it faced a major hurdle: There was not a single square foot of space on its Midtown Manhattan campus to locate it.
Its solution was to build 21 rooms on four stories above two existing six-story hospital buildings. To carry the weight of the addition, the design team created a steel superstructure platform in the form of a 150-ft.-wide, 15-ft.-deep, clearspan “supertruss.” The platform rests on four 10- by 10-ft. trussed “supercolumns” that pierce down through six to eight stories of working hospital into the bedrock below.
The solution caught the attention of the jury members.
“It may not be the largest project and it may not be one of the most glamorous, but to build operating room floors over an existing hospital is an extremely complex operation,” one juror said.
One of the major tasks was limiting the project’s impact on the existing hospital. The project team created 28 “make-ready” locations, which cleared out working areas of the hospital to allow the columns to pass through. It also planned other moves to relocate offices and entire departments to make space for the construction.
“It required teamwork, and they pulled it off,” another juror said.
To support the new vertical addition, the team constructed four supercolumns within the existing building, using a design that minimized the number of columns and therefore the level of disturbance to the hospital. To accommodate the columns, the team opened four shafts through the building from the foundation to the existing roof.
Once the new columns and platform were installed, the work shifted to the construction of the expansion above the existing roofs, which from that point on, resulted in little impact on the medical facility below. The vertical expansion has a traditional steel frame over the platform.
“It sticks out for its structural aspects,” another juror said.
Key Players
Owner: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Construction Manager: HRH Construction
General Contractor: JSK Construction Managers
Architect of Record: Granary Associates Architects
Design Architect: Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz; Perkins Eastman Architects
Structural Engineer: Robert Silman Associates
Mechanical-Electrical Engineer: Jaros, Baum & Bolles
Geotechnical Engineer: GZA GeoEnvironmental of New York |
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