Planning Updates

Construction Update: April 2016

By April 6, 2016 No Comments

view of the CWRU Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus construction siteWhen you look at the Health Education Campus (HEC) webcam these days, you see a series of extra-wide concrete pillars on the east and west sides of the site. These are the building’s “cores”—concrete shafts that will house elevators, restrooms, equipment rooms and stair towers, among other items. Ultimately the building will have 12 of these structures.

The cores look so imposing right now because they are 18 feet wide and 35- to 50-feet high. Over the next couple of months they all will reach 65 feet in the air, and will help support the signature skylight roof that will help illuminate the atrium in good weather, and protect it from hail, snow and other inclement conditions.

As of today, construction is fully on schedule for a summer 2019 opening; February’s temperatures only affected construction for three days, rather than the anticipated six. About 150 workers are on the site each day, and by the end of February they had logged 63,850 hours on the project.

Next month, crews expect to begin erecting steel; in all, the building will use 5,000 tons of it. So far, more than 1,777 cubic yards of concrete have been poured, and another 1,700 tons of rebar placed.

This work is proceeding in stages; that is, teams submit packages of construction drawings and the like for city approvals in the order of the work required. For example, a package involving excavation was among the first completed, followed by one for the foundation, and so forth. This approach allows some of the more fundamental work to progress while teams finalize design elements that won’t be addressed until much later in the construction process.