Columbia St. Mary's Project

Where Mequon Meets Milwaukee

by Bruce Buckley

Columbia St. Mary's Hospital Ozaukee in Mequon, Wis., will soon have as much in common with rural Wisconsin as it will with Milwaukee. The facility has established a strong community identity as the only hospital serving Ozaukee County since opening its doors in 1994.

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But as the construction team undertakes the $72 million expansion, the focus is also on creating a strong link between Ozaukee and the other hospitals in the Coulmbia St. Mary's system. A diverse team of hospital staff, designers and even competing contractors from multiple jobsites is working to keep the facility true to both missions.

The Ozaukee expansion includes four main elements-a five-story inpatient tower, medical office building expansion, new central utility plant and new loading dock. The project broke ground on a nearly 200-acre site in October 2005, and completion is scheduled for November 2007.

The work is part of a more than $566 million capital plan under way at all of Columbia St. Mary's campuses. The core of that plan is the $417 million, 835,000-sq.-ft. Columbia St. Mary's Hospital Milwaukee replacement hospital that will be built on the city's East Side with scheduled completion in 2010.

Milwaukee-based Smocke & Associates is the program manager for the Ozaukee and Milwaukee projects. The Chicago office of St. Louis-based Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum is designing both.

Minneapolis-based M.A. Mortenson is the construction manager at Ozaukee.

A joint venture of Milwaukee-based C.G. Schmidt and Southfield, Mich.-based Barton Malow is serving as construction manager of the Milwaukee project.

A Hospital Honeymoon

Richard Click, HOK's project architect at Ozaukee, said his firm worked to marry the community feel of Ozaukee with the systemwide goals of Columbia St. Mary's.

The existing Ozaukee hospital has a distinct look set off by its pitched roofs-a feature seen in other structures in the area.

"It almost gives it the look of a northern woods resort," Click said. "It's a very specific vocabulary that has become an icon for that community."

HOK also added features to update the look of the campus, including a glass curtain wall connector that links the existing facility to the new inpatient tower.

Glass curtain wall was also added to a few corners of the new tower to take advantage of the exterior views.

"They have postcard views from that site," he added.

When it came to the medical planning aspect of the project, the team looked for parity between Ozaukee and Milwaukee. From the patient rooms to the layout of the floors, the new inpatient areas of both facilities will feel almost identical, Click said.

"It gives a sense of orientation for patients who might use either facility, and caregivers will be familiar with the layouts of both," he said.

To help improve that connection between Ozaukee and Milwaukee, Smocke & Associates has brought together representatives from both projects to keep the work consistent and cost-effective. Both construction managers have worked through a common architect and have exchanged opinions on areas such as costing to come up with the best solutions.

"These are firms that regularly and aggressively compete against each other, but in this case they've joined hands to help the client," said Chris Smocke, president of the same-name company.

Sharing Ideas

The two construction teams also share ideas on safety. With liability on the project wrapped in an owner-controlled insurance program that covers all jobsites, "the safety directors from the different CMs periodically visit the other sites to get a different set of eyes on things," said Bill Haag, project manager with Smocke & Associates.

The advantage is simplicity. Smocke oversees the insurance program, Mortenson is in charge of safety orientation and Columbia St. Mary's saves money because coverage is wrapped in a single policy.

The four main aspects of the Ozaukee project are taking place at every corner of the existing building, so the team has phased the project to minimize impact on patients and hospital staff.

Crews began with the core of the project-the 186,000-sq.-ft. inpatient bed tower. After three months of working on utilities, work on the at-grade cast-in-place structure got under way.

The first level, called the garden level, will house a women's hospital that includes labor, delivery, postpartum and recovery rooms, birthing operating room, nursery and 22 patient rooms.

Above the garden level, the floors stack identically. Each floor can accommodate up to 32 rooms. The second level will feature 16 acute-care rooms and 16 rooms fitted for intensive care. The fourth level will be 32 acute-care rooms. Levels three and five are being shelled for future expansion.

The designers matched the floor elevations of the existing hospital with the elevations of the expansion. As the floors stacked, they became more cramped, making spaces tighter on the top floors.

This created potential conflicts for mechanical, electrical and plumbing coordination, so Mortenson used 3-D modeling to reduce the guesswork and better estimate the schedule.

"We've ended up with zero conflicts in the field with installing items," said Scott Heberlein, project manager with Mortenson. "We probably would have had problems without the 3-D modeling because we wouldn't have been dealing with elevations as much."

Meanwhile, crews built the 9,500-sq.-ft., steel-frame central utility plant.

As work wraps up on the inpatient tower, other crews have shifted their attention to the medical office building expansion.

The 32,000-sq.-ft. expansion is a concrete structure, and the exterior will match the existing masonry office building.

The final phase of the project will be a new service dock, which will create separate docks for clean deliveries and trash removal.

At construction peak, 225 crew members will be onsite and a total of 60 subcontractors will work on the Ozaukee project. With many subcontractors working at multiple Columbia St. Mary's projects, workers move from one jobsite to another as schedules demand.

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