UConn Health Outpatient Pavilion and Garage
UConn Health Outpatient Pavilion and GarageFarmington, CT – The UConn Health Outpatient Pavilion and Garage in Farmington is a design-build project that will consolidate an array of outpatient services currently housed in multiple spaces on the UConn Health campus.
The 318,000sf, eight-story state-of-the-art outpatient care center was designed to promote patient-centered care and to foster collaboration among clinical specialties. Services in the building will encompass diagnostic imaging, endocrinology, gastroenterology, internal medicine, neurology, occupational medicine, physical therapy, radiation oncology, urology, and vascular surgery.
The new facility will also include space for new clinician scientist recruits, a cafe, outdoor terraces, and retail space for a commercial pharmacy and optical shop. The building is connected to a new 400,000sf, six-story, 1,440-space parking garage by an enclosed overhead pedestrian bridge.
The project is the first design-build that UConn Health has undertaken in three decades. It was awarded in October 2012 to the design-build team of Fusco Corporation of New Haven in a Joint Venture with Clark Construction of Bethesda, MD.
This award included acceptance of the Fusco|Clark Joint Venture’s proposed modified design scheme which utilized a custom curtain wall façade at all forward-facing elevations and a metal panel rain-screen façade at the rear elevations.
By utilizing a fast-track design-build approach, the Fusco|Clark team was able to start its onsite construction activities within three months following contract award and successfully completed the garage portion of this project by meeting the original beneficial occupancy turnover date of November 8, 2013. This threshold parking garage was completed in fewer than 10 months. What made this first milestone completion a much greater challenge to the schedule was the prerequisite site preparation work before any parking structure foundation work could begin.
The limited site boundaries for the size of this project required the excavation and disposal offsite of a mountain of earth (300 dump trucks per day for nearly a three-month period), which additionally required the construction of a 50-foot-high/300-foot-long soil nail retention wall—the largest such wall in the state. Additionally, the team had to obtain permits for the foundations and structure in that three-month time frame. Other challenges included working on an occupied campus and building the garage and Outpatient Pavilion simultaneously.
The team also met their milestone date for building dry-in by fully enclosing the building envelope (curtain wall, metal panel screen wall, and roof) for the Outpatient Pavilion. This enabled full commencement of the interior fit-out work in early 2014 with a projected substantial completion date of October 15, 2014.
This project is expected to achieve LEED Silver certification later this year. The UConn Health Outpatient Pavilion will likely be the first certified LEED Healthcare project in Connecticut. The facility is slated to open in 2015.
The design team includes Centerbrook Architects and Planners, Desman Associates, Rocky Hill, and Langan Engineering and Environmental Services, New Haven.
