Squeezing Research Center Into Tight St. Louis Site

Abstract

The contractor for the $616-million Washington University School of Medicine's new neuroscience research building in St. Louis was handed a big challenge: fitting the 11-story, 609,000-sq-ft building and parking garage into a relatively small space of 4 acres. "The logistics of it are one challenge that comes to mind-the site is very tight."The building is being constructed on a square-shaped site within the 200-acre Cortex Innovation Community-a business, innovation and technology hub-and is bounded by Metro Transit light rail tracks on the south, another building on the east, Duncan Avenue on the north and Newstead Avenue to the west. "You need to have trade partners engaged in the design process so that the building is designed in a way that lends itself to prefabrication. You can prefab a 20-ft or 30-ft-long pipe rack, but if you don't have a way to get them into the building, it's not going to work."We planned for significant leave-outs in multiple locations so we had a way to get the very large prefabricated components onto floors before we closed them up," he says. Photo Courtesy of McCarthy Building Cos."It needs to have minimal vibration, not only from a seismic perspective, but to prevent vibration of instrumentation that will be in the building," Sobo says. "The chillers, electrical systems and generators are in a separate building to the south of the main building. "St. Louis's proximity to the New Madrid Fault was also considered.Kurt Bloch, an associate with the CannonDesign of St. Louis, says the building was designed in adherence with the local code under the 2018 International Building Code and ASCE 7-16 design standard that provides seismic design guidelines that incorporate the known faults as well as background seismicity data that assumes a 5.0 earthquake can occur anywhere."Furthermore, we coordinated with the geotechnical engineer to gain a complete understanding of the site which helped reduce the seismic design requirements due to the quality and elevation of rock," he says. Photo Courtesy of McCarthy Building Cos.The project includes a 1,846-space parking garage and a 360-ft-long pedestrian link connecting the research building with the rest of the medical campus.