Industry News

The University of California, Davis is constructing the new Neurosciences Building. Designed by SmithGroup, the 238,000-gsf (138,000-nsf) facility houses 102,515-sf of vivarium, laboratory, and laboratory support space.

Boston University is constructing a $31 million, 120,000-sf graduate student housing dormitory. The facility will accommodate 220 studio and one bedroom apartments. The project developer is Trammell Crow.

University College Cork in Ireland has selected Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott to design a 50,000-sf expansion of its existing 100,000-sf library. The $21 million project will improve access and create additional space for users, campus collections and archives, as well as expanding study and instructional facilities.

Alta Bates Hospital will launch a consolidated women and infants center at its Berkeley campus in July of 2004. Replacing the Oakland Summit campus maternity ward (which will become a cardiovascular services center) the $15 million project will include new labor, delivery, post-partum and recovery rooms, 90 percent of which will be private. The facility will also house a new women’s resource center. 

Kaiser Permanente opened its new $20-million emergency department and decontamination unit in Walnut Creek in mid-November, 2004. Tripling the size of the existing ER, the expansion increased the number of emergency rooms from 31 to 52, with a cardiac monitor and computer in each room. The 32,000-sf facility includes a small lab station for blood or urine samples which channels the samples through a tube at sixty miles per hour to a lab in the medical center within two seconds. The permanent mass decontamination unit includes eight decontamination showers.