A New Home for UF's Sports Medicine

Turner Construction is building the $25 million facility in Gainesville

by Scott Judy

In Engineering News-Record's most recently published Top 400 Contractors Sourcebook, Turner Construction Co. ranked as the nation's second-largest education contractor, reporting more than $700 million of work in this sector.

Turner's operations in the southeastern United States are surely major contributors to its national education total.

Some of the jobs include a $31 million contract to build a College of Law for Florida A&M University in Orlando; a $23 million student-housing project at the University of South Florida in Tampa; a $42 million Pediatric Building at Atlanta's Emory University; and a $15 million library for the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

At the University of Florida in Gainesville, Turner is following up a high-profile, $50 million expansion of the school's Ben Hill Griffin Stadium with a design-build effort to construct UF's new Orthopedics Surgery and Sports Medicine Institute.

The $25 million, 120,000-sq.-ft., four-story facility will consolidate current clinic, rehabilitation and radiology functions of the College of Medicine's Department of Orthopedics that have previously been spread across various other campus and off-campus locations.

Patients will include student athletes and people with cancer and those suffering from orthopedic-related injuries.

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"You have the surgeons, the rehab, the radiology, the anesthesia and whatever is necessary to perform an orthopedic function gathered together in one location," said Miles Albertson, UF's associate director for facilities planning and construction.

Design-Build

The project has proceeded under a modified design-build delivery, with Turner partnering with URS Corp. of Tampa as designer. The owner chose the Turner/URS team as a result of qualifications-based interviews.

As an owner, Albertson said the modified design-build delivery system has proven beneficial.

"Rather than having two sources of responsibility, with me trying to take documents from a designer and giving them to the CM - with me essentially being the middleman - the designer, URS, is working for Turner," he said. "So if there are any errors in the design, Turner is responsible for that, versus the University of Florida. It presents a different contractual arrangement, and one that I really like."

Design work began approximately in March 2002. Albertson said the first design, for a one- or two-story, nontraditional structure, was unacceptable to the university.

"The university has certain architectural guidelines for our campus buildings, depending upon where they fall on campus," he said. "We lean towards collegiate Gothic architecture, with Gainesville red range brick and commander clay-tile roofs. The original proposal that URS came up with was something that was a radical departure from that, and the administration insisted that we adhere to the collegiate Gothic style of architecture."

The initial design's low height was another problem.

"From a real-estate standpoint, we have boundaries and it's consequently to our advantage to utilize that real estate as efficiently as possible," Albertson added. "We don't build any one-story buildings anymore. We try to make everything a minimum of four stories, and more where practical."

Design Continues

Turner, URS and UF worked on design for about a year, said Bill Morthland, vice president of Turner's education division in Orlando.

"The challenge on any project is getting the most efficient building design from a net to gross square footage standpoint, which holds the overall cost in control," he said. "We spent a lot of time looking at massing options that we felt would improve the efficiency of the building - going more vertical versus horizontal. The whole key was to drive as much building program into the budget."

Accommodating the needs of the various end users was a complex process, Albertson said.

"There were a lot of different owner/users that needed input into the design," he added. "The coordination of that took a little longer than normal. Turner and URS did a great job of making sure that everybody got their input and [guided them] to get that input onto the paper. It was a difficult process, but in the end it's worthwhile."

Morthland said this extensive review process was beneficial. "By the time you make it through the multiple reviews, everybody gets their input and it promotes getting the scope into the project so we can estimate and design it," he added.

Construction Starts

While design was still progressing, the team released a site foundation bid package to jump start construction. Work began in March 2003, with substantial completion set for July 2004.

A foundation built of cylindrical steel pipe piles was chosen, based on geotechnical studies of the site. "We studied a variety of deep-piling foundations and found that the steel pile was the most economical," Morthland said. "Some of the piles extend more than 100 ft.

Gulf Foundation, Tampa, handled this work.

Partly to speed construction, the designer opted for a structural-steel frame with a composite floor system. Overall building design was still progressing when the structural-steel package was released. Allstate Steel Co., Jacksonville, Fla., won the contract to fabricate the material and Garrison Steel, Birmingham, Ala., erected it.

"The steel frame is obviously a choice that has an advantage relative to speed," Morthland said. He added that erection of the roof trusses was also paced as quickly as possible, with the systems partially fabricated offsite and then ganged together on the ground for speedy lifting into place.

"They're built up into modules that might be 30 ft. long by the width of the building - whatever the crane can handle - and the whole thing is craned up and dropped on top of the building," Morthland said. "That helped speed things up."

Midterm Grades

The project was about 65 percent complete in mid-January and was on target for its July completion.

"It has all pretty well come off as planned," Morthland said. "The owner was able to fund some additional build-out of the third and fourth floors, and we were able to work that into the schedule, so it's all synched in with what we're doing."

Albertson isn't going to offer a final grade just yet, but likes what he's seen so far.

"I give them high marks on everything they've done so far," he said of the Turner-URS team. "We do a semiannual evaluation of both the designers and construction managers, and they've gotten consistently high marks."

He added that the internal workings of Turner - who Albertson sees mainly as a construction manager - are the major factor in keeping the project moving forward.

"Their internal structure for managing projects - although the rigidity of it occasionally is a stumbling block - keeps things moving all the time and forces you to make decisions to keep them moving," Albertson said. "That is probably their strongest point."

Project Team:

Owner: University of Florida Campus Planning, Gainesville
Contractor: Turner Construction Co., Orlando
Architect: URS Corp., Tampa
Foundation Contractor: Gulf Foundation, Tampa

Useful sources:

http://www.ufortho.ufl.edu/department/