As the New Year unfolds, a seven-story addition to the Huntsville, Alabama, skyline will continue rising above the downtown campus of Huntsville Hospital, Alabama’s second largest hospital. Once complete, the new 380,000-square-foot Orthopedic and Spine Tower will stand out as the largest project on the campus in nearly four decades. Huntsville’s own Chapman Sisson Architects designed the facility and Alabama-based Robins & Morton is serving as construction manager for the project.
The basement will provide a parking garage for physicians, and the ground level will house patient registration, a kitchen and lobby, in addition to a retail restaurant. Levels one and two will each feature 12 operating rooms, a post-anesthesia care unit and pre-op space with the second floor featuring an additional 14 observation rooms. Floors three through five will house a total of 72 patient rooms, with mechanical penthouses on both the third and seventh levels. Floor six will house shell space for future buildout and expansion.
To date, concrete work on the structure’s basement and first level is complete. Robins & Morton’s onsite team is currently forming and pouring the second level of the tower, as well as the first level of the central energy plant. The onsite team will pour more than 20,000 cubic yards of concrete throughout the project’s lifespan, supported by 2,500 tons of rebar. Structural buildout will include another 3,298 tons of precast concrete and 55,200 square feet of glass for the facility’s exterior.
Robins & Morton projects the facility’s structural completion milestone, known in the trade as its topping out, to occur in summer 2020. The tower is slated for completion in 2021.
