News
TOP O' THE MORNING
April 17, 2012
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| We stopped by the topping out ceremony at Christiana Care Health System's Wilmington Hospital last Thursday just in time to catch the main event, the ever-popular beam signing. The 10-story, $215M expansion project is one of the largest developments of its kind under way in Delaware. When it wraps up in 2014, the 386k SF tower will be home to 16 emergency treatment rooms, three ORs, and an atrium and healing garden. (None of those finished products will be cartoons either, the rendering is misleading in that way.) |
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| "When the project is fully built out," says Christiana Care's Patrick Fugeman (above, in the orange tie, supporting the Flyers), "we'll be adding 120 acute-care patient rooms as well, which will allow us to move very close to an all-private room hospital. It's what the contemporary hospital would be today." Also under construction near the new tower, says Patrick, is the 51k SF Gateway MOB, which will house physicians who might otherwise be located in offices throughout the city. That project is expected to be topped off with steel sometime in August or September. |
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| We caught up with Skanska USA's Ed Szwarc, who's overseeing the hospital's expansion. He shared a few brag-worthy details, including the fact that 2,504 pieces of steel have been added to the tower, for a collective weight of 1,106 tons. The Skanska USA team, he says is also working on a $225M project at Wilmington's Nemours Children's Hospital. Skanska also broke ground last week on the Franklin Institute's $37.4M pavilion addition in Center City Philadelphia, where a 53k SF exhibition devoted solely to the human brain (which will double as a cafeteria for zombies) is scheduled to open in summer 2014. And this June, Ed tells us, Skanska will begin work on an expansion project at Delaware Hospice, just outside Wilmington. |
